Retirement, Take Twenty-Two: Music in the Rain

Wow.

I can't believe how many times I said this both out loud and in my head a week or so ago at a John Mayer concert at Lakeview Amphitheatre in Syracuse, New York.

And let me add a disclaimer here early on: you had to be there. What I have to say will not do the experience justice; the music, the lights, the shared transcendence. And yes, the rain. But I am going to write about it all anyway.

When I bought the tickets five months ago, I thought that I would get a bluesy hour and a half or so, but by the time of the concert, I knew better: he had had a series of hits, some more poppier than others and he had won seven Grammys.

For at least the last decade I have been pleasantly oblivious to popular music and maybe to a good chunk of popular culture as well, but I decided I wanted to see John Mayer because I had come across him in a YouTube video of what I think of as Old Blues Guys. I mean, there was this kid up there in the finale of Eric Clapton's 2007 (okay, a while ago) Crossroads Guitar Festival alongside Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmie Vaughan, Robert Cray, Johnny Winter and Clapton for "Sweet Home Chicago." Who's the kid? The kid, one John Mayer, seemed earnest and self-conscious; he looked over towards the others on the stage than they did at him. Clapton had called him "a master" of the guitar. Not too shabby of an endorsement.

I had seen Clapton and Buddy Guy in person. Next stop: John Mayer.

And I had heard that he had spent last year touring with Bob Weir and the reconstituted (sort of) Grateful Dead. Not a bad credential to have. Plus I heard Mayer was better live than he was in the studio and that he was basically  Slowhand Junior. Rumor was he had the best guitar face in the business.

I didn't know at first that he had been a heartthrob who had been involved with a number of young female singers and actresses whom I have difficulty keeping straight. Oh well. Then again, what teenage girl would not find "Your Body is a Wonderland" worth listening to? I may have been one of the newer people to his music, but I was not the oldest, for the audience last week was a mix: a father and daughter (although Mayer did not play "Daughters," a song, which after I first heard it, made me wonder, "Why hasn't anybody written this song before?"); adult couples; small groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and a few ageing teenyboppers, among them Sam and Jamie who stood behind us as we were finally in line to go in. At least where my friend and I were, the audience did not seem very rowdy. (Few people hollered out song titles, for instance.) Yes, the phones were up and recording. People bopped around and applauded. Old and young, some with families with small children on the upper lawn. A family-type event on a rainy last summer weekday night. (But at some points the stage had the fog machine working anyway.) People sang along.

Perhaps the audience was appreciative in part because of the rain and the logistical ordeal of getting to Lakeview. The entire region, 200+ miles in any direction, was under a storm and tornado watch--and it had monsooned off and on all day. Rain whiteouts were so bad that traffic on the Thruway (including my friend and I) pulled over and waited them out. Even when we got to the venue a good two hours before the concert was originally scheduled to start, there was only a single, slow line of cars into the parking lot of the venue for 15,000 people. And we were lucky; others spent at least an hour in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic after Lakeview changed the start time from 7 to 8 and then back to 7.30--the result being some people barely getting to their seats after hiking the mile from the wet gravel parking lots. After the doors opened in the drenching rain at 6.30: a slow line with no metal detectors, no check of ID, and a security check that consisted of someone opening my glasses case.

And then another hike on pavement past and to the predictably overpriced merch and food stalls. (A woman wearing a sign saying "FREE HUGS" had no business.)

On the bright side, the seats were comfy and we were in out of the rain. Lakeview is not the amphitheatre version of the cheap seats in a long-haul 747.

"I can do concerts," my friend said, nodding as he looked around and sipped his beer. We were stressed and drenched, but we had arrived.

By that time the opening act Dawes (to my ears with a sound similar to The Band) was playing away. They pitched their CD entitled "We're All Going to Die."

The rain stopped for the intermission. We got another beer. The sun went down and all the seats slowly filled up.

John Mayer came out. The audience stood up and stayed standing for the hour and a half.

Let's just say that in normal life I tend not to be much of an everyday wow-er. The next morning, I had a raw throat from whoohooing. Why? I knew at least some of the songs' lyrics, but I was also dazzled by what I was seeing--on both the stage and the Jumbotron, including the musicians' hands.

I had known it was unlikely that I was going to hear a lot (if any) takes on old blues songs, probably not much jamming or improvisation, and that was okay. Although Mayer regularly changes his setlist, I had a sense of what I was getting into.

There were four chapters, each announced in neon and which he  said someplace are four chances to start over. Not a bad way to think about it: full band, acoustic, trio, full band.

If he wasn't in The Zone--Zen--as soon as he opened his mouth, he did an excellent imitation of being there. And he did not stand still, literally or figuratively.

