My Lunches with Andrew

About six weeks ago, the CEO of my part-time employment sent out an email assuring us that over the Spring Break the school was monitoring the COVID-19 situation, was deep cleaning and in general taking more care. That morning I had gone to the pool the same as usual and had even noticed that the locker room did seem cleaner and the water was warmer and more than usual chlorine-smooth, silky. The school crisis team was on top of things, the email said—until, not even a day later, his next email, per Governor Andrew Cuomo, said all SUNY and CUNY campuses would be moving to online classes. Boom. Initially the pool was not closed when classes went online, but then it was when there was no really clear information on the CDC website saying that chlorine really did kill pretty much everything, including the virus. Plus, there were the issues of the lockers, the benches…the whole gestalt.

At first it seemed like overkill and then it didn’t, and we now know that Cuomo knew before most of us what was likely coming down the line. And then the changes cascaded rapidly until everything at the school except essential services (Facilities, Security) was online, and then 100% of non-essential employees had to be working from home. Although I have disagreed with the governor, or at most thought of him with “Oh well, he is the best we have” faint praise, Cuomo is made for this time, this place: what can look like arrogance in lesser situations is exactly what is needed here. “Bully Andy,” as he is known, is focused, thorough, detail-oriented and articulate. And then poof! No more places to go or people to see.

“See you in 2021!” a friend texted. Maybe so. I live in a state where because of COVID-19 more people have died than on 9/11. Within a month from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than did during the ten or so years of our involvement in Vietnam.

Aside from teaching one class online, for about five years I have been retired. I am an introvert who lives in a 1100 square foot house with two aging but loving house cats. Before COVID-19, I grumbled at having to get up in time to get to the pool three days a week year round and to go to lunch the other two days.  I mean, I would have to stop whatever I was doing and get dressed and go out.  Did I pack my towel and swim shoes? The lock and key for the locker? Those days, going to the pool felt different until I got there and found the exercise invigorating. And then after class, I came home, had a second cup of coffee, and felt energized for the rest of the day. Every other activity was pretty much TBD, negotiable within what I now see as the framework of a small daily routine.  

Retirement meant choices and order: I made a list every night of what I wanted to do the next day, and usually I got to all those things sooner or later. Just as I had when I worked full time. These days I make a weekly list and some things get done and others don’t. I mean, when inhaling wrong in the post office or touching a gas pump without wearing gloves could prove to be lethal, then maybe a list that has hourly activities implied seems….foolish. Silly. As the student-inmates used to say when I taught in a state prison for men, “I ain’t got nothing to do but time.” That said, let me assure you: I am in no way in prison. At the most, I can’t come and go as I might like, but I can still come and go (even if I go out to where other people are maybe once every 10 days at a minimum).

I had been planning to use my frequent flier miles to go somewhere (destination undecided) this year; for two-plus months I had time to make my choice, to develop an itinerary. There was no rush. But now my passport is gathering dust. And when I do think of making reservations to somewhere, mostly just to make them…well, I take myself for a walk—walks that pass for exercise and that do serve to air out my head.

It’s hard not to want to plan.

I am in a fallout shelter of a sort with windows, electricity, heat, water, food, Wi-Fi and a house full of stuff to keep me occupied if I so desire. Still, this time has redefined “home alone” as well as “home sweet home”. For me this time is inconvenience, not catastrophe. I did finally locate some gloves online. I suppose if I thought about the situation the wrong way I might think that one of the few things between me and possible death is a bar of soap, basically. But I don’t freak out.

I just carry on in my own time zone in a kind of suspended animation.

So in the course of a few days I went from minimal out-of-house routine plus big laundry, groceries, errands, and never getting up before eight except to go to the pool to, these days, almost zero routine except for…. meals. Feeding the cats. No pool, so no reason to put on my Fitbit, really, except to go for a walk. I have plenty of clothes, and now that we don’t know when it will be safe to go forth as usual, this is not the time to Marie Kondo anything as far as I am concerned. In fact, I wish I hadn’t donated my ancient fuzzy and comfy bathrobe over the summer back when donations were still accepted. I could use it now.

Just about never in my life have I ever been bored, including now. I may not like the stay-at-home order where I am not as free to come and go without worry as I was a month ago, but I am not in dire social straits during this retirement on steroids. I have an income and health insurance. I am privileged and comfortable enough to know I am going to gulp hard when I open my most recent report on my very conservatively invested retirement fund, but I am not going to panic. The stock market goes up; the stock market comes down. 

Maybe in some ways I have been preparing for this all my life.

I mean, all things considered, it’s not too terrible to be a non-essential worker even if it comes with a little sensory deprivation.

It’s funny how even those small tasks, those boxes on the calendar, the items on the to-do list served a skeleton to hang the time of my days. No more almost-daily excursions, and every once in a while I have to stop and think what day it is. Tuesday I hold an online office hour and put out the garbage; other than that, my time is mine in a way it never has been in this time in which the outside-of-my-house has the potential to be a biohazard site. I used to get up at eight at the latest, but these days it’s sometime between eight and nine; after decades of getting up at six to go to work and being in bed by ten, I now stay up until midnight or later. The cats have figured out that something is up, I think; Moonbeam Drama Queen when she is awake brings me her favorite toy at least once a day and cries if I do not immediately lavish generous praise on her for providing for me. Swishy, on the other, hand has decided she needs to stay close to me all morning after breakfast, once we are both up and functioning—and she can’t decide if she wants to sit on her chair, on my chair in the kitchen, on the cat scratcher with the catnip, or on the table. (I have long tried to make her a lap cat, which would reduce her indecision, but I have learned yet again: she will never be a lap cat, always a next-to cat.)

I am in no way in a bad way in all this suspended animation; this is The Time of the Introvert. I have occasionally felt overwhelmed in loud crowds. But I was designed to succeed in situations like, this say-at-home-if-you-can, “social distancing” time, pre-, post-  and during pandemic life. Besides, I filled out the census form which took all of ten minutes and resembles nothing like the one I remembered doing in the past, but I was counted, and therefore I am. I still tend to sleep a little later on weekends than on the other five days, and when I do go out even for a walk, it is usually, still, at the retired person low-traffic hours at the supermarket: noonish, during feeding.

