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