Mayer came out roaring with "Helpless," a song that makes him sound anything BUT helpless with it Rolling Stones' "Miss You" type riffs (and presence). "If I'm helpless/Tell me now/Tell me now." Anything but helpless.

Wow.

In "Moving On and Getting Over" there was jam of sorts,  it turned out, and it was just fine. "We're in a  groove right now and I want to take some time to investigate it."

Wow.

In the acoustic set he played his first hit, "Your Body is a Wonderland," not one of my favorites since I prefer his later-in-his-career bluesy numbers. But I can imagine Sam and Jamie, wherever they were in the audience, thinking of it as I did the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" when I was not much younger than they were. (And I did see Paul McCartney play it live before he took it off his setlist.) And my guess is Sam and Jamie sang along.

Wow.

And during the John Mayer Trio (probably my favorite part): "Vultures," and the scorching metal version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads Blues." "Who Did You Think I Was" was loud and proud. The musicians seemed more engaged than before--but then I am partial to drumming- and guitar-driven music.  Mayer and his partners Pino Palladino (about which I know very little) and drummer Steve Jordan (who has played with Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, among others) were tight. No slouches.

Wow.

The full band returned for a couple songs including the country-ish ballad "In the Blood" and then the screaming guitars of "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room," which was a metaphor I wished I had thought of. And I don't say that very often.

There is something other than possible resulting commercial success to be said for versatility: county-ish, folk-ish, pop, metal, bluesy, rock-y. Love and despair, celebration, and whatever else. Breathy, roaring, plaintive,  emphatic. Sometimes understated but with flourishes. There is something to be said for making what he was doing look effortless and far less practiced than it actually was. (But I know I have heard some of those guitar licks before: Eric Clapton? Stevie Ray Vaughan?)

Mayer's patter was minimal: "I write a lot of songs in hotel bathrooms," and, about "Your Body is a Wonderland," "I didn't know this could go that far, and I thank you for that," and "All first songs are novelty songs."

The former teenage heartthrob boy John Mayer whom I saw was all growed up now that he is pushing forty. No more baby fat but he sports hipster scruff. He has great hair. (I notice hair. And I always have.) No doubt he was focused and tuned in (no pun intended)--and that is something of an understatement. Broad shoulders, lean angular lines. A sleeve tat, the veins and muscles in his forearm visible as he played.

Hands to fit his guitars. A note never missed. (I was reminded of the life-size photo of I think the hand of Kareen Abdul Jabbar in Esquire in the later 1970s. One look and you had some idea of why and how he was successful.)

 And yes, John Mayer's guitar face, a face that did not seem the least contrived. How do you tell the dancer from the dance? The sheer pleasure of seeing people do something spectacularly well NOW, in this moment, in a world of often well-intentioned (well, maybe) mediocrity. Everydayness. Live music done this well rewards abundantly.

Even if John Mayer never grinned, the audience did. (Guitarists, or at least the intense ones, tend not to grin, I think.)

As the Alan Arkin character says in Little Miss Sunshine, "It's all a beauty pageant." Define beauty however you like, but for that time with John Mayer, everybody there was a part of that beauty.

Beauty and transcendence.

For some, the music may have been Mayer's Greatest Hits--and that us what they came for. For me that is not the point, more the means to the end: the man has guitar chops. As did the others on the stage. And therein lies the beauty.

Because the concert was on a weeknight before a work day (not mine), and the ride there had been something of an ordeal, my friend and I agreed to leave before the end when the other 14,998 members of the audience would be hiking to the parking lot as well.

Still, leaving was difficult. Mayer was only a couple songs from the end of the setlist, I knew, and we made our way to the exit to the tune of "Waiting for the World to Change." We were going to miss "Dear Marie," where the audience would no doubt be singing along, especially at the end with the oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh part. His finale would be a nice farewell, gentle "You're Going to Live Forever in Me" before the encore of "Gravity," a downer and not a downer at all ("Keep me where the light is/ Keep me where the light is") and my guess was it would be played with full screaming guitars for a big finish.

At the top of the amphitheatre, where the people in lawn chairs sat in the sweet and wet summer air, I couldn't not look back at the stage.

But as the rain began again, we moved quickly to the parking lot, a place where we couldn't hear the music any more.

But still, even now: wow.

Retirement, Take Twenty-One: Time--And Time Again

This blog has taken a mini-sabbatical this summer for reasons unexpected. First, Doodle The Cat died. A tree in the backyard keeled over--and this would not have been a problem had it not take down the internet and TV cable. The windshield on my car got dinged in Brattleboro at the end of two years of road work on the bypass from Route 9 to Route 7, and although the ding was initially small, it ended up being enough to merit complete replacement of the windshield. That at least was free, unlike the replacement iPhone I needed to get since the port where the phone recharges had somehow gotten damaged so the phone had problems charging. One of the bridges on my heavy duty backup glasses needed replacement and then repair. The weather has been cooler than usual for the most part but with a downside of regular monsoon-type rainy days, and the basement has been damp all summer even with the dehumidifier going like gangbusters.