I am sure extroverts find this try-to-stay-home time as a shock to their systems (and those who do not know what category—introvert or extrovert--they fall into should find an online version of the Myers-Briggs Test and find out for sure). I do hope they survive to do the work to get things rolling again full-time and loud when the pandemic is over. In the meantime, let’s hear it (but at low volume) for peace and quiet. Maybe Pascal was right in some ways: “All men’s [sic] miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

But in the meantime: the gyms, the bars and clubs are all closed. No more sports. So? My life is in some ways seriously the same except I can’t come and go as I like. And my modest destinations (pool, lunch, wherever else) are off limits in this time of suspended animation.

I mean, it’s not as though we are being asked to be our versions of Anne Frank here.

That said, somehow, sometimes, our leadership (and I do not mean Andrew Cuomo here) has seemed to be willing to decrease the surplus population. Maybe the observation attributed to Winston Churchill was correct: Americans always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all the other alternatives. Let’s hope we finally do.

After a couple modest pandemic pandemonium (food apocalypse now!) trips to the supermarket a few weeks ago, I likely have enough food for a month and then some.  I have to eat the perishable food first: apples, salad, or blueberries on oatmeal, before I go to the frozen blueberries under hot oatmeal, the blueberries al dente. I am not hoarding, but thorough: canned beans, salsa, bread, cheeses, eggs, pasta (and I am not one for pasta in normal times). Canned corn and green beans, many of the things my mother had in the cupboard except no Duncan Hines cake mix. Tuna and salmon in cans. I decided to try tater tots since there was no waffle or pancake mix in the supermarket, but I did see on the internet that you can make a waffle of a sort, pretty much, with sweet potato tater tots (and I already had several quarts of maple syrup that will need to be used). One can of Dinty Moore beef stew just because (but I drew the line at Spam). Sauces since I am not much of a cook. Nuoc mam and Vietnamese chili sauce. Rice. Laundry detergent and especially, especially, coffee and decaf and cream. Since it was evident that I would be inside through Easter, I did buy a small package of Peeps. Through the miracle of Chewy.com I have enough food for the cats, at least for now. The big stuff—comforter, cat beds--has made it through the super-duper washer at the laundromat.

On sunny days I go for a stroll around the neighborhood. My back gets stiff if I sit too long, so I snooze. (Rehearsal for this was fifteen months ago when I had to stay inside for two weeks after hip surgery. I was not as mobile and functioning then, though. These days, it is a little more difficult to be housebound when you are not recovering from surgery.) But hey, people from the northeast US are used to spending time indoors, though usually because of massive blizzards and roads unplowed for at least a few days. And this time is evidence that we can adjust: during yesterday’s trip to buy fruit and veggies after two weeks, I was masked and gloved and with purpose, but not with the drive of the first couple trips: I wasn’t back in what I think of as the pre-COVID-19 supermarket trance, exactly, but I wasn’t rushed, either.

Once I have room in the refrigerator, the plan is to order hot and sour soup from the Chinese restaurant and maybe even freeze some (if Google is to believed, this is possible). (IF the Chinese restaurants are still open, and rumor already is they may not be.) Plan B: tacos and chili.

Much of my current food stash would be appropriate for a fallout shelter during my childhood, but I am in no bunker. I have electricity, water, heat, a roof over my head, Wi-Fi, music, and good feline company, all of which without the amenities would make for a different experience. (Once the weather warms up and I open the windows, I am going to have to lower my voice so the neighbors don’t hear me talking to the cats, but that is a subject for another day.) I listen to podcasts including BBC Desert Island Disks, which seem appropriate, all things considered. I have finished bingeing Foyle’s War on Acorn. No need to duck and cover since no nuclear bomb is going to drop, and I am not going to have to plant a Victory Garden. I don’t have to start canning. One of my earliest memories is visiting an aunt when she was in an iron lung—polio was also caused by a virus, by the way--and it is not likely I am going to end up being the latest version of that if I am careful. If the Fates allow.

But now I understand why my grandparents had what looked like a huge Victory Garden and why, when we finally cleaned out her house in the 1990s, we found food my grandmother had canned as late as 1947 in her basement. It’s not difficult to understand putting up stores, borderline hoarding, when it feels more like providing for yourselves--trying to make sure in a time when any other certainly seems nowhere in sight. Provide, provide. Not exactly whistling in the dark, but…well, which way do you want to bet?

I am also trying to remember the context for a former biologist colleague telling me a good thirty years ago that it is likely we are all going to die from a virus. We could have been waiting for a meeting to start, but how the hell did we even wander on to that subject? He was also the person I asked about something I had happened upon in the college library in Jane Fonda’s book: yes, he confirmed, all the cells of the body are completely regenerated every seven years. Who knew?

Back to the present: I have a pile of books to read, as always.  I still have some of the books I didn’t read after hip surgery: The World According to Garp, for instance. A couple weeks ago I assembled the three adult books I remember being in the living room, between the bronzed baby shoes bookends, when I was growing up: Kenneth Roberts’ Boon Island, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. Since the public library is closed, my book does not have to be returned right away: Daniel Levin’s Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives, a 500-page book which is proving to be…. slow going (and may be unreadable). For my birthday right before lockdown I got a volume of E.B.White’s essays. I have online subscriptions to the NY Times and the Washington Post. So I have no shortage of things to read or even to watch.

I have always washed my hands, but now I wash them even after I take the newspaper out of the plastic sleeve it is delivered in. It’s hard not to scratch my nose when I can feel allergy season beginning now that the snow has melted. I’ve made a mask out of a scarf, and I also have several dust masks I bought when I was in Lowe’s in late February, right before social distancing; Trump had just said there were many “elements of medical” (language so bizarre that it was in itself a flag) and said that all would be well. Yeah, right. So I bought dust masks.

Beyond those precautions, I can only wash the door knobs so many times.

I am not going to turn into Felix Unger about the surfaces in the house. But yes, they are cleaned more than they used to be. I may be living in Weimar USA, but I can’t gather in a crowd to protest.

Even if there is no immunity to COVID-19, I have to think I have reasonably good immunity built up.  My inoculations are mostly up to date--even typhoid, Hep A, Hep B, typhoid, polio, and Td/Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis). Right now my prescriptions are filled. I lived in Vietnam during SARS--and stayed put--because the closest person infected was 1000 miles away (and the closest one at home, had I been home, was in comparatively nearby Toronto. Granted, when I stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on my way home after SARS had pretty much faded away, I was one of very few tourists in the Hong Kong airport and in the hotel). I think of the developing nation hotels where I have stayed for $15 a night, the food I have eaten: the balut--fertilized duck egg--for instance, and the platter of chicken heads, all facing the same direction and looking something like Abraham Lincoln in their brown nuoc mam, and the dishes that were wrapped for me by others in rice paper, at the table--and I wrapped their food, too. The (occasional, I grant you) street food I have munched. Swine flu, bird flu. The squat toilets (and the toilets that seemed so much like Cholera Central that I decided that maybe my bladder was stronger than I thought it was, after all). This all by no constitutes immunity to COVID-19, I know, but still. So good, so far. 

