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

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

Retirement, Take Seven: New Fiesta, a Quiche, and David Bowie

My earliest food habits when I was growing up in New England were very much of their time: meat and potatoes, and a roast for Sunday dinner; Boston baked beans and hot dogs on Saturday nights; Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs; grilled cheese sandwiches on Sunday nights. Meatloaf. Later on, my parents favored what nutritionist Gayelord Hauser called "nature foods," freshly juiced carrots or celery, B vitamins and fish oil capsules. (That juicer caused the lights in the kitchen to dim, I swear.) The candy drawer in the kitchen was filled with early versions of protein bars that were composed mostly of blackstrap molasses. But no matter the food, I insisted that I eat off the red plate (each of the set of plates was a different color).

As an adult I have been a picky--that is, selective and probably a little lazy--cook. And thus eater. My initial idea of cooking, learned at home, was adding an egg and water to a Duncan Hines spice cake mix. A tuna-out-of-the-can sandwich on toasted white bread. Campbell's tomato soup. Beans and hot dogs (I had learned well) with brown-bread-out-of-a-can (still a treat). Early on, on my own as an adult, I learned to make a quiche, a quick-enough one-dish meal if need be. Plus it could serve as breakfast, lunch or dinner. I snacked on apples and bananas. But as the years passed, later, after busy days at work, I often ate microwaved meals on a plastic tray out of a small cardboard box. Lunches at work tended to be cheeseburgers, maybe an occasional salad, but more likely a slice of pizza that was so greasy that I sopped up what grease I could with a napkin before I ate it. At least breakfast once in a while was healthy: plain yogurt and fruit, or oatmeal.

Since I retired, one of the most successful changes I have made is to my diet. I eat better. I cook more--which is to say I very likely cook less than other people, but I do cook. I put a slab of fish in the fry pan, boil or steam fresh veggies, and I make broccoli salad. Carrot and raisin salad. Spinach salad. Even what I think of as the retro three bean salad. My small crock pot  has become my friend. And last week I made a vegetable quiche.

I have never been much of a material girl. If I have a choice, I will choose to spend my money on experiences (such as travel) rather than on things (such as dishes, or even expensive food), but I am coming to understand that healthy food, if funds allow, is worth the expense. I am certainly not one to value presentation, presentation on a plate anyway, but I have to admit it is nice to have meals at home on other than a trough. Of course I speak metaphorically here; I have never had a trough. (My inherited Wedgwood and the silver tea service remain safely stored and unused.) But I have my limits. As long as I don't feel deprived, I'm okay. I am not out to impress anybody at this point--and certainly no one will be impressed by my limited culinary skills.

Over the last fifteen or so years, I have finally bought grown up dishes to replace my ancient Corningware; once I bought Fiestaware, I stopped eating on old maybe-good-for-a-student dishes. For those of you who do not know (and for most of my life I did not know), Fiestaware is the only American-made dinnerware company left. The bold, solid color dishes do catch your eye, and they are the right kind of hefty. Classy, the dishes are both comfortable--that is, informal enough--and substantial. The colors: marigold, poppy, sapphire, sage, lemongrass, plum, shamrock, cobalt blue, ivory, and many more. (Check out www.homerlaughlin.com  in Newell, West Virginia.) Initially, not knowing better, I bought over half a dozen dinner plates of various colors, each of them ten and a half inches across, and which were just too big for everyday use and which are now in a box in the garage. I also have a few nine-inch luncheon plates, but mostly what I eat out of are the Fiesta rimmed soup bowls, nine inches across. The bowl part of the dish helps anchor the food--the salmon and the spinach, for instance.

But the two rimmed soup bowls that I have used for years have hairline cracks, and they are both in the now-discontinued apricot color--a pale pink-orange--that I have to admit I do not really find, well, compelling. So recently it was time to replace them, and, in a circling back to my golden days of yesteryear, I ordered two rimmed soup bowls: bright scarlet and poppy colors, even though my very favorite color, if I had to choose, is juniper, a snazzy dark teal, a color out of Fiesta production for years. The scarlet is just that, and the poppy is a bright orange-red. If a rimmed soup bowl can be cheerful, these certainly are.