At least lately the summer sun is up from 5.30 in the morning to 8.30 at night, which gives me  a lot of time to do things--or not. Someone told me as I was retiring that I would grow more sensitive to demands on my time, and lately that has been true, in part because my work is not just flextime but my entire LIFE is flextime. There are no more days of morning meetings, of hours dodging bullets and putting out fires followed by a two and a half hour meeting in the afternoon followed by a run to get an allergy shot before teaching a class at night after a fast Lean Cuisine microwaved for dinner. Strangely, these days any event that imposes itself on my time--whether I have plans for that time or not--seems to be more noteworthy and disruptive than such events used to when there was always always something that needed doing and when in many ways  I was juggling more than I am now. (My dental hygienist once gave me a Superwoman toothbrush. Let's just say I kept up pretty well with all I had to do.) These days--and I write this on Day 811 of my retirement--there isn't much reason to multitask or to plow through things to be done without much thinking. This is a pleasant change: I mean, who used to have time to think very much?

So these days interruptions seem to matter more. Somehow. But I still--as I did when I worked--begin every day by making a To-Do List. Buy groceries, pick a prescription and a sympathy card, go to lunch, pick up the book for book club, fertilize the plants, maybe go to the gym or the pool, pay bills, clean out the upstairs closet and haul the next load of stuff to Salvation Army. (Yes, I am still divesting.) Some tasks get carried over from one day (or week) to the next--and sometimes it feels as if I don't have to do them if I write them down. Far more than when I was at work, priorities sort themselves out every day. I have a new kind of flextime.

And so I am still celebrating that I  can choose what I do. And despite all the unexpected events that have occurred recently, other things have gone well. (Touch wood again and again.) My container lettuce flourished, and only recently have the local critters started munching on my Walmart tomatoes which are almost four feet tall. (The geraniums must also be unusually tasty this year.) Cats Moonbeam and Swishy have worked out a newish feline time-sharing routine since Doodle died, and they both got clean bills of health. And so did I. My retirement guy reminded me I am financially in good shape (almost without my doing much over the decades). I have started taking glucosamine chondroitin for my popping knees, and, placebo or not, at least one of my knees pops less. I have begun a water aerobics class one night a week in my off-and-on search for a sports-type activity besides walking (one knee still hurts) that I actually enjoy.

I had a lobster roll on the beach in Maine and fell asleep listening to an unusually high ride coming in.

I am only now realizing that in my retirement I no longer HAVE to get up at eight in the morning, almost willfully, because for the better part of forty years I got up at six. And I have started treating weekends as weekends, which is to say I can sleep even later if I am so inclined. I am still as organized as I was at work. I am  just...more time-flexible. And I have come to realize that the grow-up-some-and-get-educated-for-twenty-years followed by work-for-about-forty-years followed by however-many-years-of-retirement life cycle--so to speak--is proving to be a really good deal.

In the next few months I will get back to the tree guy, get typhoid pills, get the furnace serviced, paint an accent wall and the deck railing and maybe touch up the wrought iron on the front stoop. My list of books to read gets longer every day. I will get back to this blog and other writing projects in a more focused way.

At least until life interrupts.

At least I did get a summer pedicure. It seemed important at the time.

In the next few months I will attend a wedding and go to John Mayer and Paul McCartney concerts. I will meet John Cleese and later hear Chicago play (no doubt) their greatest hits. I will listen to podcasts, watch the latest Endeavour, Hinterland and Grantchester episodes; I have finally started The Wire. (I will go to my deathbed never having watched Game of Thrones and True Blood.) Book club will meet and my online class will start again.

Today after about a season's worth of rain already, the sun is out (well, off and on), and it is breezy enough that I could put on a light hoodie if I wanted to. The weather will get hot and steamy again, I know, before the real crispness of fall arrives.

I sit here in my Official Rocker that marked my retirement, just inside the screen door to the backyard deck. The screen keeps the bugs out and the cats in. I watch the shadows from the trees (they definitely do need trimming) on the lawn. All told, a nice evening after a nice day. There are arguments for no surprises--no dinged windshields in my life--but those will go unheard by the assorted gods, I suspect. "Man proposes, God disposes," someone wrote in the eighteenth century.  More recently, John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans."

Fair enough. But still.

A thought: I am going to add having another lobster roll before the snow flies to my To Do List. I like that idea. Let's hope it happens.

I was made for retirement, and I have things to do.



