Retirement, Take Sixteen: Tidings of Comfort and Warmth

We have finished Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays, one that involves food and travel. My ride to New Hampshire on Thanksgiving Day so as to avoid the other 19 million other travelers meant driving through Vermont with so little traffic that I found myself wondering if I really do have cell reception since some of the remote stretches had a certain Stephen King feel to them, such as the seemingly empty motel that still advertised "FREE LONG DISTANCE CALLS".

I do like the winter holidays because they are places that are warm in a time when the world is cold and dark--so much so that I have already checked to see when the solstice is: December 21st. This time was always the most difficult time of the year when I was working full time, not because of the end of the semester or the Christmas rush, but because they both happened in such cold and dark that I needed at least two (and sometimes three) alarm clocks to get me up in time to make it to work. Getting up in pitch black went against all my body was telling me. And then ten hours or so later, I drove home in an equally dark and cold world. Although the last few years I had an office with windows, they were not as much comfort as I expected, probably because day in and day out I looked out on the many shades of grey (well, except for a couple pine-type trees) in a parking lot. Grey grey grey and little sun.

But once I got home in the winter, I could not imagine living any place that had no winter as I know it. Although every summer I look at the braided rugs in my house and tell myself I should be rolling them up and putting them in the garage for the season so as better to see the floors, I never do. And in the winter I cannot imagine not having the braided rugs on the floor for their bright colors, their coziness, their comfort.

Since I now have time to think a thought or two uninterrupted, in the spirit of the season: I am grateful not just for the snow and the dark and the nip in the air, not just for company and pies and Thanksgiving, not only for the spirit of Christmas. I am grateful for being able to watch, again, the Alistair Sims' Christmas Carol, and It's a Wonderful Life--and maybe this year also Love, Actually, sappy in some ways but also the one place that I know that makes the point that on the godawful day when the Twin Towers fell, nobody involved left messages of hate; the messages were all about love. Plus the movie gets the important silliness of school pageants right, and Hugh Grant does a credible High Grant version of a Prime Minister. And who--anyone who is not a Grinch, that is--wouldn't think it was worthwhile to watch Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson once a year?

Anyway, here I offer, in the spirit of the season, more that I am grateful for. It is not a comprehensive list. I give thanks and I celebrate..

First: shoes. More specifically, comfortable shoes. I am beyond wearing heels although I did keep a pair of dressy-enough black flats, just in case. The extra dollars for shoes by Clarks or Ryka or Hotter (this last a British company with shoes just this side of dowdy) are worth the money. (As are cushy heavy socks, but let's set those aside for now.) My shoes are flat but fashionable, maybe to the point of being nondescript--and if that is the case, so be it. There was a time when I wore bright blue heels, but those days are long gone (and I am not sure what good they did me anyway except feel good when I took them off). Once I made my peace with the ideas that shoes exist to assist transportation (well, mostly), I stopped wearing heels. My feet stopped hurting and I found myself in a better mood, too.

At home with heavy socks I wear fuzzy slippers or Teva sandals. I have L.L. Bean boots from long before they were the fashion. I have old white sneakers. I own a pair of Beatle-ish boots in case I have to dress up. But for me, shoes serve by being between the surface of the earth (or the floor, or the rug) and me. They offer support and protection. They help me go where I want to go. Shoes are a means to an end.

Next item: a bra. Let me refine this: a good bra. I had heard for years that most American women are wearing the wrong size bra, but of course I assumed I was not one of them. Wrongo. I discovered when I ventured into Zoe & Co. in Concord, New Hampshire a few years ago just to see what was what that I was one of the majority. I no longer discount the value of a correctly-fitting bra. Yes, bras at Zoe's are more expensive than those from Macy's or J.C. Penney. (And once after I started regularly replenishing the stock from Zoe's, I did try Penney's again when the local store advertised a bra-fitting event which, as it turned out, meant the clerk measured over both a turtleneck and a heavy sweater--not the way it should be done.) So. Clothes from Zoe's are not Victoria' Secret nor, well, industrial; they successfully and fashionably combine form and function. And the same goes for shoes, by the way. (It does help that Zoe's gives me a discount on by birthday.)

Like comfortable shoes, the right bra can be a transformative experience.

There is probably much to be said for good-fitting and comfortable clothes, period

I am also grateful for much of what other people are grateful for: family, friends, the cats, health, a heated house, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, electricity. Contact lenses. Music. Wifi. A new snow shovel. Time. Transportation. My car.

I am grateful that my car will be paid for in a year; in its fourth year, it has only 35,500 miles on it. It is a cool-enough car, a red Jetta with a sunroof and cruise control. I like the sunroof but rarely use the cruise control, and the car does have more features than I need, especially the heated seats it came with. Why did I need heated seats? When I looked at cars in the middle of the summer, heated seats seemed not just unnecessary but also embarrassingly bourgeois. I mean: why?

But heated seats are one push of a button away (and there are three settings), and in the winter they make the cold drive to New Hampshire comfortable. They arrived in my life unsolicited, a non-negotiable surprise since there was no way to buy the car I wanted without them.

I am grateful for heated seats.

In this season of all seasons, winter thoughts remind me that some things are more important than others. I know that if I had to, I could manage with much less. (And I have lived for most of my life with much less do-what-I-want-time.) I am writing about creature comforts, after all, about first world problems, things WAY beyond the necessary. I know this.

Be that as it may, I like heated seats because they keep me warm enough that I don't need to blast the heat and end up with dry eyes; I swear heated seats make it possible for me to see better when I drive. More than that, I like the seats because they make it possible for me to go in comfort over the river and through the woods to see people and places more important to me than heated seats.

And so for a couple days around Christmas I pack the undies and shoes, the jeans and flannel nightgown, and I leave the cats in their home cozy with heat and bright braided rugs. With the heated seats, my car takes me  through the dark and cold of Vermont  to a place where I am most grateful, a place of light and music and gifts. a place of holiday joy. Yes, the cold and dark matter, and I enjoy them while I can. I really do like winter--and I do think I would like it even if I did not know that in a few months, the dark will lighten, the snow will melt, and things green will bloom again.

Merry Christmas.

Copyright Sandra Engel
December 2016

Retirement, Take Fifteen: Dancing Away

In the beginning there was dancing school.

In many ways, whatever discipline and imagination I possess I owe at least in part to nine years of dancing lessons.

My first teacher had danced in George M. Cohan musicals but moved to New Hampshire and taught Saturday mornings in the local Masonic hall. I learned the basic ballet vocabulary: the five positions, plus entrechet, plie, arabesque, barre. I read a comic book biography of Anna Pavlova. The first photograph of me as a dancer came from a recital at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel (now the location of an L.L. Bean outlet). In that black and white photograph, I am the only one doing the bow correctly. With my banana curls and leotard, I am looking into the camera. If who I am now has any connection to her, that girl with the curls, it is that she is trying to focus and do the bow right, as she has been taught, and more importantly, as she knows--appreciates--it should be done.

When the former George M. Cohan dancer stopped teaching, I carried my ballet slippers and tap shoes in a hatbox to lessons a half hour away. Miss Sally was a local girl who had trained in Boston and New York and who had her own thriving dance studio, heavily pink, high on the third floor above a bowling alley. In a photo from one of those recitals in the Palace Theatre, I am on the end of a chorus line; you can even see the edge of the photographer's backdrop. I have gone from banana curls to pin curls; I am no doubt wearing my mother's red lipstick. I had not yet moved to tap shoes with higher heels (which I never did like). We all have bare legs, tap shoes and sequins. I am the only one not looking at the camera, but I am smiling. In a second photo, a solo, I am standing by myself, in a dance pose, and I look happy there, too.

What I aspired to be at the time of these photos I don't remember, but before that time--say between the two of the photos, the banana curls one and the pin curls one--there was a time when I wanted to be a June Taylor Dancer, one of the dancers on The Jackie Gleason Show who did dance routines known for the dancers lying on the floor and moving their arms and legs so as to look like a kaleidoscope to the camera directly above. I learned what I now think of as fairly diverse--for the time--routines: tap, ballet and jazz, a soft shoe and an Irish jig, a Highland fling, a cancan and a hula. The nine years of lessons started with the "Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy" and "Muskrat Ramble" and ended with the music from Joey Dee and the Starlighters' "Peppermint Twist". Quite a range.

Dancing school was about standing in a line and watching the teacher, watching myself in the mirror. And it was about listening. Together and separate. With the music. (And to some extent it was about muscle memory.)

