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
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