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