These two everyday-use kinds of dishes will complement what I have already accumulated, which is far more than I need: a dozen or so Fiestaware  mugs of various kinds and colors; four glasses; and four sets of silverware that look increasingly mismatched and worn.  I have a loaf pan, a casserole dish, and a pie pan--although I did not use that last when I made the quiche. Rather, I bought a crust already made and in an aluminum pan. With eggs much more expensive then they were when I first made quiches, plus spinach, mushrooms, a little cheese, and onions, the quiche tasted much like I remembered it tasting, and later the leftover were certainly as rubbery as I remembered as well. Oh-- and I have a small red tea pot and a larger sapphire blue one and a few completely impractical disc pitchers that were impulse buys. (Why in the world did I buy an orange disc pitcher? What could it serve as other than as a dust catcher?)

Much of this has been purchased in the Fiesta outlet store in Newell, West Virginia. A small flaw on the outside of a ceramic mug is not a problem to me. (Note to Homer Laughlin, though: you could develop a whole new market if you took some of those seconds, contracted out to starving artist jewelry makers, and then sold the results: vivid jewelry. But perhaps doing so is not as business-savvy, or as much as a tax write-off, as selling as many of the seconds to people like me is.)

Other people collect and use Fiesta. I only use. But I do understand the passion of the collectors. A while back, someone added me to the I LOVE FIESTA Facebook group, and the other people there are enthusiastic and informed the way any kind of fans or devotees are:  cat people, Beatle people, vintage train people, Star Wars people, Deadheads. The object of their passion is different, but the nature of their passion is not. Every once in a while someone posts before and after photos of a collapsed display shelf (even my rimmed soup bowl weighs two pounds), but for the most part, the online exchanges are about good buys, place settings, and questions about the tasteful and eye-pleasing collectors' market. Ebay? Kohl's? Dillard's? Estate auctions? Some items ordered online arrived in smithereens. Some members seem to aim for complete sets of all (or maybe as many as possible) of everything that Homer Laughlin makes--or has ever made since 1936.

I am not a collector. For me, the plum canister without its lid is a pen and pencil holder. (If I didn't have the canister, I might well use a coffee can. Well, maybe not, but you get my drift.)

If I have a choice--and I am fortunate that I do, at least at this point--I am going to choose what I like, even if I chose modestly. I did not order a collection of rimmed soup bowls, after all, but two that will be of daily use. And I am certain the way I am about few other things that this purchase does not augur more Fiesta. There will be no Fiesta-binge on my part. Even if I did have room for more dishes, I am ever the student of literature, and I appreciate the Victorian William Morris' idea:  "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know how to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

And as you know, since these days I am partial to old rockers, so let me put this in more contemporary terms. I think David Bowie was onto something when he said ageing is "an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."

I lived most of my life without red plates and with what might generously be called uneven (and at some points genuinely unhealthy) eating habits.

And so I bought two reddish plates. I cook some. I eat well.

And here I am.



Copyright Sandra A Engel, 2016

Retirement, Take Five (Old Rockers)

After I made the decision to retire, my employer sent me a letter offering me the choice of a commemorative rocking chair, a table lamp, or an equivalent financial donation to a charity of my choice. Although I am afraid that I am still not convinced that the chair will become the treasured family heirloom upon my demise as the letter declared, I opted for the rocker of the stereotypical retired person. I mean: A ROCKER! (And I am not one who usually uses exclamation points.) The stereotype: the old woman (or man) in maybe velour sweatpants and hoodie, slippers, sitting and rocking, a movement back and forth that gets nobody anywhere. As if I am become Grandma Moses. At best. Go to work and be productive one day and then the next day be relegated to the ranks of the invisible and infirm, moving but stuck in one place. Forgetful at best, demented at worst. Old and obsolete, relegated to the intellectual and professional dustbin.

This attitude--and it does lie beneath the Politically Correct surface, I assure you--toward people of a certain age is a part of American culture that relentlessly values the young and the new even if the new and the young may not be as novel as they think. But the young don't understand that because they have no sense of history (they weren't there) and as far as I can see, they don't want to know about history. They don't ask about pre-them time. (I know I am overgeneralizing, but there is at least some truth to this. And I do not limit this to the well-under-forty group by any means, and I do smile to myself when I hear people do "Woe is me" when they turn fifty. Oh, come on. I remember fifty.) As a friend says, "It's all new to them." For them, precedents don't matter at least in part because those precedents are associated with those of us who are either on their way to rocking chairs or already in them. And this happens during a time of alleged concern for diversity pretty much everywhere.