Also, public service announcement: I have never had malaria, but the two types of prophylactic medicines have been so powerful (with bizarre side effects that started with nightmares) that I stopped them before I should have. I have never taken hydroxychloroquine but I would not unless I really had to. Anything malaria-related requires strength I may not have.

I had thought that the closest I ever wanted to be under house arrest had already happened when I was asked to stay within the walls of the school I was at in the Mekong Delta after a rumor—totally unsubstantiated—arose that the local Muslim pirates in the Bay of Thailand were planning on kidnapping the two Americans in town at the start of the war with Iraq. (And even as I was told this, I was also assured that the pirates did not kill anybody but just held people for ransom: “They are nice pirates.”) Every school is surrounded by a wall, and you are a “member” or not, and with help from the US Consulate, the compromise was for me to tell the guard at the gate where I was going, and, if possible, to take along a local. Just to be safe.

That was then. These days, the phrase “going viral” will never seem the same. I put on a mask before I go out. It’s sweaty under there. I don’t need to wear earrings or makeup. I tell myself the mask is a fashion statement. Indoor clothes, outdoor clothes.

And every once in a while this all still seems so surreal that it cannot be happening.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it seems that these days we are pretty much at the “Safety” level, far from the Self-Actualizing level. Or at least we are aware of that Safety level in a way I at least was not in the past. Then again, as they say on the internet: “Your grandparents were called to war. You are being called to the couch.”  How much we took for granted even a few weeks ago. That said, it is difficult to imagine that health insurance costs will not skyrocket. To their credit, my employer has done all it can to manage to keep even part-time workers employed, at least until the end of the semester. Other people are without work; people at work are being careful in ways they never imagined.

Speculation on Twitter and elsewhere is that nothing will ever be the same again after the pandemic; children who were born circa 9/11 are now coming of age. Will we again be forever changed?

Maybe so. Already I have heard that it seems that, looking back, we really didn’t need all those meetings after all—and a lot really can be handled by email! Maybe people who are rushing to hoard toilet paper might (I did say “might”) think more kindly of refugees who are in many cases fleeing for their lives, not hustling for (and with the means for and the luxury of) a 12 pack of Charmin. I hope that after these months we will all be beyond what I think of as the German Hamsterkaufe stage (“Hamsterkaufe” meaning shopping like a hamster cramming food into its mouth); we may not have been buying food before the virus as we did recently, but many of us were certainly were happy and regular customer-consumers.

Some say after this is over, there will be the big party of all parties. We will hug freely again. Nobody is predicting that people will be going, “Oh boy, back to the meetings that we replaced for a few months by email.” Maybe there will be less support for the Edifice Complexes of The Powerful and the accompanying reorganizations and remodeling of the many probably not-necessary levels of management, tasks completed mostly in an attempt to justify job and salary. Maybe.

And I hope we try to fix the things that we did to ourselves, the parts of our society that we broke, resulting in lack of (or criminally unfair) healthcare and employment compensation--and our relentless consumer culture. We had a serious lack of worst case preparation for the next pandemic.  (Note: this event is less like Pearl Harbor than it is like Chernobyl where the powers ignored the problem until it was too late to stop it. And there should be Nuremberg-type trials after this is over.)

The One Per Cent versus the Rest of Us. I know how modestly fortunate I am; I teach a variety of students online, many of whom always, still, represent the first generation in their family to go to college. They all work at least part-time. I have not, in the past month, been brave enough to go back to their first week online introductions where they told us all a little about themselves; I am afraid I would now find myself making an educated guess how many are now no longer employed. We live in discombobulating times: one of the best returning adult students whom I imagined as fairly unflappable recently handed in a writing assignment that was blank. (Of course I asked her to resubmit it.) Who knows how many will test positive and have to be hospitalized? The possibilities seem horrific. Viruses are shape-shifters.

Until the situation improves, to be safe, I am not being lazy so much as I am being energy-conserving (but getting exercise) just in case. I would like to postpone any currently avoidable trip to the doctor, to the veterinarian. I want to maintain some pandemic equilibrium, so to speak. I don’t want to catch a cold, pull a muscle. Please may I not need a plumber. Let’s hope the furnace doesn’t need fixing. It seems likely that the home repairs I had penciled in for this year (such as replacing the garage door) may have to be postponed since I don’t want somebody tramping germs around. So far the worst thing that has happened is the printer does not seem to be working, but that proved to be fixable with a USB cord. 

And even now in this time-with-little-structure there is still always something else to do, and if this retirement on steroids does not prove that work—any task—expands to fill the time you have for it, I don’t know what ever will. I get a few things done every day and call it good; the most ambitious pandemic housekeeping project I have undertaken is cleaning out my underwear drawer.

People bloom in different times and in different ways. Always have. We don’t know when or how we will come out of this. Maybe there will be dancing in the street (as opposed to in the living room), but maybe there won’t. Maybe just a sigh of relief and a move from a stroll to a having little more spring in the step. I look forward to driving where I want to—even through the potholes. I am hard pressed to believe I will be glad to navigate holiday rush hour traffic near Albany again, but maybe I will once I am free to come and go at will. I do know I will be glad to get my hair cut. To see my family and friends.

So be it. Truth be told, I don’t mind not having to accomplish too much. At least for now, the cats still sit on the book I am reading and even on the yellow pad I am writing on. I still text Dad jokes to my nephews. The laundry still waits to be put away longer than it should on the rocker upstairs for a day or two. Somehow the T-shirts still need touch up ironing and I have to admit there is (as I knew pre-COVID-19) a lot to be said for sitting around in sweat pants all day. Now that there’s less of a routine of sorts, it’s okay, although I do miss having to go out and see people. I miss the freedom to do whatever and not have to worry about getting exposed (or exposing someone) to something invisible and airborne that has the potential to kill me since I happen to be in what I think of as the “endangered species” (at risk) category per the CDC and Andrew Cuomo. I miss the whiff of chlorine as I rinse out my bathing suit in the sink three mornings a week. My guess is I will want to dress a little better than I used to before all this self-quarantine began, but after those first few days, I make no promises.

