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