And it seems I am expected to adopt this attitude: I am old and infirm, obsolete, to be left rocking away.

Here's a word for you: ageism.

Hit a certain age and you are expected to say, "My rocker, c'est moi," I guess, if the choice of gifts is any indication.

But I am still here. I don't feel like a fossil.

Consider this: in some ways I am in  better shape than I was ten (or maybe even more) years ago (then a time when I am sure to some I was already part of what they see as Jurassic Park). And I would like to suggest that my mind is in better shape than it has been for decades, if only because I am free (mostly) from the distraction and stress of work. I mean, I can finally think a thought.

Most people have no idea how it feels to be my age. (Or, depending on your age, dear reader, OUR age.)

I already had more lamps than I was using, and, to be honest, I did want something to mark my years of service. Perhaps (if it had been available, but then it wasn't, and after all, clocks perpetuate the stereotype too, tick-tock), a nice wall clock would have been more appropriate--but then some friends had already given me a very cool light-sensitive wall clock that plays Beatles tunes on the hour as a combined birthday and retirement gift, so another clock would have been neither here nor there. Instead of the rocker I probably would have been content to keep my oldish school-issued laptop rather than have to take everything off it, put it on my home laptop and my external hard drive and save, save, backup, backup, but that option was not to be. (Someone else had asked.)

As I write this, the rocking chair I received is serving as an informal clothes rack. In the four months since I received it, it has started to smell less-new than it did when I set it on the lawn in the backyard to take a photo of it once it arrived. I have tucked it between a tall bookcase and a floor lamp, near the heat vent, and I am hoping that in the winter it will serve as a place for me to sit and read.

I have always liked rocking chairs. The first piece of furniture I bought for myself as an adult was a rocker, dark-stained pine, now in hibernation in the garage (which functions as an attic since I have no attic). I also have two small rockers, one from my childhood bedroom, white, a sort of French Provincial, painted by my father, and a second that I took, much later, from my grandfather's workshop. The French Provincial one sits in the living room and serves as an extension of a bookcase, and the other, upstairs in my bedroom, has a cat sleeping on a pillow on it as I write this.

In addition, a few years ago, I bought and spray-painted red two pine rockers for the deck at the back of my house. On summer evenings there I sit, my feet up on the railings: backward, forward. I rest my head against the top of the chair and see the blue hour through the leaves. So all but the new rocker are old.

I like rockers and I was as gracious as I could be about this new retirement chair, all things considered. I was not going to kick such a gift in the mouth (so to speak), but I am wise enough to know that it is special since it recognizes thirty-nine years of work in one place. It is nice to have something that does that. As with other things, the new rocker may come to grow in sentimental value over time. Time might prove to be on the new chair's side.

But not now. It is just too new.

Old rockers: they have not just age but character from a time when people made-do (as my parents and grandparents used to say) and when perhaps "new" was not always the obvious preference for seemingly everything in the universe, including people. The old rockers have the occasional ding from pretty much daily use for years. This is all part of their beauty, their character.

Maybe it's not the retirement rocker per se that bothers me. A piece of furniture is a nice gift, after all, and it was well-intended. But I am bothered about the attitude that comes with it--and this is by no means limited to any single employer. I am finally free from daily work-for-pay. I have time, finally, for some balance. Time for myself, for a return to authenticity, to the genuine, to the possibility of saying no (to whomever since I no longer have a full-time supervisor or colleagues to play nice with, but anyhoo)--but also, as I choose, to say yes.

But I have known for twenty-plus years that the human body replaces cells every seven years (apoptosis, in case you were wondering), so it is not as though I have just started aging. Pay attention here: even babies age. More than that, why should youth necessarily represent the only perfection of any kind? Why is what somebody thinks of physical perfection as it is narrowly defined by the culture important? Why does beauty have to be conceived only as the conventional beauty of the young? Character can seem to be a little unformed or amorphous or just not visible in those conventionally beautiful and young. (But perhaps I am missing something or not looking carefully enough.)

Why is perfection determined only by the exterior, primarily by looks, a notion that I would like to think anybody with a functioning brain might admit is....well, maybe important in its way, but also superficial?