I started going to water aerobics because I wanted to get more exercise, exercise that I correctly assumed would be easier on my knees and hips, than, say, jogging—or anything that happened in non-water gravity. Water aerobics has the feel, sometimes, of splashy gym class, but most often, with the music, it seems as much like dancing in the low end of the pool than anything else. The locker room is rackety and crowded, with never enough room, the floor as often as not slippery. But once we get in the water, we (students, mostly women of a certain age) are visible only from the neck up. I don’t even get my ponytail wet. Being in the pool is like being in church in that we students each have our usual places in the pool to occupy: I am a low end of the pool kind of girl, and even there the water is almost up to my shoulders.

Nobody can tell if I am kicking as high as anybody else or lifting my knees halfway to my chin or not. For me, a non-swimmer in the low end of the pool, this is a non-competitive, low-impact, invisible, Zen activity. Still, I watch the faces of the other women as we form a circle around the teacher: my face, I like to think, is Zen but observing, counting the steps as in dancing school. Others also seem serious—or really focusing far more than I am—and a few always seem to be happy happy, what I think of cheerleader happy, as we go from jumping jacks to a 100 step cross country ski move. One student even once asked the lifeguard to take her photo as she smiled and posed with her weights as the rest of us bounced around in the blue waves and the bubbles. Esther Williams we are not.

In the water, collective as the activities are, nobody cares as long as you don’t go under (which I did, by the way, and went home to dose myself prophylactically with leftover atomic antibiotic, just in case). Go with the flow but not totally.  I now think of the pool as normal, inconvenient life, a place of fluid, splashy business.

Someone once told me that at the end of first grade, second grade looked scary. True enough even though a pandemic is not the same old same old, exactly. These days, my late morning/noontime routine is what I think of as Having Lunch with Andrew Cuomo, a person on a screen one I have never met, and a government official in a jacket and tie delivering mostly bad news in a way that does not make things sound, well, totally hopeless. At least somebody (technocrat that he is) seems to be as in charge of this much as anybody can be. In my little way I just have to live through it all. Still, I really do look forward to doing (or not) my regular everyday social distancing on my own terms again sometime; I’ll be glad when these kitchen lunches are over.

After he finishes, after I wash the dishes, I go for a stroll around a few neighborhood blocks. The air is spring fresh and the few neighbors—relative strangers--I see keep their distance and offer friendly small gestures. Their little dog strains to come over for a pet but they keep him close. We wave. We say the sun feels good. I don’t always recognize them, and I am not sure they recognize me, either, with my baseball cap, sunglasses and mask—and it doesn’t matter. I’m not even much of an outdoor person but all of a sudden I like being outdoors for that hour or so more than I used to. I can’t smile at anybody, and I can’t see anybody else’s smile, either.

I’m not exactly pounding the pavement, and I miss the buoyancy of the pool. I’d really rather be going there, to the pool, where we all weigh 15% of what we weigh on earth (or so I am told and as I choose to believe), where I bounce and stretch more easily in the flow and amid the bubbles and the waves, where the water is far more forgiving than gravity is or ever can be. And even at an inconveniently early time of the morning.

Four Plus Years Out, More or Less

Mostly I am grateful for reasonably good health, for my new hip, and especially to finally being able to see.

Beyond that, four plus years out after retirement, I have realized:

1. Napping is my superpower.

Naps are good. A half hour mid-afternoon nap doesn’t restart the day, exactly, but it does provide an energy boost. It is my retirement version of falling asleep sitting up while watching the 6 o’clock evening news, a workday habit for many years.

2. I never thought of myself as a cat mom before I retired. But after spending time with them every day, many hours, a cat mom I certainly am. In some ways, without the obligations and the other obligations of my work life, my life is more similar to theirs than I would have imagined, now that I think about it, but that is a subject for another day. In cat years, Moonbeam is my age and Swishy is middle aged. They take good care of me.

3.  I still don’t miss the meetings (not even ones I called) and even now I try to avoid anything even vaguely meeting-y. “Going out” some days means going out to lunch or to the pool or buying groceries, but then I have never been one for big par-tays anyway, so no matter. It’s nice to finally be able to let my introvert flag fly. Finally. In the relentlessly social workaday world, introversion is grievously undervalued.

As Neil Young sings, “Myself at last.”

If I were one to bother to advocate, to take on the world at this point of my life, I would make a loud public case for introversion to be recognized and valued far beyond what it is. The comparative peace and quiet of retirement has reinforced my notion that the world would be a better place if any number of extroverts SHUT UP. (You will never convince me that there is no obvious bias in the workplace for the terminally social.)

And when I hear just enough about how life is continuing just fine without me at my previous place of full-time employment, I am grateful to be gone.

4. That said, there are a few people from work that I miss if I stop and think about it, but I haven’t stopped to think about it that often. There is nothing keeping me from contacting or seeing them, but usually I don’t--even if I am really glad to see them when I run into them. And social media keeps us connected just enough. This one is doing this, that one is doing that.

This is a more recent version of my reaction to the people I knew in high school. I attended one class reunion maybe 11 years ago and that one surreal evening was enough. It was nice to see people (well, I remembered some of them) but I can’t say I have gone out of my way to see any of them again. Nor have they reached out to me.

Fair enough. I mean, it has been a very long time since high school.

That said, someone I knew for twelve years of childhood schooling—someone I have not thought about since never mind what year-- recently sent me a Facebook friend request and I found myself pleasantly surprised to accept and to see that he has done well for himself. Small world in a new way.

Nothing more or less than that.

5. Work, defined here as whatever it is you are doing in retirement, really can expand to fill the time you have to fill it. The time can be interrupted and delayed (as has the writing on this blog). Except, that is, if I am washing the floor or vacuuming it because the job is always fast and perfunctory. A good enough job. But other distractions can be….well, interesting.

6.   I have more time than I ever expected to have for myself and the quality of that time is different.  I have more time that is just mine to use. I have learned once again and very thoroughly that on some days I am excellent at doing nothing. So be it. Managed-enough procrastination is okay.

Twenty years ago I did not know that I would ever be my current age. And retired. I didn’t even think about retiring beyond socking money in my retirement account so that I might have enough money if (and only if) I decided to retire—if I were ever able to. How or when or even I might retire I had no idea.