And it was about practice--imitation and practice. Many days after school, I danced away to the music on the record player in the basement, my tap shoes tapping on the cement floor until the grey paint started to peel. I practiced the routines--usually one new step every week--and I made up my own little dances. I loved to dance. I just loved it. With my tap shoes--even with no audience--I made a joyful noise.

How else but to learn except by imitation and practice, by approximation leading to ability--and maybe to perfection?

I loved dancing school, and I stopped the lessons only when I found I needed more time to study once I got to high school. Memorizing Latin declensions and conjugations replaced dance; in those days, if you wanted to go to a college of any kind, you were expected to have studied two foreign languages. (French started the next year.) I didn't know it when I registered for the College Prep curriculum, but foreign languages required practice and discipline. So after I got out of school at 2.30, I went home, sat at my desk, and I memorized and memorized. I spoke out loud to myself. I made flash cards and wrote out the vocabulary again and again. I did the homework and practiced some more. Mimicry-memorization, pattern drill. Over and over.

About the same time, I stopped going to Sunday school even intermittently. Consider the context: in 1955 and in the state of rock walls and Live Free or Die, my parents bought a colonial four bedroom house, one big and solid with a hedge around the front and eventually a stockade fence around the back.  From there I had gone to dancing school. The house was down the street from the local pre-Vatican II grammar school and church, St. John Le Baptiste. In pairs, nuns in full regalia (which the burqa has reminded me of many times, to be honest) strolled down the street. Some of the children in the neighborhood told me that since I was not a member of The One True Church that I was bound to go to hell where, depending on the day, either I would burn forever or I would be eaten by the hell hounds.

The majority language was Canadian French. I spoke no local French, and although I attended Sunday school at the Congregational Church one town over, I was never baptized. Instead, religious training was basic and simple, and although my family did not say grace before meals, we did when we had company who did. (That says something, I think.) We did not believe in religious bureaucracy (communicating with God could be direct) or in original sin. I learned The Golden Rule and "In Christ There is No East or West" right before the Doxology. I learned to light one candle from another. It was all very New Testament; my mother fashioned the old curtains from the den into costumes for the Three Wise Men for the Christmas pageant. Thanksgiving was a celebration outdone only by Christmas, the most memorable one when I was given a box of Nancy Drew books. I was something of a reader before I read Nancy Drew, but I certainly became one after that Christmas.

When the time came for me to go to college, my parents said I could join a sorority if I wanted to but that it might not be wise for me to make friends based on how much money they had or how they dressed. When my parents were asked, much later, why they had moved us to where they had, my father said they had wanted to give us the best of both worlds: the real world and the world beyond it. My father had a white collar job and a company car. One of my friend's father was a foreman in a Thom McCann shoe factory, and others had jobs in construction and at the post office. The mothers never worked until the children were in high school (or later) when they got jobs in retail or offices. One of the mothers gave perms in her kitchen; she gave me my first Tonette perm. (My mother's mother had said I would always need curls.)

What I learned in and out of dancing school and Sunday school stayed with me. I had no intention of joining a sorority, and I did not even audition (which is what rushing sounded like). But I did eventually find two homes of a sort: in writing (and other) classes, and more visibly, with a group of friends in International House. I had friends from Massachusetts and New Jersey and also from Tibet, India, Thailand, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Japan. I arrived at the University of New Hampshire having studied both Latin (two years) and French (three years) and had high enough scores on my French SAT that I was exempt from the foreign language requirement, but I took a year of German anyway. (And later, in a wonderful old-timey traditional Ph.D. program, I took two years of Spanish in addition to my French to satisfy the foreign language requirement.)

I studied these languages with the same discipline that I had practiced my dance routines, but I am getting ahead of myself. (And it is worth noting that foreign language teaching at the time was far more grammar- and conversation-based than it was culture-based. There were certainly no eclairs or baguettes in French class, for instance. No videos. Not even any tapes, now that I think about it. And blessedly, no working in small groups.)

In college, my friends were all over the political spectrum. Most leaned more left than right, but one friend, a devout (and I do mean devout) Republican in International House and during the time of the Vietnam War, asked when people disagreed with him, "What would it take for you to change your mind?", a question I now think of as wise beyond our years--a question that asked us to think about our thinking.

In college I learned about the music of the spheres, of metaphors and similes, of scientific classification. Sumer, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.  The literature: the required Shakespeare and Chaucer and survey courses. Addison and Steele, Donne, Twain, Dickens, Frost. Emily. Yeats. Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Dante. (Even though he would disagree, I think a little sloth could do a lot of people some good.) Of Kant's argument that moral rules are those which we would will on everyone. Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics, Utilitarianism and and Empiricism. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first book I read in college, for a Sunday night Introduction to Philosophy class, one subtitled "In Search of Authenticity". The  first night of class, the professor played a bootleg copy (on reel-to-reel tape) of the then-new Broadway play Hair, because, he said, "I had to." As part of the physical education requirement, I took folk dance, but most of the dancing I did was of its time, dancing with friends on Saturday nights to Iron Butterfly's "In a Gadda Da Vida."

Yes, it was the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, but that is not my point. And in those way pre-Google days, if I didn't understand what Nietzsche wrote, I read it again. And again. I wrote in my books. I took notes. Later I bought the vinyl of the soundtrack of Hair.

And the writing classes: once a week workshops where the main assignment was to submit X number of pages per semester. (I remember it as either 35 or 50 pages. Typed.). There were no assignments but short readings--and the faculty encouraged wide and relevant reading on our own. So I found myself reading E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictional retelling of the trial of the Rosenbergs from the point of view of their son. I browsed the New Books section of the library. I read as I wanted and we developed our own projects. And we were treated more as writers than as students even though we certainly were students.

These days my house is what somebody recently called "one of those small houses," but it is big enough, and it is a place where I still practice watching and listening.When I am home, I am one of those neighbors looking out the front window with no embarrassment at the police car down the street. When I go for a walk, I mosey so I can look around. (What's the rush?) I have been known to dance with the vacuum cleaner, and I used to try to dance with Doodle the cat until he protested. I have decided that, at best, the things of this world call us to love it: the fur on my cat's nose, a baby's fingernails, clothes on a clothesline. Tropic heat and winter cold that never let me forget where I am. Laughter. Music.

I can't not watch and listen and dance as I can, even though I wear no sequins--these days I own no sequins. But I do still own a lot of books. (I even own some old Nancy Drew books.) These days my hair is straightish, pretty much. I belong to no country club, and I would be content at a diner. Most Sundays I don't go to church. Do I believe in God? I do and I don't. (I think there is some truth to the observation that any kid who has taken a math test wants to believe in the power of prayer.)

We are what we do. And what we do is determined by the context we work to create--how we put things together. The connectives matter: because this, then that. Although. Despite. But. And.

How we put it all together. Each of us, one by one.

Let's go back to my beginning here as I go toward the ending: I do not know if I am going to be lunch meat for the hell hounds or not, but I do know that in this world I am decidedly a cat person. As for the people who predicted my future in hell...well, although they may someday be proven correct, right now I think of them as children who had been taught an Old School (and singularly unchristian, all things considered) perspective. Even only on their better days, can they even begin to imagine themselves as big readers, as dancers, as part of a kaleidoscope, as a teensy part of a secular, informed world of ideas? As fully and immediately in the world? As at least sometimes independent?I don't know, but I hope they can. If they want to.

No point in going back or backwards. The essayist Edward Hoagland once said something along the lines of a good day happens when nobody we know dies. I agree. Touch wood, today is one of those days.

And so in broad daylight on this weekday morning, I connect the songs on my iPhone to the small Bluetooth speaker. I tap my fingers, I tap my toes. To the music I make my way to the kitchen sink, to the laptop, to the door--to the things of my world, and to do the things of this--my--world. The muscles remember. (Well, some do.) Doodle has run upstairs, but at this moment, I inhabit a happy sound, an authentic and joyful world, in my very own small house--a world that is as real and as important to me as the sound of a little girl's tap shoes on a cement floor once were.


Copyright Sandra Engel
November 2016

Retirement, Take Fourteen: Halloween, Shadows, Trees

Head's up: I am not going to celebrate (or whatever verb you choose) Halloween. I decorate minimally for every holiday anyway, and Halloween is no different: mine is the only house in the neighborhood without seasonal vegetables, ghosts, witches and plastic inflated creatures in the front yard. As usual the last few years, I am going to ignore Halloween.