Copyright Sandra Engel
August 2017

Retirement, Take Twenty: Two Years In

   

     Two years of retirement already.

     Even though the time has zoomed by, I can certainly say my time has proven to be my own.

     I can say no in a way I didn't used to be able to. And there may be some truth to the observation that once free from work (mostly), people become more themselves, more who they really are. And if I learned nothing else working in open-door community colleges for most of my adult life, I learned that people have an incredible capacity to bloom at different times in different ways. If we're lucky, we do contain multitudes.

     Two years ago I really WAS a recovering employee: I used to sleep until eight just because I didn't have to get up at six to get to work. But these days: hey! I'm retired! So some days I get up when the birds are singing (which I assume is because the sun is shining, a comparatively rare event where I live), and other days I sleep in. Some days I have to remind myself what day it is.

     I am still grateful for all the opportunities my places of work afforded me even as those days are receding in the rear view mirror. More than that, I am grateful that I made it this far. When I had lunch with a former colleague who had retired voluntarily six years ago and when I think about those who recently were "realigned" (management speak for their positions being abolished), I am certain that I retired at the right time.

     What's changed?

     I am aware, or more aware, that I need to get exercise, as much for my brain as for my body. And I do. I get enough exercise to know I feel better when I do, but I also know I have no aspirations to be An Athlete.  I also listen to Slow French on my iPad (intermediate level, and most of which I do understand). I read. I write. 

     My time is my own--and it is mine to fritter away if I like. My routine is good until it is not, until it gets interrupted by, say, a phone call or the new episodes of Orange Is The New Black.

     Now that I am home and refocused, the seasons seem to matter more than they used to. Or at least I am more aware of them than I used to be. I no longer have to drive on unplowed streets to get to work. I can stay in. I can go out. Where I go is up to me. I actually notice when the weather is nice in part because I am not in an office eight hours a day. I am no longer exhausted at certain times of the academic year (say at the end of the first week of classes or at graduation).

     I no longer have to suffer fools the way I had to in the past. And, to be fair, perhaps a few of the fools are not grieving that they have found themselves Sandy-free for a couple years.

     I am no longer offended by being given the senior discount, most often at Dunkin Donuts. Not that I have ever asked for it. I have other things to think about. And when I am home, and, for example, the power goes out, I am the person in the neighborhood likely to know when it is going to go back on. I have been known on occasion to watch what goes on in the neighborhood, but I don't see myself ever saying, "Get off my lawn". Yet.

     Because my time is pretty much mine, my using it wisely is more important than it used to be. I left full-time work two years ago, and since then, others have left as well, either to the Great Beyond or to other locations--this last so much that there are very few people left to swing by and say hello to except, maybe, my annual Girl Scout cookie supplier. Otherwise there is little reason for me to visit quickly because I am in the neighborhood and taking a book out of the library on the floor below. So maybe there is some truth to the where-we-are-is-who-we-are idea. Or who we are determines where we go once we retire and realize time has passed for everybody else, too.

     More than that, maybe in a recent synchronicity-type occurrence the Universe reminded me to continue to pay attention to what matters--or maybe it just was a random event: I read a telling obituary the last time I was in New Hampshire. I happened to be sitting in a coffee shop and I came across an obituary in the Manchester Union-Leader (which was far less right wing and vitriolic than I remembered it). I didn't write down her name and I haven't been able to find the obit online, but the 90-plus year old woman had died after a life that included a husband, several children and grandchildren, and a successful business that sounded like she had made wrapped-submarine-sandwiches-for-supermarkets. Though she had grown up in a local orphanage and the obit made reference to "her orphan sisters", it also gave the name of her birth mother, and said about the deceased: "She always wanted to be a nurse." 

     Which she had never done, apparently.

     How much of our lives do we make and how much is a matter of luck and circumstance? She must really have wanted to be a nurse for her family to mention that fact. (Unless, of course, she wrote the obit herself. No matter if she did.) Maybe we contain multitudes, and, well, maybe we don't. I don't know for sure. I just kind of toodle along with whatever purpose and interests I have.

     Even though my left knee pops more than it used to, I am fairly content in my SandyNiche as I define it for now.  Few things are as calming (not that I need calming) as a snoozing cat. I still think that you can never have too much flannel and and that it is wise to never underestimate the power of Vietnamese coffee, cafe sua da, iced espresso with sweetened condensed milk as a power drink.

     I have never encountered anybody who was unhappily retired although perhaps they exist. All I know is the locus of control has made a tectonic shift to moi. I have a certain social (and personal) security that I never had in the full-time workplace. When I think about it all, it seems like I have done a lot along the way, including in retirement. But I don't want to be a nurse, and I don't want to find myself thinking that way in a few years. 