More than anything, retirement equals time, time that is mine to use. For a change.

Morning coffee does not have to be rushed.

7. Many people have things far better than I do, but I do have things pretty good. Granted, these days I am not much of a material girl compared to many. I am also not going to jump on the fad bus of decluttering even though now and then I fill a bag or two for recycling or for the garbage. I just go and do things at my own speed. The difference between working full time and part time is the locus of control, and these days I really do live on Sandy Time.

BUT although I have thrown out 99% of my work clothes, I have discovered that, yes indeedy, from time to time even in retirement you do need to buy new clothes. A fifteen year old ratty sweater is a fifteen year old ratty sweater, after all. I think of new clothes as wardrobe maintenance. But these days the need is for warmth and comfort, mostly, with an occasional very brief glance toward fashion. (Because I recently attended wedding festivities, I now have two new dresses.)

Still, I am less and less a material girl. That said, over the years I knew I was approaching a no-definite-date retirement, I decided what I wanted: a dry sink, and later a roll-top desk, both of which I found used versions of. I have comfy shoes. I wear comfy clothes. I have long thought that a woman needs comfortable shoes and a good bra. After that, as the kids say: whatever.

 Comfort is underrated.

 Flannel is good.

8.  On the rare free association moment when I find myself looking backward, I am amazed (and sometimes horrified about workplace life) here and there during the Later Middle Ages: the three women faculty in a department of fourteen being assigned the eight a.m. classes until we spoke up; the new locally-grown supervisor (“stupidvisor” is a word I recently encountered) asking me where I went to high school after I had a Ph.D.  Many days I went from class to meeting to office to allergy shot appointment to supermarket to dinner to preparing for the next day before going to bed and getting up at six to go to work and start it all again. Work took up a lot of psychological space—and at the time I was happy to do it. And I was by no means the only person who lived that way.

The other day I found myself agreeing with Michelle Obama when she was asked what it felt like to find herself the only woman at a table full of men: she observed that you come to realize many of them are not terribly bright. (Not that all the women at the table were geniuses.)

Recently I threw out the final batch of souvenir documents I had for whatever reason saved from my workplace, and as I was ripping them up, I realized that I could not remember some of the things I had done. For instance, I found my signature—one of at least fifteen--on a memo to the CEO requesting that we middle managers be told why, since enrollment was up 11%, we were being asked to reduce our budgets by 3%. We asked to see the whole institutional budget to better understand what was going on. (We had a lot of responsibility and wanted more authority.)

I had to stop and think hard, but I don’t think we ever saw any results, really, but those of us who signed it, the fifteen of us, kept our jobs for a long time afterwards; I’m not sure this kind of event would happen these days (and certainly not without some kind of later deniable retaliation on the part of upper management).

And as a more experienced colleague told me very early in my management career, a lot of what people do on the job is what increases the chances that they will keep their job, not necessarily what is best for the institution or the students/customers (or what would now be called “brand”).

 That was then and there. These days: not my circus, not my monkeys.

9. People bloom in different ways at different times, and I am not sure how much of that blooming is predictable. Even in retirement—maybe especially in retirement.

I spent a career watching this happen in the classroom and out: the eighteen year old student who starts to bloom after she discovers—after four years of misery in high school—that she does indeed have interests and skills; the former factory worker (“I worked at the finger factory,” a place repeatedly cited for OSHA violations before the work was shipped overseas) who returns to retrain into nursing: “I never thought I could do this.” The person who has a transforming experience during an internship or a seven-day study tour to London or a community college class reluctantly taken during a stint as a prison-inmate.

We get interested in what we get good at. I was good at my jobs, but hey, to everything there is a season.

10.  Long ago a fellow student in grad school whose name I don’t remember beyond Laura Somebody from what I now know as Tom Petty’s hometown in Florida took a look at my palm and told me my quick fortune one afternoon in the student union. She began by looking distressed. Then she said, “There will be some problems early on, but then you will live a long and happy life.”

Why that bubbled up recently I don’t know, but I like it.

Age is relative. It has always been relative, especially when it seemed to matter less. I know people my age who are infirm and others who act like they are fifty (or far less). I am not going to bewail my age, or wish I were younger (well, not often, anyway). Age is what it is, and there is a good deal of truth that attitude and resourcefulness make a big chunk of difference.

Perhaps it is the case that age matters more during the younger and older years than it does during midlife, but then again, maybe not. Think of the difference between a ten year old and a fifteen year old. How old would I be if I could be any age? Maybe I would shave a few years off, but not many. Retirement is too good to go back to a younger age where I would have to go to work every day.

I’m not only retired; it’s a time of my life, not my total identity. That may be something many non-retired people do not see in our celebrity-driven, youth-worshipping loudmouth extrovert culture, but it is true. Still, even now the glow of retirement has not yet worn off, and recently I found myself driving past my former place of full-time employment singing “R-E-T-I-R-E-D” to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”. Again.

We make what we can of what we have. Never could I have predicted any of this, and although the Fates could reverse the turn of my wheel at any moment, these days I prefer to chug along, making my way through this time of year, this official season of giving thanks and of celebrating in both religious and secular terms two food holidays. Soon we will celebrate the birth of—as one person I know pronounces the name—“Baby Cheezits.” More than food nurtures us, and, as they say, any day above ground is a good day.

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 Thirteen: Going Solo, Living a la Carte

How many times over the years have people told me they enjoy solitude? That they enjoy the peace and quiet that comes from being alone? Lots. But as a friend observed over lunch the other day when the subject came up, "But you actually mean it."

Yes, I do.

Somebody finally got it.

I like peace and quiet even though these days, with the windows finally closed, there is usually music or NPR playing in the background. (At least some of the music is from David Teie's "Music for Cats" with many sounds I can't hear but assume are there. Do my cats have a transcendent experience as those CDs play? Hard to tell, but my guess is they prefer that music to Eric Clapton's screaming guitar.) I read. I write. I play with the cats when we are all awake. I do a little housekeeping. I take a break and surf the Interweb, or maybe I do my nails if I feel like it. I finally have enough food in the house that I don't have to go out to buy, say, milk at the last minute. The larders are full enough.

I begin the day by sipping Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk in it. As the Interweb meme says, "First I drinks the coffee, and then I do the things." That about sums it up. I don't cook much, but recently I bought a twenty-inch gas stove to replace the thirty-plus year old failing one. So far I have used two burners and the oven. Most days I am content with oatmeal and quiche, a piece of fish, or beans and brown bread. I am not much of a consumer. I do pay attention to nutrition, but sustenance does not require a complicated menu to taste good. I am pretty much content will entry-level creature comforts.