Let me explain. I don't mean to be a grinch. I don't mean this to be an autumnal "Get off my lawn!" I don't want to be a spoilsport. I really don't. Fall is my favorite season; I like the cooler temperatures and the crunching leaves. Several times over the past few months, I have driven to New Hampshire, the place a friend calls "The Land of Robert Frost", and I have seen the foliage season emerge. I've seen more reds than I expected given the drought, and lots of golds and browns. Just gorgeous. Trees trees trees. And of course some are evergreens. (And as the Sandy Karaoke car went past the golds on Hogback Mountain in Vermont, it occurred to me that my three cats are autumn colored, too: orange tiger, calico, and a Halloween black cat with one eye. None of them, my familiars, has supernatural powers, but black Swishy does seem invisible  when she scoots under the kitchen table after dark. That is a place of shadows, and she is a reminder that Lewis Carroll got the now-you-see-her-now-you-don't nature of the Cheshire Cat right--even if both you and the cat are without the assistance of pharmaceuticals.)

I'm not anti-autumn at all, and I will get to that. I just want to avoid Halloween again this year because it seems too contrived. Commercial.

I choose not to participate in Halloween because life is scary enough. What do I mean? I always close and lock the windows and doors when I am home (at least when the weather is cool enough). Ditto my car even when it is in my driveway. I also always use the parking brake.

Going to a Halloween party or greeting trick and treaters does not mitigate the possible horrors of everyday life.

As the saying goes, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Someone could go postal in the dairy section of the supermarket just as you are putting your yogurt in the grocery cart. Retire one month and then three months later your significant other dies unexpectedly. Cancer can grow slowly, so when you try to get out of a booth at a beach shack where you have just finished your first-of-the-summer lobster roll, you might discover that your legs won't work.

Just this afternoon as I was running errands, I saw an errant larger-than-life balloon jack-o'lantern bouncing down the street in the twenty mile an hour gusts. It just careened along, on the invisible air, plastic and unmoored.

Such an impersonal universe.

Black cat and symbol of Halloween Swishy was brought to the humane society as a stray. She had to have one eye removed, but no one I met when I adopted her knew why. Was the problem with her eye congenital, just a born-with-it wonky eye? Was it damaged in a fight with another animal? Was she harmed by children or adults before she managed to escape? Or did she try to make it down from a high branch and was poked in the eye because of her own misstep?

I don't think of my response to Halloween as paranoia. I don't think I am being over-sensitive or humorless or in possession of an overactive imagination. (Well, okay, maybe a little on that last.) But which way should I bet?

I don't need to make the day fun. I am not going to dress up as a pirate or a cat or Hermione. (Why should I if there is a party going on in my head 24/7 and you are not invited? Please see a previous blog posting.) If someone else--young or old--wants to dress up as Big Papi or a zebra or a mermaid, go for it.

But how many people do I know--correction, DID I know--who are no longer among us in this beautiful world we inhabit? Too many for me to find entertainment in faux graveyards and dancing skeletons. For me the wolf--even if it is a tiny wolf--is at the door 24/7/365. Dressing up as somebody else, real or fictional, will not keep the wolf from the door. I just can't get into the spirit of the Halloween season.

And I have a distant second reason for not participating in Halloween: I don't want to be part of the commercial  corporate holiday it has become with candy in stores right after Labor Day and every house regaled with emblems of the spirit of the season. (Not to mention the neighborhood O-O-O-O-O sound effects and the Halloween mood lighting.) Granted, I do think really small children dressed as ghosts and goblins and Elsa  and any other manner of other Disney/Pixar characters are cute. And this is the one time a year when children can accept candy from strangers. But I would prefer not to subsidize somebody else's kid's sugar habit. If this seems grinchy, so be it.

There was a time when I did do Halloween. At various points I was a beatnik, a witch, and a clown (long before the current clown terrorism and, well, prom queen zombie costumes). I went trick or treating for UNICEF. After that I do remember a party or two and bobbing for apples and feeling grape eyeballs in the dark. But no costumes.

I liked the holiday enough when I was younger. I don't mean to kill anybody's joy. But if you stop and think about the injustices, the horrors and accidents, the vicissitudes and agonies in the world near and far, the scariness of Halloween is potentially every day--not just at the beginning of the darkest time of the year.

I mean, given the ways of the world, who needs somebody jumping out and saying, "BOO!"?

And yes, I did use to give out candy to the few small kids who came by, usually just at dusk. As often as not, their parents, my neighbors, stood halfway down the driveway. As the night wore on, cars of high school kids emptied out in the neighborhood, and the later the evening got, the taller and rowdier the costumed celebrants got. And once when I did stay up and provided Hershey bars to to the 9 o'clock (and later) trick or treaters, I discovered the next morning that my stockade fence had been spray painted.

I guess they didn't like the Hershey bars.

But these days the school bus does not rumble by in the morning, which means there are no nearby little ghosties and aspiring goblins.

Ignoring Halloween is also just a piece of who I am. Setting aside Godzilla, Frankenstein and King Kong (all of which I watched through my fingers on black and white television decades ago), I have seen only one horror movie, The Shining (and I kept my eyes down in the theater through most of it). No Pinhead, no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no Halloween Part Whatever. I did try to finish Stephen King's Mr. Mercedes, but the end got just too nervous-making, so I gave the book away. (I did enjoy King's 11/22/63, though.)

And now to autumn: so this weekend before Halloween I will finally move the furniture from the deck into the garage for the winter and will dump this year's few annuals (they are still partially green as I write this) on the curb. This is as close to a harvest as I will get. And so I will recognize the turning point of one season to the next; my hands will be stiff in the cold, and the smell of the neighbor's wood stove will be in the air. I will want a warm meal afterwards, and, as night falls, a glass of wine. Maybe I will wonder (as I usually do), if it is too late in the season to plant bulbs, just crocuses, but most likely I will let that idea go away as I always do. I like the cold if not the dark that comes early, but the indoors is cozy.

I haven't seen any Canadian geese going south yet, honking in the overcast, but I will. Thanksgiving is less than a month away, one of my favorite holidays even if my decorating will again be minimal at best. At some point before Thanksgiving, the lawn guy will come vacuum up the leaves and they will end upon the curb, too. Thanksgiving means another ride over Hogback Mountain. Good.

On Halloween, as I have in the past, after an early dinner I will turn off the outside lights, close the curtains and make sure only one light upstairs is on. I won't be unhappy if it rains. Because it is a holiday that can be dangerous to cats, I will make sure mine are all inside even though they are always inside.

I will go upstairs and watch Netflix or read. The cats will eventually follow me upstairs. We will stay warm.

Robert Frost, he of New England, wrote "Nothing gold can stay", and he's right as far as he goes. Around Halloween things do die. But Frost does not take into consideration memory (not to mention evergreens) and the turn--and return--of the seasons. We hope that we have--that we will live to have--another autumn, one not unlike the ones we have known before, ones where we learned that the shadows start to come earlier and earlier.

In that cycle is comfort.

Not long from now the leaves will all have turned and fallen. The ground will be too hard to plant bulbs even though the evergreen hedge will not need trimming until May.

Yes, nothing gold can stay. But even with no leaves, the trees still stand tall.

Copyright Sandra Engel
October 2016

Retirement, Take Thirteen: Going Solo, Living a la Carte

How many times over the years have people told me they enjoy solitude? That they enjoy the peace and quiet that comes from being alone? Lots. But as a friend observed over lunch the other day when the subject came up, "But you actually mean it."

Yes, I do.

Somebody finally got it.

I like peace and quiet even though these days, with the windows finally closed, there is usually music or NPR playing in the background. (At least some of the music is from David Teie's "Music for Cats" with many sounds I can't hear but assume are there. Do my cats have a transcendent experience as those CDs play? Hard to tell, but my guess is they prefer that music to Eric Clapton's screaming guitar.) I read. I write. I play with the cats when we are all awake. I do a little housekeeping. I take a break and surf the Interweb, or maybe I do my nails if I feel like it. I finally have enough food in the house that I don't have to go out to buy, say, milk at the last minute. The larders are full enough.

I begin the day by sipping Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk in it. As the Interweb meme says, "First I drinks the coffee, and then I do the things." That about sums it up. I don't cook much, but recently I bought a twenty-inch gas stove to replace the thirty-plus year old failing one. So far I have used two burners and the oven. Most days I am content with oatmeal and quiche, a piece of fish, or beans and brown bread. I am not much of a consumer. I do pay attention to nutrition, but sustenance does not require a complicated menu to taste good. I am pretty much content will entry-level creature comforts.

I wear jeans or sweats and ragg socks. Sometimes I wear my contact lenses and some days I don't.