     Still, complacency is not good, for  as someone told me long ago, if you are complacent, then you are in a rut, and if you are in a rut, you are close to being in a grave. That may overstate things a bit, but still. 

     I have a loose and expanding list of things I want to do and that will happen: paint the deck and the wicker love seat; get the car inspected and the trees trimmed; decide what to do with oldish cameras and organize thousands of photos. Pick up an el cheapo chair for the beach. Buy the tickets to see John Cleese. Other occasions and ideas will appear, evolve--maybe will bloom--and I will do what I can to move things along. So good, so far.

     And if all these things seem small and ephemeral and whatever else--well, hey, what I did at work (and not at work) all those years was equally and cosmically small and ephemeral even as it all looked Very Important at the time. So things go.

     And so, as the T-shirt says:

                                    I don't want to

                                    I don't have to

                                    You can't make me

                                     I'M RETIRED

Copyright Sandra A. Engel

May 2017 

     

Retirement, Take Nineteen: A Fine Fellow

Ten years ago I went to the local humane society just to look at cats after I had to euthanize 20 year old Camden. I waited a couple weeks and initially thought I would wait longer, but the time seemed right just to go look. For the first time in many years I was without a cat. So I went.

And a couple days later I went back. The cat I wanted to see again was named Misi, a one year old calico who had miscarried three babies and who had been brought in allegedly because the family was moving and couldn't take her. Misi would be spayed later, but when I met her, she was cowering in the back of a cage, clearly the model of a nervous post-pregnancy cat--and, I now know, a drama queen calico to boot.

But her calico markings were striking and she looked nothing like the recently-deceased brown tabby Maine Coon Camden. After I stood outside her cage long enough, she came over and rubbed her whiskers against my fingers. When the vet assistant opened the cage, the cat was willing to be held. She looked to look around; she was nothing if not alert.

Between the first and the second visit, I had decided that maybe I would adopt two cats. Which two I had no idea. I do remember a couple grey and white sister cats together in a cage, but their eyes were rheumy. Kittens I did not want, but two almost-adults sounded good since, hey, I worked all day.

After I held then-Misi, I asked the assistant what cat she would recommend as a second cat, and without hesitation she said, "The Dude," who was already so big that he was in a double cage at ground level. He was big, he was smoky orange, neither of which I had planned on, but she assured me no, not all male cats spray, and sometimes a male and a female cat are a better pairing than say, two females.

He was an armful even then although his records say he was only 8 1/2 pounds. He had big bones, and he seemed cautiously obliging to be held like a baby or to be plopped in my lap as I sat in a chair. He had a good purr. (It never occurred to me to test drive him--so to speak--with Misi, but given her calico drama queen personality, she might not have easily approved of any other cat, really.)

So I filled out the paperwork, and, as things worked out, I brought then-Misi home a few days earlier than the then-Dude since he developed a case of the sniffles and had to stay a couple extra couple days to get better. Misi came home and seemed to adapt well enough.

The following week, I went back to pick up The Dude but neglected to bring the cat carrier since I left right from work. No problem since the humane society had a cardboard one for him (and me). He looked fine, and there were smiles all around except for The Dude, who, within the first mile, had clawed a hole in the cardboard carrier. As I shifted into traffic, I saw an orange paw reaching for the glove compartment.

But we made it home and he reverted to his calmer self once he was out of the box. The papers from the humane society pegged him right: "This animal has a friendly demeanor and has demonstrated good health during his time at the shelter...We hope he adjusts well in his new home and that your vet confirms good health at his post-adoption re-evaluation. Thanks--good luck with this fine fellow!"

The first night at home, there were no fights even though we did not get much sleep. The Dude had been named wisely: he was mellow. He let Misi (renamed Moonbeam because she was so lunar, so calico nutty) do the theater. He wasn't a look-at-me, look-at-me cat. Not the least bit ostentatious. I changed his name to Doodle, and he proved to be a next-to cat, not a lap cat, and he snoozed next to Moonbeam and later near to new sister Swishy. He liked the top platform of the cat tree and he moved with ease from the top of the roll top desk to the top of the six-foot bookcase. He was big but fleet of foot. He was always happy to play with a wand toy, at least for a while, but mostly he just wanted to hang.  He met me at the door regularly enough, but he only once decided to try to go out one slushy winter day as I was hauling in bags of groceries. Doodle got down the couple stairs into the driveway into an inch of slush and then bolted full speed to the distant other side of the house, as if screaming, "Wet feet, wet feet!"