As far as I am concerned, my age means that I have been successful. Aging means that I am still alive. Retirement does not necessarily equal illness. Nor does aging have to mean what Anne Karpf in The Guardian on November 5 characterized as "the pastel-ization of old age"--as if we of a certain age fade, fade until we become  faint and old and enfeebled versions of our former selves, asexual prune-eaters with arthritic hips and sore knees. Among other ailments.

In this version, we start our lives, apparently, in whatever the latest technicolor, saturated colors are.

Until we fade into invisibility and move to The Great Beyond.

The Big Lifelong Fade Away.

It's as if, after a certain age, the culture expects me to morph into human and fading Muzak. At best. Yes, for over ten years my hair color has not been natural, and for nearly twenty years I have used reading glasses. (I have had glasses, plain old glasses, since second grade. So?) I have always liked to walk and now I can do more of it because I have more time to myself. Do I value comfort more than I used to? Not really. I never was a fashionista and I am not going to start now. (Does it really matter if I wear jeans that are more mom than gangsta or skinny?) Do we really want to be that superficial? (I have resolved to be the last person on the face of the earth without a tattoo or a piercing aside from one piercing in each year for earrings which in my case long predates the current fashion for body art.) If anything, thus far retirement  has made possible a rejuvenation of my sense of self-possession. (And I still do have all my original body parts. So far, anyway.)

I do know this: this mortal coil is only temporary. Yes, the wolf is at the door, but then it always has been. Maybe other people have spent their lives thinking they were invincible, but for the most part, I have not. My world has always seemed a but too risky, too fragile. I could get hit by a bus any day. Fall in the shower. Choke on a vitamin or a piece of rigatoni. Not to mention all the risks that come from interactions with others: think "going postal" or 9/11 writ small or large. Sometimes I am surprised we are not all agoraphobic. (Yes, this is written by a person who has gone to Southeast Asia by herself multiple times. The wolf if everywhere. So be it. I go anyway.)

But still. I prefer--as of this writing, anyway, and I do touch wood again as I write this--to think of aging not as decline (I hope I have good genes) but also as a time for growth. Youth to me never equaled perfection, I don't think, just busyness and obligation. Or maybe I missed the perfection stage. I do know that people less than half my age have all kinds of energy and aspirations, and good for them. But they don't have a corner on the market.

Old rockers, I am convinced, are cool.(And I assure you that I am about to make a deliberative, associational leap here; I am not unknowingly wandering off to another related-enough subject. I am far from demented. Just come along with me here.) Consider the musicians I came of age with (so to speak) and who are still around: half of the Beatles. All of the Rolling Stones. (Okay, so now they are without Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman, and Bobby Keys recently joined the horn section in the sky.) The Who. Granted, some of their voices may not sound the same as they did fifty years ago, but whose does? Why is a younger voice necessarily better to sing rock and roll and blues? We are not talking about a boys' choir here, for crying out loud. (Coincidentally, "Not Fade Away" was the first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote.)

The pre-Socratic philosophers knew you can't step in the same river twice--sing into the same microphone twice. Play to the same audience twice. Have the same job twice. No Groundhog Day for most of us, not complete life do-overs. The only constant is change--and with that change comes a wolf of one kind or another, even if sometimes we manage to forget he is there. Life is fragile. Life is iffy. Tempus fugit.

But wait a minute: what about that which prevails given all this risk, all this change?

Back to the old, more experienced rockers: name a song that is more of a rocker than "Helter Skelter." Or "Helen Wheels." More of a rocker than The Who's "Baba O'Reilly." Or the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" or "Gimme Shelter."

The songs still rock, and as far as I am concerned, so do the singers. Rock and roll, like play, is an attitude, not an age. It's fun, exuberant, even if at this point it may not always aspire to appear totally unrehearsed. (That would be disingenuous.)

Rock and roll prevails. That's what prevails.

More than that, if you have never lived through an event that metaphorically connects one way or another with the chaos, the angst suggested in "Gimme Shelter," then you haven't lived much. If you don't understand "Midnight Rambler" in some visceral way even if you have never been physically, violently threatened....then you need to get out more. Risk more.