The point is I can choose. And all this feels sustaining: my new a la carte life.

I have enjoyed pieces of this kind of time here and there over the years, but such time, given all the other demands, was waaaaay back on the back burner, a slender slice of the pie chart of my happily-long-so-far life. (As Paul McCartney sings, "I go back so far/ I'm in front of me.")

In retirement I am finally able to be who I am, and I have an academic-ish way to begin to explain that identity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Jungian psychology; according to this test, I am an INTJ: Introversion, Intuition, Thinking and Judgement. Mine is the rarest of the sixteen Myers-Briggs personality classifications with a mere 2% of the population and only .8% of women testing into it. INTJ is characterized as "The Architect" with the ability to inhabit the world of ideas, be comfortably at one remove, and content to work alone. (I never did see the point of team-building exercises. Never.) I like to let things percolate. Big picture and small picture both. Although we are quick-minded, we are not demonstrative; we are more hard-working than warm and fuzzy, and we tend to be fiercely independent and private. Other INTJ's per the Interweb (and I take this with a large lump of salt): Michele Obama, Hillary Clinton, Walter White (Heisenberg) on Breaking Bad. And Gandalf.

Well, maybe.

Still, I think there is some truth to this INTJ thing. How many times through grammar and high school was I told I needed to speak up in class? I like to think about things; being called on to say something NOW did not help me develop anything worth saying. Not surprisingly, once I go to college, I gravitated to writing classes that usually included weekly one-on-one conferences with the professor--my kind of learning at last. (And I still have the voices of those teachers--Don Murray and Tom Williams--in my head. THAT was teaching.) And from them I also learned the importance of the first rule of criticism: giving things--writing or whatever--a sympathetic reading.

Even if I did not have the words for it, I have known forever that I recharge in solitude. I need peace and quiet. I can do a stretch of bonhomie if you like, but  for me, it will be exhausting, not invigorating.

Extroverts, please take note. We don't all sit at the same table that you do. Your kosher is not my kosher. So to speak.

A recent piece in The Guardian, "Hey Parents-Leave Those Introverts Alone!" reviewed Susan Cain's latest book, Quiet Power: Growing Up in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Somewhere between a third and half of all people are introverts (of one stripe or another) Cain says, and in this book written with teenagers in mind, she identifies introversion as a "superpower". (However, if a superpower isn't recognized in a world of gabby extroverts, does it really exist?) But the most salient observation was in the comments, by one Lorraine Lewis, whoever she may be: "I am an introvert & there is a party going on in my head 24/4--& you're not invited."

Amen. At  the least there is always a lot of food for thought in my head.

And no, I am not Sybil. Or Rain Man. I am not on the autism spectrum. It's not that simple.

Let's not be dismissive here. Let's give me a sympathetic reading.

Granted, over the years my small house has become my refuge, one singularly party-free outside my head.

And I do go out and abroad to see the world. For example, I regularly--a couple times a week--have lunch with friends at Marr-Logg House, a restaurant. It's a routine that doesn't feel like a routine; usually we sit in the same booth. Marr-Logg isn't the restaurant version of Cheers, exactly, but it is a place where we are known. It's a breakfast-and-lunch place where we know the names of the servers, too, a place where they don't have to wear uniforms or name tags.. If one of us is missing, it gets noticed.

Marr-Logg has a blackboard with the daily specials, but usually I have pretty much the same thing: a toasted BLT or a crunchy Caesar salad with the dressing on the side. Sometimes a fish Reuben. Things I usually don't make at home. Choose one as a side: potato salad, macaroni salad, coleslaw, or applesauce. It's that kind of place.

The servers know I want iced tea, even in the winter--one server says to another "An iced tea and a Sierra Mist just came in" as she brings the drinks and the laminated menus to our booth. In an age of high-tech, order-your-food-on-a-tablet-at-your-table, the servers use order slips and pens. The handwritten order also serves as the bill.

Over food my friends and I get caught up: the show at the local community theater. The new job, the old job. Cats. Purchases on eBay. The ride to Maine or New Jersey and back. Hiking up and down Adirondack mountains. Family. Friends. The election  Our book club.

Lunch at Marr-Logg is testimony to the importance of routine, to our all being dots in the social matrix. The servers seem to enjoy what they are doing, and if they have ever been in a bad mood, it has never shown.

At this point my car can probably drive itself there. The drive is three songs away from home.

I go to Marr-Logg for the food. I go there for the company.

I suppose a shrink might chalk all this introversion with lunch and such events (I will spare you the others) up to a number of things: Maybe introversion is genetic. Maybe it's nurture, not nature: after all, I spent the first eighteen years of my life as an English speaker, nominally Protestant, in a community that seemed to be primarily French-speaking, and that definitely was proudly pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. I was a majority minority before phrase was coined, I suspect. Maybe I am an introvert because I wasn't an athlete or cheerleader, but that I think confuses cause and effect.

Different strokes. Different palates. So be it.

More than that, writing, for me, provides an important connection to the page, one of the best connections there is. As good as the best conversation. There is contact with the page that is unlike any other. This is something Tom Williams spoke with me about toward the end of my college career, and he was right. All those years ago. That I had not forgotten.

But in this retirement time-to-think mode, out of nowhere the other day I  remembered a Bible verse I was given in Sunday school by my teacher Miss Foss. It had to begin with S for Sandra:  "Salt is good, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how will you season it?" from the Revised Standard Version.

Such a statement of taste, of time and loss, and--to go all English major on you, dear reader-- a rhetorical question that invites ideas. Or so it seemed at first when I remembered it. But then I looked it up online. This Mark 9:50 verse is followed by an answer: "Have salt in yourself and be at peace with one another."

So.

The things I want to do order my life.

In the end, all we have are who we are and time and space--and the people we surround ourselves with. As I said, my a la carte life. Hot and cold, crispy and mushy. Sweet and sour, bitter and salty. Music and silence. Staying in, going out. Here and there. Home and away.

Nourishment comes in many forms.

Copyright 2016
Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Twelve: Discounted Senior, Heal Thyself

I have started perfecting my Queen Elizabeth II wave for when I stop in at my former place of full-time employment (and now my place of part-time employment) and I see former colleagues going into a meeting so they are unable to chat. My wave is a little hand cup that goes back and forth, not too enthusiastic and not unfriendly. I might say my wave is regal, but really it is not. It is just my labor-saving wave. The people I wave to are most likely on their way to fifty-minute meetings followed by a ten minute break before they go into another fifty-minute meeting.

May they knock themselves out. Me? I count my current blessings and give my little wave. I have declared victory and moved on.

Queen Elizabeth is ninety and no doubt lives a life far different from mine. She does not have to do her own laundry. She doesn't have to dust. If she ever cooks, it is probably just for fun (which is what I do as well, maybe once a year, now that I think about it. A gourmand I am not. Most days I am content with a can of tuna.) Her clothes--from hat to pumps--are color-coordinated for her. She still apparently is doing pretty well in that family business even though all that socializing and waving has to take at least some toll.

Still, it isn't bad to be queen. My guess is people show up without fail when she calls a meeting and make sure they do not look bored. And I doubt that she has ever rushed out the door to go to work on an icy January Monday morning thinking, "Bad hair day, but maybe that will be the worst to happen to me today if I'm lucky." It's okay to be ninety when your younger face is on the national currency--and on postage stamps!--and you're a queen.

Some of us who are not Queen Elizabeth perhaps have a difference experience with age--and age discrimination. I have always held that a generous view of differences, of the rich variety and complexity of human nature, was something to be valued. Even if on occasion they drive me up the wall, there are arguments for reveling in what used to be called "The Family of Man." The human family. Old, young; rich, poor; here and there. And so on. At least in the abstract.

Although I never think to ask for it, every third visit or so I don't mind the cashier at Dunkin Donuts giving me a senior discount. (I am fortunate because not getting the teensy discount is not going to break my budget.) The senior discount on my Amtrak ticket  to Boston was  a few dollars; there is no significant senior discount for major appliances, plane tickets or flannel shirts, AARP notwithstanding. (The tactful British refer to all this as "a consideration", a far less commercial and direct term than "senior discount".)