I wear jeans or sweats and ragg socks. Sometimes I wear my contact lenses and some days I don't.

The point is I can choose. And all this feels sustaining: my new a la carte life.

I have enjoyed pieces of this kind of time here and there over the years, but such time, given all the other demands, was waaaaay back on the back burner, a slender slice of the pie chart of my happily-long-so-far life. (As Paul McCartney sings, "I go back so far/ I'm in front of me.")

In retirement I am finally able to be who I am, and I have an academic-ish way to begin to explain that identity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Jungian psychology; according to this test, I am an INTJ: Introversion, Intuition, Thinking and Judgement. Mine is the rarest of the sixteen Myers-Briggs personality classifications with a mere 2% of the population and only .8% of women testing into it. INTJ is characterized as "The Architect" with the ability to inhabit the world of ideas, be comfortably at one remove, and content to work alone. (I never did see the point of team-building exercises. Never.) I like to let things percolate. Big picture and small picture both. Although we are quick-minded, we are not demonstrative; we are more hard-working than warm and fuzzy, and we tend to be fiercely independent and private. Other INTJ's per the Interweb (and I take this with a large lump of salt): Michele Obama, Hillary Clinton, Walter White (Heisenberg) on Breaking Bad. And Gandalf.

Well, maybe.

Still, I think there is some truth to this INTJ thing. How many times through grammar and high school was I told I needed to speak up in class? I like to think about things; being called on to say something NOW did not help me develop anything worth saying. Not surprisingly, once I go to college, I gravitated to writing classes that usually included weekly one-on-one conferences with the professor--my kind of learning at last. (And I still have the voices of those teachers--Don Murray and Tom Williams--in my head. THAT was teaching.) And from them I also learned the importance of the first rule of criticism: giving things--writing or whatever--a sympathetic reading.

Even if I did not have the words for it, I have known forever that I recharge in solitude. I need peace and quiet. I can do a stretch of bonhomie if you like, but  for me, it will be exhausting, not invigorating.

Extroverts, please take note. We don't all sit at the same table that you do. Your kosher is not my kosher. So to speak.

A recent piece in The Guardian, "Hey Parents-Leave Those Introverts Alone!" reviewed Susan Cain's latest book, Quiet Power: Growing Up in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Somewhere between a third and half of all people are introverts (of one stripe or another) Cain says, and in this book written with teenagers in mind, she identifies introversion as a "superpower". (However, if a superpower isn't recognized in a world of gabby extroverts, does it really exist?) But the most salient observation was in the comments, by one Lorraine Lewis, whoever she may be: "I am an introvert & there is a party going on in my head 24/4--& you're not invited."

Amen. At  the least there is always a lot of food for thought in my head.

And no, I am not Sybil. Or Rain Man. I am not on the autism spectrum. It's not that simple.

Let's not be dismissive here. Let's give me a sympathetic reading.

Granted, over the years my small house has become my refuge, one singularly party-free outside my head.

And I do go out and abroad to see the world. For example, I regularly--a couple times a week--have lunch with friends at Marr-Logg House, a restaurant. It's a routine that doesn't feel like a routine; usually we sit in the same booth. Marr-Logg isn't the restaurant version of Cheers, exactly, but it is a place where we are known. It's a breakfast-and-lunch place where we know the names of the servers, too, a place where they don't have to wear uniforms or name tags.. If one of us is missing, it gets noticed.

Marr-Logg has a blackboard with the daily specials, but usually I have pretty much the same thing: a toasted BLT or a crunchy Caesar salad with the dressing on the side. Sometimes a fish Reuben. Things I usually don't make at home. Choose one as a side: potato salad, macaroni salad, coleslaw, or applesauce. It's that kind of place.

The servers know I want iced tea, even in the winter--one server says to another "An iced tea and a Sierra Mist just came in" as she brings the drinks and the laminated menus to our booth. In an age of high-tech, order-your-food-on-a-tablet-at-your-table, the servers use order slips and pens. The handwritten order also serves as the bill.

Over food my friends and I get caught up: the show at the local community theater. The new job, the old job. Cats. Purchases on eBay. The ride to Maine or New Jersey and back. Hiking up and down Adirondack mountains. Family. Friends. The election  Our book club.

Lunch at Marr-Logg is testimony to the importance of routine, to our all being dots in the social matrix. The servers seem to enjoy what they are doing, and if they have ever been in a bad mood, it has never shown.

At this point my car can probably drive itself there. The drive is three songs away from home.

I go to Marr-Logg for the food. I go there for the company.

I suppose a shrink might chalk all this introversion with lunch and such events (I will spare you the others) up to a number of things: Maybe introversion is genetic. Maybe it's nurture, not nature: after all, I spent the first eighteen years of my life as an English speaker, nominally Protestant, in a community that seemed to be primarily French-speaking, and that definitely was proudly pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. I was a majority minority before phrase was coined, I suspect. Maybe I am an introvert because I wasn't an athlete or cheerleader, but that I think confuses cause and effect.

Different strokes. Different palates. So be it.

More than that, writing, for me, provides an important connection to the page, one of the best connections there is. As good as the best conversation. There is contact with the page that is unlike any other. This is something Tom Williams spoke with me about toward the end of my college career, and he was right. All those years ago. That I had not forgotten.

But in this retirement time-to-think mode, out of nowhere the other day I  remembered a Bible verse I was given in Sunday school by my teacher Miss Foss. It had to begin with S for Sandra:  "Salt is good, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how will you season it?" from the Revised Standard Version.

Such a statement of taste, of time and loss, and--to go all English major on you, dear reader-- a rhetorical question that invites ideas. Or so it seemed at first when I remembered it. But then I looked it up online. This Mark 9:50 verse is followed by an answer: "Have salt in yourself and be at peace with one another."

So.

The things I want to do order my life.

In the end, all we have are who we are and time and space--and the people we surround ourselves with. As I said, my a la carte life. Hot and cold, crispy and mushy. Sweet and sour, bitter and salty. Music and silence. Staying in, going out. Here and there. Home and away.

Nourishment comes in many forms.