When I came home after being away, Doodle was the slowest to forgive, but when he did, he was the coziest. Doodle was an introvert--one difficult to ignore at almost 16 dusky orange pounds. He loved to be brushed, and he hated the 7 minute ride to see the vet once a year; he yowled on the way there but assumed the loaf position in the carrier on the way home and then bolted upstairs. He had a oink nose and a cute smile (and no, he did not spray). He was big but he was healthy, and he was a sensitive dude: if I dropped a metal dish in the kitchen or if a door slammed in the wind, he came to see what happened and to say a hello meow, although whether he was protesting or trying to calm me I was never sure.

Doodle's usual place on the coldest winter nights--and we had a lot of these this year--was next to me on the bed, which was fine except, cat-style, since he trusted me, after his nose-touching, he often lay on one side and faced away from me. Granted, his back end was discreetly covered by his tail, but still. Sometimes I tried to turn him sideways so at least his paws or his back were closest to me, but usually when I gave up and rolled over and slept on my other side, he didn't seem to mind.

Doodle was my favorite cat the way every cat I have had has been my favorite cat.

Over the years, the cats managed to do kitty time-sharing, which is to say they had their favorite places to sit but also took turns in their way: the bed, the cat tree, the couch. They managed their own routine.

Then one day after breakfast--after their breakfast, too--Moonbeam followed me into the bathroom, Swishy went up to the spare room window, and Doodle stretched out on the foot of the bed. I did the dishes, did some work online, and then went upstairs to put on sweatpants to go to the gym.

Doodle was on the bed, on his side as usual, but when I went to greet him, he wasn't moving.

He had been to the vet not six weeks previously.

First, disbelief. And then it was awful.

Once I could get myself together enough, I called the vet to say I needed to bring in Doodle. For better or worse, the person who answered the phone at 11:55  told me the office was closed between 12 and 2 but I could bring Doodle in at two. Over the phone I arranged for cremation and a post-mortem paw print (which made little sense, but I was not my most cogent, so okay). I said Doodle and I would be there at two.

I sat with Doodle for a long while. Moonbeam sat and watched from the hallway; Swishy slept through it until I got Doodle downstairs. Like Moonbeam, she sat and watched from a distance.

After a while I had to decide how to move sweet Doodle. He had been sleeping on an old flannel pillowcase, so that was the first layer of what ended up being a  kitty burrito. More than other cats, he liked cozy places. I didn't have a cardboard box (which he would not have liked anyway); I wasn't going to carry him in my duffle bag even if he fit: he was 16 or so pounds and pushing 3 feel long. At the end, telling myself again and again that he liked cozy places, I wrapped him loosely in bath towels and pinned them in a couple places. Once I got him downstairs, I slid Doodle burrito into a couple clear plastic bags lest any bodily fluid escape in the 7 minute drive in a friend's car.

To the veterinary clinic's credit, Doodle and I went to the front of the line when they opened at two. In the examining room, a very young vet tech handed me a form and said, "This just says that Noodle hasn't bitten anyone..." and there was another "Noodle" before I sobbed and corrected her and she looked totally abashed.

While she went out of the examining room to process my credit card, I slid Doodle in his kitty burrito out of the plastic bags, and, because I didn't know what else to do, I started to unwrap the burrito just to take a last peek, a last quick look at his pink nose.

Doodle wasn't much of a joker--he was too mellow for cheap cat jokes like trying to trip me or hiding his  toys--but he was a sensitive dude with a cat smile, and I like to think he would have appreciated how fitting it was that without intending to, I happened to open the back end of the burrito first--derriere with tail modestly down--before I finally got to his pink nose.

A fine fellow indeed.

Retirement, Take Eighteen: Tick Tock, or Hair Today

In retirement I find I am having occasional problems with punctuality. I tell people I will be there at ten but at 9.55 I find myself sending a text apologizing and telling them I will be there by twenty past. Having an appointment means I can't digress while browsing on the internet or doing laundry; I have to limit the reading I do over breakfast and limit the play with the wand toy that Swishy lets me know she wants NOW. This is quite a contrast to a lifetime when arriving on time meant  getting somewhere ten minutes early. Most days recently, my arriving ten minutes early would be overachieving.

Over the years I have saved the calendars I used, some of them from the kitchen wall and some the smaller, pocketbook-sized ones. Each day was a box. Although I never used an hour-by-hour calendar, I did once try to see what doing so might be like: 8-9 answering email and snail mail; 9.30-10.45 meeting; 11-12 student complaint; 12-1 lunch; 1-4 meeting and 4-4.30 return a couple calls and then make a list of the tasks to try to get to on the next day. But this list made my work life feel claustrophobic, WAY beyond punctual, and I see now that it left out the specificity, the granularity of my working life: I mean, what mail did I answer? What was the nature of the complaint? What was the agenda for the three-hour meeting, and who said what and what was decided? (I tended to speak up, and oftentimes little actually got decided.)