In the eyes of many I am old. To those people, age is not the continuum that Ashton Applewhite reconceptualizes age as being in her  book This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. For her, age is a continuum with younger on one end and older on the other. and the gradations of age are infinite rather than, say, the oversimplified binary of "old" and "young". More than that, I am also a woman, which to my mind makes my experience more complicated. Let me put it this way: I am old enough to get Social Security in a country that values youth.  And the standards of beauty for men and women still differ: older men--men my age and often even younger--whose builds are basically those of  very pregnant women are seen as...normal. Or normal-ish even if there might be private speculation (in some cases perhaps unfairly)  that they are basically walking heart attacks. Yes, there are a few svelte silver foxes, male and female,  and a few people with gorgeous white hair that in the workplace might suggest power, but most of us do not look like not-very-ageing Miss Americas (a show which, by the way, I have not watched since at least the mid-1970s). Even so, many of us have a style worth noticing, and that matters. (But personal style is a matter for another day.)

The Interweb does not help. Consider the various videos of people of a certain age--most commonly women--dancing. These videos are not designed to celebrate the fun the dancers are having; instead, they invite the viewer to laugh at, not with, the dancer. Even when song and dance man Dick Van Dyke does a minute-long soft shoe, the surprise is that he can do it at all. He is ninety! Look! He can dance! It's a miracle!

I grant you that age does take some toll. A few years ago I asked my gynecologist what happens next, and he said, without missing a beat as he snapped off his rubber gloves, "Everything shrivels".  That was enough of a summary for me, thank you very much. But if I have been around the block a few times, at least these days--touch wood--I can choose which blocks I want to go around and at what pace. There's a lot to be said for that.

The heart still beats, and touch wood yet again, age does not necessarily mean instant decrepitude and infirmity.

Somewhere in the 1970s when I was reading public library books such as I Want to Run Away From Home But I'm Afraid to Cross the Street,  I came across a theory that whenever a woman enters a room, she knows exactly where she ranks in comparison to the other women in the room. I am still not 100% convinced, but at least on some occasions it has seemed true: the Great Female Competition.  (And at the age when I read about that theory, I would never have even begun to factor in women my current age being in that room. So young I was.)

That said, at one point I worked at a place and in a time where there really was a group called "Faculty Dames"; the group was 90% wives although female faculty were strongly encouraged to help out as well with social events. (I didn't; I left after two years.) Later, for a long time at faculty parties, the men tended to congregate in one room, the women in another. At that point I was one of four female faculty members in a department of fourteen or so--and in a discipline that was historically female. This was only a few years after the first publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Quite a disconnect between what I read and what I saw around me in the provinces--in the real world, as they say.

Ashton Applewhite suggests that if you want to gauge diversity or access, you need not do more than look at the footwear under the table at a meeting. The more variety, the better. If you had looked under the table during a meeting in those (my) not-that-long-ago work days, you would have seen, most likely, wing tips and pumps (including mine). These days? My guess would be flipflops and kitten heels for women, and for men, sneakers or oxfords or loafers. Maybe a few wingtips on the feet of the members of the top  management. But very few of the comfy flats I wear these days, I bet.

One of the benefits of retirement is that my time is finally my own (mostly) and I can use it as I choose. I can finally respect the time I have and not sell it to an employer for a paycheck. These days, fifteen months in, retirement is feeling less and less like a new pair of shoes.

So on the days when I don't have reason to go to the post office or any place near it, I put the birthday card I need to mail in my mailbox and the mail carrier picks it up. Convenience matters; I can use my time to do things other than running errands if I want to. (Here's a thought: some days I may have it even better than the Queen does: very little responsibility. Who knows. This may be.)

I have learned over the years that it is sometimes possible to catch yourself unaware. There are small surprises if you are paying attention.

I like to think that in my best moments I am beyond ageism and sexism. But one rainy day recently, I did do errands, and, walking along, dropped some bills into the mailbox down the street. As I was turning away from the mailbox, a woman with white hair got out of an older car and put envelopes into the box as well. "I usually put my mail in the mailbox at home, sticking out, and the mailman picks them up, but it's too rainy today. They'd get all wet."

I responded with some chitchat about our needing the rain and liking the cooler temps and then walked on. I was kind. I was polite. I may have even smiled.

But then as I walked away, I thought: older than I. White hair. I walked (virtuously young) and she drove. I think I am younger than she, but then I do do what someone older than I does, the outgoing mail into the mailbox at home, most days--as if I were young and she were OLD. As if I had no good reason to put the birthday card into the mailbox to be picked up. And I am doing what she does only fifteen months into retirement. I must be older than I think I am. Welcome, Decrepitude. Already.

At least I caught myself having that thought.

And then I thought, maybe more than other people would have and maybe not, maybe to my credit and maybe not: Sandy, heal thyself.



Copyright Sandra Engel 2016

Retirement, Take Eleven: Cool Enough to Sing

I want to wear long sleeves again--not because of fashion really, but because it is time for the higher than usual temperatures to end. One day in late May I was turning on the heated seats in my car, and the next day I was blasting the air conditioning. Although last winter was comparatively mild, it was, well, still winter.

Given everything that is going on--the weather, politics, my car problems--I think there may just be some truth to the observation that maybe, just maybe, David Bowie was somehow making sure things worked at least a little better, and since he has left us, things have gone slightly askew. With him gone and with whatever unifying cosmic force he might have been now absent, here we are, sweltering away in what used to be a temperate zone.

Makes as much sense as any other explanation I have heard. (Global warming explains only the weather.)

I want the weather to cool off into fall temperatures because things seem more possible when the weather is cooler, if only because then I do not feel flattened by the heat. I want to feel like going for a walk and to the gym again. (The gym I had been going to has limited AC which apparently only kept the place cool in the very early morning.) I want the temperatures to cool off because I want to feel like dancing and singing.

This year has been the inaugural year of the Family Summer Concert Series. (My niece came up with the title and the idea that we do this once a year. Good idea!) I have been saying for several years that I am in the process of very slowly cleaning out. I don't need more stuff. More than that, especially now that I have time--retirement is the ultimate flextime--experiences seem much more important than possessions. And beyond that, there is something to be said for shared experiences.

On this score, (no pun intended), music works. Attending a concert does requires some planning and coordinating, some attention to logistics ("So who's going to drive?"), and once on the road, there is conversation, food and drink. There's singing along with the music, with usually not a lot of conversation except "Who's Bob Weir?" after Paul McCartney brought him on stage for "Hi, Hi, Hi". My niece asked me that, and ten minutes later I asked her who Rob Gronkowski was as he was brought on stage as well. (Answer: A Patriot. Later my brother explained, "He catches the ball and then basically runs over people." Gronk apparently had connections to someone on Sir Paul's staff; Weir had played at Fenway the night before.)

So this year with family members I have seen Tedeschi Trucks Band, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor and Jackson Browne, the last three at Fenway Park. Don Henley of The Eagles will be next and he will be followed by Buddy Guy. Then this season pretty much ends.

My house does not have air conditioning but it is insulated and does have new windows and doors that do a much better job keeping out cold drafts in the winter and hot air in the summer than it did in years past. But even so, this summer has been a sauna. I have three oscillating fans downstairs and one upstairs for a house that has a footprint of maybe twenty-five by twenty-five feet. But it has still been hot.

The heat has reduced my productivity, my get-up-and-go. My general energy level. I get up, shower, eat, and then want to sit in the shade or go back to bed. (When I lived in the tropics, I would have taken to the opium pipe had there been one, if only to escape the heat.) For a couple months my retirement work ethic--not manic, not driven, just busy enough--has been on hold. Steamed out. Poached.

But last week we had a cooler day--a day well under eighty degrees--and, among other activities, I got myself to the top end of a mop and of a vacuum cleaner. All of a sudden it was possible to breathe again. I felt as if I were not living in hot broth. I could think about moving and doing things.

For most of my life I have been fortunate enough to have a house of my own, one that now, even with my donations to Salvation Army, still has a lot of books and photos of places I have been. Hence there is dust even after I dust. I have never been much of  a homemaker.  The housekeeping I do tends to be done in spurts: no day-long marathon, but the bathroom one day, the kitchen another. That said, my philosophy is that it all needs to be clean enough. I do not live in a clinic. I do live with three cats who have been shedding machines in the heat.

With the cooler weather, the temperature was no excuse to stall. I swept up the few pieces of dry cat food outside the bowl on the kitchen floor and then vacuumed and got out the mop and bucket.

Music helped. I still have CDs, and I can blast the music on my iPhone through a Bluetooth speaker. The windows were open, and although I live on a corner and have more yard than floor, mine is a very quiet neighborhood. So I could play the music only so loudly.

I moved the chair, the cat bowls, the three-legged stools in the corner. The playlist--my setlist--started with Paul McCartney. "One, two, three, fah!" and "I Saw Her Standing There" was off. "How could I dance with a-nother?/ And I saw her standing there." And then the chang of the guitar that begins "A Hard Day's Night" followed by "It's been a hard day's night/And I've been working like a dog..." I sang along to the na-na-na-na's of "Hey Jude", and, truth be told, to the rest of the songs, too.