Copyright 2016
Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Twelve: Discounted Senior, Heal Thyself

I have started perfecting my Queen Elizabeth II wave for when I stop in at my former place of full-time employment (and now my place of part-time employment) and I see former colleagues going into a meeting so they are unable to chat. My wave is a little hand cup that goes back and forth, not too enthusiastic and not unfriendly. I might say my wave is regal, but really it is not. It is just my labor-saving wave. The people I wave to are most likely on their way to fifty-minute meetings followed by a ten minute break before they go into another fifty-minute meeting.

May they knock themselves out. Me? I count my current blessings and give my little wave. I have declared victory and moved on.

Queen Elizabeth is ninety and no doubt lives a life far different from mine. She does not have to do her own laundry. She doesn't have to dust. If she ever cooks, it is probably just for fun (which is what I do as well, maybe once a year, now that I think about it. A gourmand I am not. Most days I am content with a can of tuna.) Her clothes--from hat to pumps--are color-coordinated for her. She still apparently is doing pretty well in that family business even though all that socializing and waving has to take at least some toll.

Still, it isn't bad to be queen. My guess is people show up without fail when she calls a meeting and make sure they do not look bored. And I doubt that she has ever rushed out the door to go to work on an icy January Monday morning thinking, "Bad hair day, but maybe that will be the worst to happen to me today if I'm lucky." It's okay to be ninety when your younger face is on the national currency--and on postage stamps!--and you're a queen.

Some of us who are not Queen Elizabeth perhaps have a difference experience with age--and age discrimination. I have always held that a generous view of differences, of the rich variety and complexity of human nature, was something to be valued. Even if on occasion they drive me up the wall, there are arguments for reveling in what used to be called "The Family of Man." The human family. Old, young; rich, poor; here and there. And so on. At least in the abstract.

Although I never think to ask for it, every third visit or so I don't mind the cashier at Dunkin Donuts giving me a senior discount. (I am fortunate because not getting the teensy discount is not going to break my budget.) The senior discount on my Amtrak ticket  to Boston was  a few dollars; there is no significant senior discount for major appliances, plane tickets or flannel shirts, AARP notwithstanding. (The tactful British refer to all this as "a consideration", a far less commercial and direct term than "senior discount".)

In the eyes of many I am old. To those people, age is not the continuum that Ashton Applewhite reconceptualizes age as being in her  book This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. For her, age is a continuum with younger on one end and older on the other. and the gradations of age are infinite rather than, say, the oversimplified binary of "old" and "young". More than that, I am also a woman, which to my mind makes my experience more complicated. Let me put it this way: I am old enough to get Social Security in a country that values youth.  And the standards of beauty for men and women still differ: older men--men my age and often even younger--whose builds are basically those of  very pregnant women are seen as...normal. Or normal-ish even if there might be private speculation (in some cases perhaps unfairly)  that they are basically walking heart attacks. Yes, there are a few svelte silver foxes, male and female,  and a few people with gorgeous white hair that in the workplace might suggest power, but most of us do not look like not-very-ageing Miss Americas (a show which, by the way, I have not watched since at least the mid-1970s). Even so, many of us have a style worth noticing, and that matters. (But personal style is a matter for another day.)

The Interweb does not help. Consider the various videos of people of a certain age--most commonly women--dancing. These videos are not designed to celebrate the fun the dancers are having; instead, they invite the viewer to laugh at, not with, the dancer. Even when song and dance man Dick Van Dyke does a minute-long soft shoe, the surprise is that he can do it at all. He is ninety! Look! He can dance! It's a miracle!

I grant you that age does take some toll. A few years ago I asked my gynecologist what happens next, and he said, without missing a beat as he snapped off his rubber gloves, "Everything shrivels".  That was enough of a summary for me, thank you very much. But if I have been around the block a few times, at least these days--touch wood--I can choose which blocks I want to go around and at what pace. There's a lot to be said for that.

The heart still beats, and touch wood yet again, age does not necessarily mean instant decrepitude and infirmity.

Somewhere in the 1970s when I was reading public library books such as I Want to Run Away From Home But I'm Afraid to Cross the Street,  I came across a theory that whenever a woman enters a room, she knows exactly where she ranks in comparison to the other women in the room. I am still not 100% convinced, but at least on some occasions it has seemed true: the Great Female Competition.  (And at the age when I read about that theory, I would never have even begun to factor in women my current age being in that room. So young I was.)

That said, at one point I worked at a place and in a time where there really was a group called "Faculty Dames"; the group was 90% wives although female faculty were strongly encouraged to help out as well with social events. (I didn't; I left after two years.) Later, for a long time at faculty parties, the men tended to congregate in one room, the women in another. At that point I was one of four female faculty members in a department of fourteen or so--and in a discipline that was historically female. This was only a few years after the first publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Quite a disconnect between what I read and what I saw around me in the provinces--in the real world, as they say.

Ashton Applewhite suggests that if you want to gauge diversity or access, you need not do more than look at the footwear under the table at a meeting. The more variety, the better. If you had looked under the table during a meeting in those (my) not-that-long-ago work days, you would have seen, most likely, wing tips and pumps (including mine). These days? My guess would be flipflops and kitten heels for women, and for men, sneakers or oxfords or loafers. Maybe a few wingtips on the feet of the members of the top  management. But very few of the comfy flats I wear these days, I bet.

One of the benefits of retirement is that my time is finally my own (mostly) and I can use it as I choose. I can finally respect the time I have and not sell it to an employer for a paycheck. These days, fifteen months in, retirement is feeling less and less like a new pair of shoes.

So on the days when I don't have reason to go to the post office or any place near it, I put the birthday card I need to mail in my mailbox and the mail carrier picks it up. Convenience matters; I can use my time to do things other than running errands if I want to. (Here's a thought: some days I may have it even better than the Queen does: very little responsibility. Who knows. This may be.)

I have learned over the years that it is sometimes possible to catch yourself unaware. There are small surprises if you are paying attention.

I like to think that in my best moments I am beyond ageism and sexism. But one rainy day recently, I did do errands, and, walking along, dropped some bills into the mailbox down the street. As I was turning away from the mailbox, a woman with white hair got out of an older car and put envelopes into the box as well. "I usually put my mail in the mailbox at home, sticking out, and the mailman picks them up, but it's too rainy today. They'd get all wet."

I responded with some chitchat about our needing the rain and liking the cooler temps and then walked on. I was kind. I was polite. I may have even smiled.