I do have the old block-a-day calendars. I know that on April 4, 1989 I got my teeth cleaned. On March 10, 1987 I took  a cat to the vet, and then on August 30, 2007 I went to "workshop" (on what I do not remember). I have very few visuals to accompany what is in the blocks.

There is a certain comforting sameness to the days of anybody's life, I imagine, and if we are lucky, that sameness isn't interrupted by an in-a-New-York-minute-everything can-change-event, usually for the worse.  But then again, I don't want to think of my life as my version of the Groundhog Day movie but without the improvement or redemption. Things do change even if they are not noted: every day, and a few exceptions notwithstanding, what others see as old age looks a little younger to me every day (but the kiddos I know tend to keep looking like kiddos even if they now have a few specks of grey at their temples).

Anyway, these days I live on Sandy 2.0 time. Usually I compose a list of what I am going to do every week, day by day, but I find the tasks (such as "clean out upstairs closet") are...movable. The closet may not get cleaned out; I mean, nobody is going to die if the closet stays as it is. The activity is not public the way, say, meeting someone for lunch is. I do try to be on time. I really do.

My time now really is my own. But then again it isn't; nobody can own time. But the most I can do is use it well.

Time and space. (And health, so I have started going to the gym three days a week, probably less for  physical health than for the intellectual health--to get the blood flowing upward.)

So these days I am usually up and functioning by eight in the morning. I go out to lunch, for a walk, to the gym. I run errands and I keep in touch with family and friends. I plan, and I am learning the importance of having a routine, and I know the importance of mis-en-place, the arranging of things so  in the morning I am good to go once I sit down to write or to begin to paint an accent wall. Even a gentle routine makes a difference--and now the responsibility for the routine lies with the supervisor-free moi.

Somebody asked me the other day, "Don't you wish you had retired sooner?" and my response was no, I retired when it felt like the right thing to do. (And sometimes when I happen on campus, I am even more convinced that I got out at the right time, before the angst became palpable. Or so the place looks to Sandy 2.0.)

These days, except when I travel overseas, I seldom wear a watch. I have a clock radio next to my bed, a clock in the kitchen. I have a wall clock that outclasses almost everything else in my house --a generous birthday and retirement gift--that, during daylight hours, depending on how I set it, plays bars of Beatles' songs, Christmas carols or classical music on the hour. So nine o'clock may be "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", ten o"clock "The First Noel". I measure my time in songs. (And so I did when I was driving to work every morning; I can't tell you the distance between work and home, but I can tell you that, in good weather, the drive took three songs. The drive to see family in New Hampshire? Five CDs.)

In retirement I take to heart what someone told me when I moved into management: that I would have a lot of responsibility but not much authority, which at the time seemed true enough, although these days I have more authority over my life than I have ever had. So since I have the luxury of my values, my interests and quirks serving as the basis organizing my time, I do make sure I have something of a routine: get up at eight, shower and then blow dry my hair; eat, read, write: go out; go to the gym, teach online, make dinner and then relax. And then yes, repeat this all, pretty much,  just as I am here from a couple paragraphs earlier. I have both responsibility and authority, and, if it were not such a mouthful, when people ask, I would not say I am retired (which still connotes decrepitude and obsolescence to many) but would say I am a woman of independent means: WIM. (Even though the means are pretty modest, all things considered.)

In a few months I will have been retired for two years.  How do I best measure my time? There are a lot of ways to measure anything.

I could measure my life not in coffee spoons but maybe in books read. In walks taken around the neighborhood, in trips taken. In music sung along to. In lunches, in loads of laundry or closets cleaned. In new clothes, in old clothes recycled, in bills paid, in mileage on the car, or in passport stamps. In rides across Vermont, in beach days and concerts. In vinyl, CDs, and downloads. Longer term, in generations of cats: first my grandmother's cat Putzi, the short-lived Stormy, and then Rudder; then Dandelion and Willow; then Bathsheba and Camden, and then Doodle and Moonbeam followed by Swishy who arrived almost four years ago which seems like a long time ago and not much time at all.

By haircuts: long and straight, then a bouffant; long and straight again; then a shag, short and angled; a big hair  perm; and now a bob, long enough and low-enough-maintenance.

One constant along the way has been my hair. It is thick and coarse and straight. A lot of corkscrews: I once had a department store hairdresser declare "I can't work with this hair" as she went to get her supervisor to complete the cut. My hair looked fine at the end of the appointment, but I never went back there. Whenever I hear of people not needing a haircut for a couple months, I can think of nothing beyond "wow". (And there is no indication that my hair growth is slowing down, by the way.)