I was singing. Not as loudly as I might. But I was singing. Although I was someone whom the music teacher told not to sing loudly at all in elementary school music class (I was enthusiastic), I like to sing. (Using earbuds is not the same as singing along to music in the air. It just isn't.) The car trips to see my family the day before we go on the Family Concert Series featured Sandy's Car Karaoke for a good four to five hours over the hills of Vermont into New Hampshire. (I kept the windows closed, the AC cranked.) If there were a summer fantasy camp, even just a few days, for people who wanted to be backup singers, I might consider attending. I mean, who doesn't want to sing backup with Aretha Franklin?

Not only was I singing along, but I was mopping. Mopping and slopping. Later I would text a friend to ask if there were ever an I Love Lucy scene where she mops and sings; in some ways this just felt that way. I moved a couple more pieces of furniture, slopped more soapy water. And then more water. I realized I should have rolled up my crops a little. My flipflops were wet. Oh well.

A few more songs, including "Sweet Baby James," and I remembered how the crowd went nuts cheering when James Taylor sang the line "from Stockbridge to Boston" at Fenway. I mopped away and tried to see if any of the already-mopped parts were drying. Maybe a little.

By the time "Up on the Roof",  a nice slowish song, came on, I was hitting my musical stride. I sang along a little more loudly. "On the roof, that's the only place I know/Where you just have to wish to make it soooooo". I was once again enthusiastic.

"Up on the rooof/ Up on the roo-oof/ Up on the roo-oooof" for a big finish.

Come fall, I can close the windows and sing. Really sing.

Bring on the fall.

Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Ten: Eating Off Rocks, Riding on Tires

In the "Bring out your dead" plague scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, someone tosses a limp Eric Idle character onto a cart carrying the dead. Eric Idle's character protests, "I'm not dead yet," and some days I think I should wear a T-shirt that says just that.

I am not dead yet. I am also no longer thirty. I have to admit I am not sure how much the T-shirt would matter, though. (And whenever I bring up the subject of my eventual demise, I always touch wood multiple times just to be safe. Let's not tempt fate.) I do, however, think there is a lot of truth to the observation that ageism is still an acceptable form of discrimination, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Title IX notwithstanding. Certainly corporate management in many locations has been known to "manage out" the more experienced and qualified employees. (I was lucky; I was offered a retirement incentive.) Let me give you a more personal and quirky example of ageism: in a meeting a few years ago, a relative newbie manager at work (not my direct supervisor) said to another colleague of the same vintage as I and me, "When did that happen? Back when you were eating off rocks?"

It was funny at the time. Sort of.

And of course, when we mentioned his comment to him later, he claimed he had no memory of saying that--an ironic and convenient lapse of memory in someone probably easily half our chronological ages. Neither of us alleged eaters-off-rocks can remember what we had actually said, but I can tell you that for at least the last twenty years I have been careful NOT to say, "In 1986 we tried that...". I am aware of how tiresome the past can seem to some relative newbies.

These days we live in an age of ageism (and sexism, but I will leave that subject for a later time) in a culture that still privileges those whose age is well under the old-timey 55 m.p.h. speed limit. Such is the American beauty pageant. I do know I have more time behind me than I do in front of me unless science changes things soon. I also know that life has been good to me so far (as Joe Walsh and The Eagles sang; if you have been paying attention, you know I am partial to old rockers). And I am grateful. Every day I am grateful. I also recognize the truth of my late colleague Ron Medici's observation as he prepared to retire: wherever he went, he kept finding himself the oldest person in the room. But on the bright side, lately I have come to realize that I usually don't think about how old I am until someone reminds me, directly or indirectly, of my age. This is good. Until.

Granted, I do tend to pay more attention to obituaries than I used to, but mostly I check the years of the deceased's birth. 1932? Okay. Lived a long life. 1987? 1990? What did they die of?

At this point I could give you my version of my Boomer versus Millennial rant. I really could. But I won't. I will say a few things, though: for some of us, life is not about selfies and emoticons. Rather, life is very much a matter of focal length. And chance.

My issues with the relative newbies are two. some tend to ignore the time- and idea-travel  that an active mind tends to do simply as a matter of habit--and this is a rich and wonderful habit to possess, I think. The things--the ideas, the conversations--of this world are not always linear and are often better for not being linear and simple. More than that, Mr. Back-When-You-Were-Eating-Off-Rocks, there are lots of different frames of reference in the world. Nobody is the center of the universe. Nobody.

Corporate slogans aside, we also may not inhabit the best of all possible world now that you have arrived. I mean, do we really think there are new ideas in the world? Or maybe we just never heard of these allegedly "new" ideas before? Maybe that's the case at least sometimes.

I confess that at odd moments at work I wanted to say, "Listen, you should consider yourself lucky if you live to be my age." But I never did and I won't. And I don't think for a minute that things were necessarily better in the past.

In the meantime, we all have the same twenty-four hours a day. Physics suggests that body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

I keep busy...even without a title, even without an office. Even without a full-time job.

Imagine that.

I don't want reverence for my past in the workplace beauty contest. And I don't want to go back to the past. I just want--wanted--courtesy. Respect.

And now to my second issue with the newbies: how vulnerable to chance we all are. The nature of the universe argues for humility, not newbie hubris. Traveling in time with ideas, having a reflective cast of mind--these can engender humility. Granted, actuarily speaking, it is likely that I will be going into The Great Beyond before Mr. Back-When-You-Were-Eating-Off-Rocks does. Age brings physical changes. Fair enough.

But separate from those, I can conjure up all kinds of things that can go wrong, not just for me but for anybody. Nobody is exempt from such possibilities, from chance and accident, from the cosmic zigs and zags that may be more impending than we know. (For fictional examples, read the novels of Charles Dickens and John Irving.) Slipping in the bathtub. Being hit by a bus. A mole that morphs into skin cancer either because I did not use enough sunscreen or because of, well, karma. Choking on a peanut or a bit of beef while I am home alone watching Netflix.  An ankle broken by accidentally stepping into a hole at a bus stop (which I did recently witness). A home invasion. A blown tire that sends my car careening off Hogback Mountain at a least 45 miles per hour.

I mean, the wolf may well be at the door even if we don't know it. Think about it.

But then there are also happy accidents. Call them luck, call them karma.  The truck driver who helped me change a flat tire outside Hamburg, New York, when I was driving ti Iowa. "I would want someone to do it for my daughter." The helpful desk clerk at the small hotel near the Hauptbahnhof in Munich who, it turned out, had not only visited the small city I had recently moved to but who also knew more about it than I did. The expat teacher in Ho Chi Minh City who--surprise!--attended the same high school as I did, albeit some fifteen years later. The bathtub fall I did not take, the cashew I safely munched. The cat I did not trip over in the dark. The psychosis that I did not develop as a result of taking Lariam, a powerful anti-malaria pill. The intestinal parasites I did not have after extended stays in a developing country in the tropics.

And my car did not careen off Hogback Mountain but instead had a flat tire a day and a half later as it was sitting in the driveway. (It turned out both front tires needed replacing.)

I once applied for a teaching job in a location and school that I had never heard of before because I wanted to move eastward. The July job interview with only a department head (no committee, no dean, no VP, no HR) went well enough, I thought. The school was looking for someone with new ideas for teaching writing. I had those credentials. The job was pretty much doing what I had aspired to do and went at least sort of in the direction of what these days is called a "dream job".

Toward the end of the interview, the department head took out my letters of recommendation (hard copies at the time) and asked me how Tom Williams was doing.

In my letters of recommendation was a letter from Thomas Williams, one of my writing professors at the University of New Hampshire. Tom's novel The Hair of Harold Roux had won the National Book Award a few years earlier.

It turned out that the department head had been in the army in Korea with Tom Williams--in military intelligence, I think--and had pleasant memories of talking with him about books all those years ago--at that time probably a good fifteen to twenty years previously, actually.

I was offered the job all but officially before I got on the plane to go home.

I don't want to go back to the old days. I really don't. But I do recognize life's vagaries and how I have benefited from them (and in some cases have survived them, but that is a subject for another day). Karma, luck--call it whatever--is an argument for humility and for not dividing the world into the eating-off-rocks people, the people seen as still-breathing fossils, the local anachronisms and, on the other hand, the more highly evolved relative newbies who think they are in the process of inheriting the earth. For some of us the world is richer and more arbitrary than the selfie-rich newbie perspective suggests.