Or develop an imagination. Which also means a sense of play. Which also means possessing an agile mind and an open heart. All of which may or may not be common characteristics of people much younger than I am and who, God help me, seem to be selfie-driven. (No offense, but enough with the photos of you. I already know what you look like. I may be overgeneralizing, but I don't think by much.)

The Rolling Stones are supposed to have the best concert around when it comes to spectacle, especially when compared to their beginnings in north London fifty years ago. And there is a lot to be said for seeing Keith Richards, hard rocker of hard rockers, sing and play. He's an outlaw, a pirate. A man with gnarled fingers and not too much of a dad bod, all things considered. (He is over seventy.) A man still with some swagger and rawness. Still. Given how he has lived and the amount of drugs and alcohol that has gone through his body, he should not be alive. He just shouldn't. Yet the Rolling Stones seem to enjoy what they are doing, the sheer physicality of it. And they keep doing it.

Only in the last year or two has Keith Richards let his hair go white as he plays the iconic riffs that the fans go to see in person: the dum dum/dum dum dum beginning of "Satisfaction", for instance. Or think of the beginning "who-whoo"s of "Sympathy for the Devil."

Granted, he may not always be clearly playing as many notes as he used to, all things considered, but, well, the only constant is change, and who cares if things are not totally the same? Here's a thought: Keith Richards' and Mick Jagger's voices may not have the same tone and power that they had fifty years ago, but that occasionally gravelly sound complements the lyrics and finally adds character.

In a time of hyper-speed marketing and elevator speeches: character. Integrity. Not words that you hear often these days.

It s not overstating it to say that Keith and Mick are still badass motherfuckers.

They cannot need the money. Maybe they want to further secure their legacy. Maybe they just want to play. Sentimentality (as some of you may think this is all about) aside, these old rockers do hark back to a simpler AM radio kind of time when all they wanted was to play and write the music they loved--and when all the listeners wanted was to listen and to, in a small way, maybe feel a moment of transcendence.

Along the way, the Rolling Stones learned to work the crowd as well as the music.

Rock and roll is the opposite of rocking in a chair. (Not surprisingly, recently I read that--surprise!--singing and dancing promote brain health.)

If you have any doubts about the Rolling Stones' resilience and resonance, their energy these days, then take a look at their concert at the Glastonbury Festival in 2013 on YouTube. Keith's  Chuck Berry moves during "Satisfaction." Mick running miles without losing his breath and singing "It's Only Rock and Roll." His strutting and prancing (his father was a physical education teacher, by the way). About four minutes into "Brown Sugar" he calls out "Put the lights on, Patrick" without missing a beat. Think about this: it may be this exact dancing, their energy, even now defining rock and roll so it is no longer solely the game of the youngest. "It's only rock and roll/But I like it, like it, like it." Grandfathers belting it out while they wear clothes that very few men their age (and in some cases, men far younger than they) could carry off.

BUT if you are short on time, check out only the 2013 Glastonbury "Gimme Shelter," seven and a half minutes of what I hope is your long life. Look at the moves and listen to the voices and backup singer Lisa Fischer sounding as good as she ever has and dancing in boots with impressive (and likely painful) heels. Think about that, about keeping old sings fresh and energized requiring a certain talent. That talent makes the music look the right kind of effortless. Age does not seem to slow them down much, really. (If at all.)

By the way, please tell me exactly what it is YOU are planning n doing when you are in your seventies. Hmmmm?

And if the Stones have more special effects than they used to have in the Ed Sullivan days, so be it. More power to them. Pyrotechnics and confetti are all part of rocking these days. They are still edgy in their way: I mean, Keith Richards is a white-haired pirate rocker.

There is nothing pastel about them.

They are playing their hearts out. And from the music: fun, and making possible transcendence, too.

Old rockers are the best.

Or as Keith Richards says in his recent biographical film Under the Influence, "You're never grown up until they put you six feet under." The film shows him recollecting in New York, Chicago, Nashville. At home. "Nobody wants to get old. Nobody wants to die young," he says. Keith Richards is all cigarette smoke and blues headband or cool fedora, all gravelly voice and deeply-lined face. He earned that face. And he has a great smoky, rumbly laugh.

"I'm not getting old," he says. "I'm evolving."

And he is right.

May we all keep rocking.


Copyright Sandra Engel