My hair still grows quickly, and so, decade in and decade out, I have had it cut every three weeks. If I stretch it into four weeks, I walk around looking as though I need a haircut. Longer than that and I start to look like Cousin It. (Google him if you don't know who he is.) Teenage fashion magazines of yesteryear would say that my hair is one of my best features. I like my hair, and I liked it all the way through Sandy 1.0, too. Using a blow dryer most mornings is a nice contemplative and finite way to move into the world.

When I moved here years ago, I found my hairdresser by asking someone who had hair similar to mine where she got hers cut. She is long gone to greener professional pastures, and my salon has moved at least four times, but it is still within a four song drive from my home. Lately the appointments have been on Saturday mornings, and since I don't like to drive at night, I make sure to make the next appointment before I leave the salon to make sure I have one. Lately the appointments have  tended to be earlier--say, nine o'clock on a Saturday morning--but no matter.

Regardless of the day or time, I have never been late for or missed an appointment to get my hair cut.


Copyright Sandra A. Engel 2017

Retirement, Take Seventeen: My Books, My Self

I keep saying that I have more time to myself than I used to, but the trick, I have decided, is to spend my time more wisely, and I have also realized that since I spend more time at home than I used to that I need to make a little more space. And one easy way to start this is to sort out my books. Some few I have already given away.

To some people my doing so is heresy, I know. If books are not sacred, they are important enough to keep. Well, mostly. But having fewer (and better organized)  books means less dusting.

What started as a stack (well, stacks) on the top of the roll top desk is now a cardboard box of books I want to read again: Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. and E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictionalized telling of the Rosenberg trials told from a son's point of view. Montaigne's essays because I can just pick up the volume and start reading anywhere, pretty much. A couple volumes of maybe-the-last-polymath Stephen Jay Gould's essays. Dickens' Dombey and Son is there, and I also have a copy of Our Mutual Friend to read. I'd like to reread The Dalai Lama's Cat: The Art of Purring by David Michie, an introduction to Buddhism, and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have finished all of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run except the epilogue since I don't really want it to end.

And in various other locations in the house there are other books I want to read: Marilynne Robinson's Home and Lila, follow-ups to her wonderful Gilead. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. For Christmas I got a book about the lyrics to Beatles songs I would like to read, and I still haven't gotten to Klaus Vorrmann's bilingual (English and German) graphic novel about his designing the Revolver album cover. He autographed my copy for me in August and it has been on the bookshelf waiting since through no fault of its own, just as Krista Tippett's Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living and a collection of William Hazlitt's essays named On the Pleasure of Hating have been. Recently I finished both Martha Gelhorn's Travels with Myself and Another and a biography of her, and over the summer The Big Read was Claire Harman's Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. These days I need to finish Tana French's The Trespasser for my book club by the end of the month, and about that time the U.S. version of Ian Rankin's tartan noir Rather Be the Devil should arrive.

My books, my passions: I have what I think of as the Vietnamese collection and the Beatles collection. A few books on digital photography and an assortment of travel books, Lonely Planet Vietnam, Rick Steves'  Britain, and then some aspirational travel books (Latvia and Lithuania, for instance) and a couple by Michael Palin who, after all, has been just about everywhere.

I have some old-timey Nancy Drew books and some books salvaged from the family farm: Robert Louis Stevenson's  Treasure Island, Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs, a book on sex behavior probably from the early 1900s (?) that I haven't yet opened, and a heavily annotated  Complete Course in French. I keep my 1976 $4.95 version of Our Bodies, Our Selves just because.

I have a sense of what I don't want to reread or keep: I can tell you exactly where I was when I first read and loved Tristram Shandy, but I didn't enjoy it at all when I tried to read it a couple years ago. Moby Dick. John Milton. Most of Shakespeare except the sonnets. Donna Tarrt's The Goldfinch. A lot of the cheap mysteries I read and forgot I have already found a home for. But I have kept the anthologies that I amassed over the years--world, British and American literature--if only because hey, you never know. I may want to read something in them. Some day. I still have my Chaucer book stashed upstairs with the anthologies and my undergraduate German 101 textbook, also very heavily annotated; I marvel at the vocabulary list even at the end of the first chapter--eighty-eight words!--in those pre- CD and DVD days. But learn those words I did.

I have no shortage of things to read--so much to read that even sorting the books to make more space seems to be taking time from doing that same reading! And I have to confess that I have thrown out (that is, put in the recycling bin) some  novels primarily because they have dark grey words on recycled-a-dozen-times grey-white paper and thus are difficult to even think about reading again..

And  I do have an iPad, mostly because of its retina display which yes indeedy does make a difference. The iPad eye-ease resolution makes the print easy on my eyes even if the reading experience lacks the feel of a book--any book old or new: the the first opening of the cover, the flexing of the binding, the folding of the page corners. The smell.

And yes, even the dust.

Copyright Sandra Engel
January 2017