Why should my age be an issue? I'm not dead yet.

And I have always eaten off a plate. Just FYI. :-)

Copyright Sandra Engel
August 2016

Retirement, Take Nine: Material Girl

Material Girl

When I cleaned out my office a little more than a year ago, I put stuff into three piles: the garbage/recycling pile; boxes of books I wanted to save, and finally a couple boxes labeled "sentimental/save for now" which I came to think of as The Decide Later Boxes. I am pleased to report that I have thrown out at least three-quarters of  the contents of The Decide Later Boxes, the stuff--the material--I didn't want to force myself to decide about a little more than a year ago. Very old grade books? Shredded and out. The odd memo or very used textbook that was state of the art at the time and that seemed thirteen months ago  to mark some sentimental milestone?  A no brainer: out. 

What did I end up keeping? Duplicate copies of articles I had published. Small gifts people had given me over the years. A few business cards with my former titles (and identities) on them, plus business cards from overseas colleagues. A dozen notepads with "From the Desk of Sandra Engel" at the top, pads originally designed by a colleague when computers were very, very new.

Also a little at a time I have been going through drawers and closets and easily bagging clothes for the Salvation Army. Did I save the jackets I bought in Hanoi and wore to work even though now the material is very frayed and the jackets almost unwearable? Of course. Did I sort through at least some of my junk jewelry? Yes, but I probably did not throw out enough. I washed and gave two of my father's army blankets to my nephews. I probably still have too many scarves, but oh well.

I think there is something to feng shui, even if I was rearranging things mostly in drawers and closets.

And no, I did not thank each piece for its service or anything like that, as a best seller suggests. I did marvel at how much money I probably spent on clothes even though it was spent over decades. I am not a minimalist. I do know that I could not have accomplished all this a year ago, this latest round of sorting. Maybe James Taylor (and I think Rosemary Clooney before him) was right: "The secret of life/Is enjoying the passage of time." Maybe things happen as they should. Or when they should. Maybe.

Somebody suggested that I take the clothes--in installments if I needed to--to a consignment shop, but that seemed like too much effort. Nor did I want to end up having several yard sales that I doubted would be worth the effort. And for those of you who wonder how my politics align with those of the Salvation Army: well, they don't. But my great aunt found meaning working with the Salvation Army, and the mother of one of my dance teachers was helped so much by the Salvation Army during the Depression that she named her daughter Sally. Yes, I prefer Lowe's to Home Depot and Target to Walmart because of their corporate politics. I have never set foot in Hobby Lobby. (To be fair, I have never had any need to.) But I choose to grant the Salvation Army a little more slack than I do other entities with politics I am pretty sure I disagree with. 

So I focused on getting stuff to the car and to the curb.

And I do feel lighter.

And it occurred to me as I was bagging things up that I do live in my head more than I used to since I finally CAN. There are days when I live in a Happy Sandy Bubble. All day. In this Happy Sandy Bubble, I can do whatever I want.

Maybe David Bowie was right when he said that "growing older is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been". So maybe I am back (back?) to who I should have been had I not had to work to support myself. In order to keep even my modest roof over my head, I had to compromise and socialize. At least for a good chunk of time, I enjoyed it all. I really did.

Recently a wise friend of mine gave me a mug that says, "I AM ONLY TALKING TO MY CAT TODAY", and yes, that does describe some days even when I am not sorting and packing things up. I read. I write. (And I am not writing memos and reports that may or may not get read, I might add, even though they were requested.)  I listen to podcasts. I make the occasional list. I putter around the house. I listen to music. I enjoy my own company without many interruptions. Mostly. My time is my own. I like my own company. I like peace and quiet.

Yes, I talk to my cats.

And nothing feels rushed. NO RUSH. This is a very big change. And I am not doing things I might not otherwise choose to do since I am not being paid.

Space. Space in my head is good.

Maybe there is some room to grow now. And if I can finally locate myself firmly on the introvert side of things, so be it.

And as I was busy with this episode of cleaning out, I also had routine blood work done.

I have learned again that the mind and the body are connected. One largely unrecognized issue is not the effect of the workplace on stress (we know they are connected, workplace-->stress) but on corporate management's moral responsibility to minimize stress if  at all possible--not to simply offer wellness programs and then call everything good. Yes, indeedy, I have felt better, all told, in the past thirteen months than I did in much of the last thirteen years. People tell me I look better.

I will spare you the other medical (and irrelevant) details, but I will tell you that my cholesterol has dropped fifty (yes, 5-0) points since I retired--the major change in how I live being retirement. Yes, I do eat better although I do not deprive myself of  hot dogs or ice cream cones, and I do do a better job of taking prescriptions on schedule. But I am in no way getting any more exercise than I used to when I was working, especially during this unusually hot and steamy summer.

This lower number is no small change especially when you know that I have outlived my parents by at least ten years.

I don't want to think much about the likelihood that working for forty-plus years shortened my life. (And I  was lucky and had good white-collar jobs.) We'll never know. But.

Anyway, moving on.

I don't need more stuff. I still have more than I need and that is okay. Eventually I will hoe some more out, probably when the weather gets cooler. All my little aches and pains have pretty much vanished in the last thirteen months (just as they used to whenever I went to Vietnam). I am grateful that I am still here. 

I am still here, flesh and bone, lipids and cholesterol, most body parts functioning (as far as I know anyway), and so a little more than a year into retirement--touch wood, always--grateful every day, I find myself content to be a new kind of material girl.

Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Eight: Just Visiting

During the past year of retirement, I have been teaching one class online, but other than that, I have been work-free, which is to say my time has been my own. The exception to this was my role in the recent hosting of a visiting professor from Vietnam. The good news was that since I had done this for the seven previous years, I had a routine of a sort, a schedule for the nine weeks: the trips to and from the airport, the campus and bibliographic orientations, her weekly meetings with the resident directors, the brewery tour. I also had a sense of what I was likely to  do and to hear: yes, on campus it is difficult to tell the instructors from the students. Yes, American coffee is comparatively watery, and a coffee break at work does last only fifteen minutes or so. Yes (again), the weather is cold but it will get warmer and by the time you leave to go home in May, we will not even be wearing sweatshirts. (And all this is hard for them to believe.)

Although I knew things would not go as planned--they never do--I did not anticipate how much time it would take to address an error, a transposition that should not have happened, in the visa paperwork completed by someone else. This  resulted in a good extra ten hours of my figuring out and addressing the error since it had implications for her compensation. This was the bad news, pretty much the only major bad news.

Please keep in mind that I was doing this hosting pretty much pro bono,  If this bad news situation was stressful for me--and it was--no doubt it was also for the guest. And unnecessarily so. And even separate from that, I realized how much I had done in the past; this hosting gig was a full-time job, albeit more some weeks than others.

I knew the visit would be labor-intensive along the way, and that it certainly was. I did have a lot of help, but I also found myself wishing that I had even more help--help with the not-going-out-to-do-fun-stuff but with the daily, more routine stuff, the less-glamorous trips to the supermarket, for instance.

And I knew this as I recognized that I had been spoiled by being retired for ten months, by doing whatever the hell I wanted to do.

Don't get me wrong: I am grateful for all the help I had. And I had a lot. In fact, in many ways, my faith in humanity has been revived  every one of these last seven--now eight--springs. At certain points in the visit my faith and trust in other people is just buoyed.

Being the default  during the visit, though,  got old a couple times, especially when I was sick off and on for a couple weeks. Plus, despite disclaimers, visitors to any location sometimes have expectations. I mean, they left home for a reason. They may or may not be expected to be entertained 24/7 (or say they do not expect to be entertained), but their idea of appropriate activities may or may not include a trip to the post office or the allergist on the way to the Asian market. And sometimes it is just necessary to stop and put gas in the tank, be you at home or overseas.

There is a travel philosophy in here somewhere: life is made of small, real events, and if the tourist why-not-see-even-more-of New-York-City isn't balanced by these small typical events, then I am put in the position of organizing something that is more a trip for tourists than a modest but meaningful representative cultural experience. A cultural exchange is not just about seeing landmarks that you can already identify. There is a difference between a tourist and a traveler.

My name is not Sandy Tourism.

And since my retirement, I have taken up a different role in the work/institution universe. During the visit, another thing I realized resoundingly, almost with a THUD, had to do with the people at the school. Before the visiting professor arrived, I went on campus maybe once a week to pick up my el cheapo educational discount New York Times in the school library. Sometimes I would see a librarian or two--which I was always glad to do--but that was it, pretty much. What I didn't fully realize before the guest arrived was how much I enjoyed seeing, even in passing, many of the people I used to work with full-time. Granted, I don't know all the newbies, and sometimes, although I know someone's name, I have to ask,"Which one is he?"