But then as I walked away, I thought: older than I. White hair. I walked (virtuously young) and she drove. I think I am younger than she, but then I do do what someone older than I does, the outgoing mail into the mailbox at home, most days--as if I were young and she were OLD. As if I had no good reason to put the birthday card into the mailbox to be picked up. And I am doing what she does only fifteen months into retirement. I must be older than I think I am. Welcome, Decrepitude. Already.

At least I caught myself having that thought.

And then I thought, maybe more than other people would have and maybe not, maybe to my credit and maybe not: Sandy, heal thyself.



Copyright Sandra Engel 2016

Retirement, Take Eleven: Cool Enough to Sing

I want to wear long sleeves again--not because of fashion really, but because it is time for the higher than usual temperatures to end. One day in late May I was turning on the heated seats in my car, and the next day I was blasting the air conditioning. Although last winter was comparatively mild, it was, well, still winter.

Given everything that is going on--the weather, politics, my car problems--I think there may just be some truth to the observation that maybe, just maybe, David Bowie was somehow making sure things worked at least a little better, and since he has left us, things have gone slightly askew. With him gone and with whatever unifying cosmic force he might have been now absent, here we are, sweltering away in what used to be a temperate zone.

Makes as much sense as any other explanation I have heard. (Global warming explains only the weather.)

I want the weather to cool off into fall temperatures because things seem more possible when the weather is cooler, if only because then I do not feel flattened by the heat. I want to feel like going for a walk and to the gym again. (The gym I had been going to has limited AC which apparently only kept the place cool in the very early morning.) I want the temperatures to cool off because I want to feel like dancing and singing.

This year has been the inaugural year of the Family Summer Concert Series. (My niece came up with the title and the idea that we do this once a year. Good idea!) I have been saying for several years that I am in the process of very slowly cleaning out. I don't need more stuff. More than that, especially now that I have time--retirement is the ultimate flextime--experiences seem much more important than possessions. And beyond that, there is something to be said for shared experiences.

On this score, (no pun intended), music works. Attending a concert does requires some planning and coordinating, some attention to logistics ("So who's going to drive?"), and once on the road, there is conversation, food and drink. There's singing along with the music, with usually not a lot of conversation except "Who's Bob Weir?" after Paul McCartney brought him on stage for "Hi, Hi, Hi". My niece asked me that, and ten minutes later I asked her who Rob Gronkowski was as he was brought on stage as well. (Answer: A Patriot. Later my brother explained, "He catches the ball and then basically runs over people." Gronk apparently had connections to someone on Sir Paul's staff; Weir had played at Fenway the night before.)

So this year with family members I have seen Tedeschi Trucks Band, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor and Jackson Browne, the last three at Fenway Park. Don Henley of The Eagles will be next and he will be followed by Buddy Guy. Then this season pretty much ends.

My house does not have air conditioning but it is insulated and does have new windows and doors that do a much better job keeping out cold drafts in the winter and hot air in the summer than it did in years past. But even so, this summer has been a sauna. I have three oscillating fans downstairs and one upstairs for a house that has a footprint of maybe twenty-five by twenty-five feet. But it has still been hot.

The heat has reduced my productivity, my get-up-and-go. My general energy level. I get up, shower, eat, and then want to sit in the shade or go back to bed. (When I lived in the tropics, I would have taken to the opium pipe had there been one, if only to escape the heat.) For a couple months my retirement work ethic--not manic, not driven, just busy enough--has been on hold. Steamed out. Poached.

But last week we had a cooler day--a day well under eighty degrees--and, among other activities, I got myself to the top end of a mop and of a vacuum cleaner. All of a sudden it was possible to breathe again. I felt as if I were not living in hot broth. I could think about moving and doing things.

For most of my life I have been fortunate enough to have a house of my own, one that now, even with my donations to Salvation Army, still has a lot of books and photos of places I have been. Hence there is dust even after I dust. I have never been much of  a homemaker.  The housekeeping I do tends to be done in spurts: no day-long marathon, but the bathroom one day, the kitchen another. That said, my philosophy is that it all needs to be clean enough. I do not live in a clinic. I do live with three cats who have been shedding machines in the heat.

With the cooler weather, the temperature was no excuse to stall. I swept up the few pieces of dry cat food outside the bowl on the kitchen floor and then vacuumed and got out the mop and bucket.

Music helped. I still have CDs, and I can blast the music on my iPhone through a Bluetooth speaker. The windows were open, and although I live on a corner and have more yard than floor, mine is a very quiet neighborhood. So I could play the music only so loudly.

I moved the chair, the cat bowls, the three-legged stools in the corner. The playlist--my setlist--started with Paul McCartney. "One, two, three, fah!" and "I Saw Her Standing There" was off. "How could I dance with a-nother?/ And I saw her standing there." And then the chang of the guitar that begins "A Hard Day's Night" followed by "It's been a hard day's night/And I've been working like a dog..." I sang along to the na-na-na-na's of "Hey Jude", and, truth be told, to the rest of the songs, too.

I was singing. Not as loudly as I might. But I was singing. Although I was someone whom the music teacher told not to sing loudly at all in elementary school music class (I was enthusiastic), I like to sing. (Using earbuds is not the same as singing along to music in the air. It just isn't.) The car trips to see my family the day before we go on the Family Concert Series featured Sandy's Car Karaoke for a good four to five hours over the hills of Vermont into New Hampshire. (I kept the windows closed, the AC cranked.) If there were a summer fantasy camp, even just a few days, for people who wanted to be backup singers, I might consider attending. I mean, who doesn't want to sing backup with Aretha Franklin?

Not only was I singing along, but I was mopping. Mopping and slopping. Later I would text a friend to ask if there were ever an I Love Lucy scene where she mops and sings; in some ways this just felt that way. I moved a couple more pieces of furniture, slopped more soapy water. And then more water. I realized I should have rolled up my crops a little. My flipflops were wet. Oh well.

A few more songs, including "Sweet Baby James," and I remembered how the crowd went nuts cheering when James Taylor sang the line "from Stockbridge to Boston" at Fenway. I mopped away and tried to see if any of the already-mopped parts were drying. Maybe a little.

By the time "Up on the Roof",  a nice slowish song, came on, I was hitting my musical stride. I sang along a little more loudly. "On the roof, that's the only place I know/Where you just have to wish to make it soooooo". I was once again enthusiastic.

"Up on the rooof/ Up on the roo-oof/ Up on the roo-oooof" for a big finish.

Come fall, I can close the windows and sing. Really sing.

Bring on the fall.

Copyright Sandra Engel

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