But for nine weeks and change I spent a lot more time on campus.

I don't know everybody the way I used to, and that's okay. What I have more fully realized, though, more than I ever did when I was trying to detach and go on campus only once a week, is how much I enjoy having contact with the people I know and like. I cannot say I know any of them well, or even that I have friended them on Facebook (or they me). I have never seen most of them outside of work and it is unlikely I ever will.

But if the place I invested thirty-nine full-time years is on a trajectory to become a place in many ways unidentifiable to me within the next five to ten years, so be it. At least for a while, good people, work friends of a sort, will continue to be there: Paul K., Jason, Mark R., Sharon Z., Jean L., Jill H., Both Sergei's. And others. And there are some who are comparatively new: Mary N., Gloria K., Jim and Norma, Joann D., Carolyn D. Jake.

I cannot list them all.

It is always great to see them, even fleetingly. But even so, I would not go back to working full-time. (And every once in a while  I am not sure I even want to work part-time although right now I don't want to think about not  going in once in a while to get my newspapers.)

These days. as I approach the anniversary of my retirement, I realize that I have walked away. In some ways I am a visitor, too. And that is just fine.

And Then There Was A Slight Interruption...
And this is what I was doing:
http://uticaod.com/article/20160515/OPINION/160519776

Retirement, Take Seven: New Fiesta, a Quiche, and David Bowie

My earliest food habits when I was growing up in New England were very much of their time: meat and potatoes, and a roast for Sunday dinner; Boston baked beans and hot dogs on Saturday nights; Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs; grilled cheese sandwiches on Sunday nights. Meatloaf. Later on, my parents favored what nutritionist Gayelord Hauser called "nature foods," freshly juiced carrots or celery, B vitamins and fish oil capsules. (That juicer caused the lights in the kitchen to dim, I swear.) The candy drawer in the kitchen was filled with early versions of protein bars that were composed mostly of blackstrap molasses. But no matter the food, I insisted that I eat off the red plate (each of the set of plates was a different color).

As an adult I have been a picky--that is, selective and probably a little lazy--cook. And thus eater. My initial idea of cooking, learned at home, was adding an egg and water to a Duncan Hines spice cake mix. A tuna-out-of-the-can sandwich on toasted white bread. Campbell's tomato soup. Beans and hot dogs (I had learned well) with brown-bread-out-of-a-can (still a treat). Early on, on my own as an adult, I learned to make a quiche, a quick-enough one-dish meal if need be. Plus it could serve as breakfast, lunch or dinner. I snacked on apples and bananas. But as the years passed, later, after busy days at work, I often ate microwaved meals on a plastic tray out of a small cardboard box. Lunches at work tended to be cheeseburgers, maybe an occasional salad, but more likely a slice of pizza that was so greasy that I sopped up what grease I could with a napkin before I ate it. At least breakfast once in a while was healthy: plain yogurt and fruit, or oatmeal.

Since I retired, one of the most successful changes I have made is to my diet. I eat better. I cook more--which is to say I very likely cook less than other people, but I do cook. I put a slab of fish in the fry pan, boil or steam fresh veggies, and I make broccoli salad. Carrot and raisin salad. Spinach salad. Even what I think of as the retro three bean salad. My small crock pot  has become my friend. And last week I made a vegetable quiche.

I have never been much of a material girl. If I have a choice, I will choose to spend my money on experiences (such as travel) rather than on things (such as dishes, or even expensive food), but I am coming to understand that healthy food, if funds allow, is worth the expense. I am certainly not one to value presentation, presentation on a plate anyway, but I have to admit it is nice to have meals at home on other than a trough. Of course I speak metaphorically here; I have never had a trough. (My inherited Wedgwood and the silver tea service remain safely stored and unused.) But I have my limits. As long as I don't feel deprived, I'm okay. I am not out to impress anybody at this point--and certainly no one will be impressed by my limited culinary skills.

Over the last fifteen or so years, I have finally bought grown up dishes to replace my ancient Corningware; once I bought Fiestaware, I stopped eating on old maybe-good-for-a-student dishes. For those of you who do not know (and for most of my life I did not know), Fiestaware is the only American-made dinnerware company left. The bold, solid color dishes do catch your eye, and they are the right kind of hefty. Classy, the dishes are both comfortable--that is, informal enough--and substantial. The colors: marigold, poppy, sapphire, sage, lemongrass, plum, shamrock, cobalt blue, ivory, and many more. (Check out www.homerlaughlin.com  in Newell, West Virginia.) Initially, not knowing better, I bought over half a dozen dinner plates of various colors, each of them ten and a half inches across, and which were just too big for everyday use and which are now in a box in the garage. I also have a few nine-inch luncheon plates, but mostly what I eat out of are the Fiesta rimmed soup bowls, nine inches across. The bowl part of the dish helps anchor the food--the salmon and the spinach, for instance.

But the two rimmed soup bowls that I have used for years have hairline cracks, and they are both in the now-discontinued apricot color--a pale pink-orange--that I have to admit I do not really find, well, compelling. So recently it was time to replace them, and, in a circling back to my golden days of yesteryear, I ordered two rimmed soup bowls: bright scarlet and poppy colors, even though my very favorite color, if I had to choose, is juniper, a snazzy dark teal, a color out of Fiesta production for years. The scarlet is just that, and the poppy is a bright orange-red. If a rimmed soup bowl can be cheerful, these certainly are.

These two everyday-use kinds of dishes will complement what I have already accumulated, which is far more than I need: a dozen or so Fiestaware  mugs of various kinds and colors; four glasses; and four sets of silverware that look increasingly mismatched and worn.  I have a loaf pan, a casserole dish, and a pie pan--although I did not use that last when I made the quiche. Rather, I bought a crust already made and in an aluminum pan. With eggs much more expensive then they were when I first made quiches, plus spinach, mushrooms, a little cheese, and onions, the quiche tasted much like I remembered it tasting, and later the leftover were certainly as rubbery as I remembered as well. Oh-- and I have a small red tea pot and a larger sapphire blue one and a few completely impractical disc pitchers that were impulse buys. (Why in the world did I buy an orange disc pitcher? What could it serve as other than as a dust catcher?)

Much of this has been purchased in the Fiesta outlet store in Newell, West Virginia. A small flaw on the outside of a ceramic mug is not a problem to me. (Note to Homer Laughlin, though: you could develop a whole new market if you took some of those seconds, contracted out to starving artist jewelry makers, and then sold the results: vivid jewelry. But perhaps doing so is not as business-savvy, or as much as a tax write-off, as selling as many of the seconds to people like me is.)

Other people collect and use Fiesta. I only use. But I do understand the passion of the collectors. A while back, someone added me to the I LOVE FIESTA Facebook group, and the other people there are enthusiastic and informed the way any kind of fans or devotees are:  cat people, Beatle people, vintage train people, Star Wars people, Deadheads. The object of their passion is different, but the nature of their passion is not. Every once in a while someone posts before and after photos of a collapsed display shelf (even my rimmed soup bowl weighs two pounds), but for the most part, the online exchanges are about good buys, place settings, and questions about the tasteful and eye-pleasing collectors' market. Ebay? Kohl's? Dillard's? Estate auctions? Some items ordered online arrived in smithereens. Some members seem to aim for complete sets of all (or maybe as many as possible) of everything that Homer Laughlin makes--or has ever made since 1936.

I am not a collector. For me, the plum canister without its lid is a pen and pencil holder. (If I didn't have the canister, I might well use a coffee can. Well, maybe not, but you get my drift.)

If I have a choice--and I am fortunate that I do, at least at this point--I am going to choose what I like, even if I chose modestly. I did not order a collection of rimmed soup bowls, after all, but two that will be of daily use. And I am certain the way I am about few other things that this purchase does not augur more Fiesta. There will be no Fiesta-binge on my part. Even if I did have room for more dishes, I am ever the student of literature, and I appreciate the Victorian William Morris' idea:  "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know how to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

And as you know, since these days I am partial to old rockers, so let me put this in more contemporary terms. I think David Bowie was onto something when he said ageing is "an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."

I lived most of my life without red plates and with what might generously be called uneven (and at some points genuinely unhealthy) eating habits.

And so I bought two reddish plates. I cook some. I eat well.

And here I am.



Copyright Sandra A Engel, 2016