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 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

Retirement, Take Three

My name is Sandy, and I am a recovering employee.

I only realized this lately, and I had no idea, really, that this was coming. Until I started to think about retiring, I was for the most part reasonably content at work, at least on most days. Once retirement seemed possible and I considered the alternative of not retiring (more meetings, more of the same that was starting to lose its shine), I had little problem hitting GO. (Although I like to think I do not consider peer pressure as much as many do, the fact that a lot of people my age seemed to be living lives of leisure in retirement did have some impact, if only because they never looked tired.) Truth be told, there have been a few small annoying bumps to this transition, including sorting out the official date of my retirement. (You would think a retirement start date is a start date, but not so. Oh well.) Social Security does not automatically tell you to let them know how much you want taken out for taxes. But those bumps were balanced in the long run, really, by the fact that the retirement incentive that my employer offered did end up in the bank right on time. (I checked the very day it was scheduled to happen.)

I write this on Day 137 of Retirement. A new way of measuring time.

My retirement honeymoon, or at least the beginning of it, coincided with at least some of the time I would have had off in the summer had I not retired. This summer felt different, though, if only because I was still working out what stuff of my career to keep, what to give away, and what to trash. This was a summer of celebration, of grinning to myself before I even got out of bed because I did not have to get out of bed for a workday the way other people do. I didn't have to get up right then, much less get dressed for work.

I threw out even more work clothes than I expected to--and even more still need to be rehomed, so to speak. I have seen my family more this summer than I have in most summers, have seen friends, went for walks, talked to the cats and even watched some TV. For a change there was just about no rush. NO RUSH. I had also been wise enough to plan to travel overseas during the time when I would otherwise have been required to return to full-time work. (A blog or two on those travels will arrive....eventually.)  I put my online teaching into a box: I did the teaching, and I think I am doing it as well as I have ever been, but it is now clearly a part-time job that I do when I am wearing my bunny slippers. It is clearly not a way of life.

There's the rub.

I may be a new, or newish, me.

After a while I started thinking about what I want to accomplish every week: get the new windows installed, paint the trim, rearrange the furniture in the spare room. But that didn't work because in some cases I could get all those things done in one or two days at the end of the week. (But the rhythm of the week has changed, and by Fridays I am no longer exhausted.)

So then the plan was to try to get something practical and concrete accomplished every day: wash the cat beds, rearrange the living room furniture, pick up the dry cleaning, work on the blog, call my brother, have lunch with friends. That worked to some extent, but each day needed even a little more structure. I am far more capable of binge watching Last Tango in Halifax on Netflix or napping or surfing than I knew.

As much as it ate up time and mental energy, full-time work provided structure, even if it often came down to at-work/not-at-work.  I once looked at a long-term colleague  about a year ago after we first heard "work-life balance"  in a meeting and he said, "Balance? They didn't want balance. They wanted us to WORK."

I am way too happy and resourceful to dither away a lot of time.

I am hoping that I will not always be a recovering employee the way alcoholics and addicts are forever recovering. I have done no more searching moral inventory than I have ever done, and to go further down the twelve-steps would be to insult twelve-step programs. (A colleague of mine, himself a friend of Bill W.,  many years ago once characterized Alcoholics Anonymous as "the most truly Christian organization on the face of the earth." I can't say I have any personal experience with AA, but given what I do know of it and like organizations, it seems to me, that, hyperbole aside, there might be something to my colleague's observations.)

I can say that all those years of full-time work seem to be growing smaller, increasingly in the distance as I make my way forward. I have other things to occupy my mind, but I still do have to admit that I enjoy hearing the latest happenings when I run into somebody from work in the supermarket. Unfortunately, X's spouse has cancer, Y is retiring in January, and Z had a temper tantrum that resulted in whatever. These are all people I know. And I tell them my news. It is a chatty fifteen minutes.

I mean, I did spend 39 years of my life there, which if you calculate the time at ten months a year, at my age it was:

39 years x 10 months of employment per year=390 months
My age x 12 months in a year=780 months

Or roughly half the days of my entire left I worked in one location. Even if you factored out the sleeping time and weekends from both calculations, it would still be half my life.(IF you roll in time off at Thanksgiving, Christmas, semester and spring breaks, all into a nine-month year, the numbers will still be impressive. And yes I KNOW how fortunate I was not to have a fifty-week a year/two weeks of vacation job. Believe me, I know.)

It may take a while to fully detach--if I ever totally do--but it seems to me that I have made pretty good progress, all things considered.

Those of us with a reflective cast of mind like to think about things, and I really DO like to think about things now that I finally have enough time--what other people think (perhaps) of unlimited time since I am  retired and therefore obsolete, or so it seems to some, I think, though nobody says anything out loud because that would not be cool, and hey, overt discrimination is not professionally becoming. Think about this: NOBODY of any age has unlimited time. Ahem. Really, it's not live free or die but rather live free and then one way or another you will die. We all will. Get used to it.

So. Here is the mid-thinking-about-things plan as of now:

1. I need more structure and more exercise than walking and watching the DVD of  (okay, I do some of the poses) Yoga for The Rest of Us. Next stop: gym membership.

2. In the mornings I am likely to be doing something pleasantly solitary. Please don't call. Or if you call, lease leave a message.

3. Please do call, and when you do, please know that we can certainly plan.

4. To whatever extent that I have a choice, I would prefer not to dress up. I dressed up (some times more than others, granted) for a long time. Please cut me some slack here. I like jeans and sweaters for a change. Flannel. Ragg socks. Remember: I am recovering.

5. At some point or other, I need to make newer connections, people not directly connected to my former place of full-time employment. And I think it is also important for me to keep track of the number of days I have been retired, if only because I can, since it marks a new way of seeing my time and because, hey, on this calendar (of a sort), I don't have to ask for time off or rearrange my dental appointment (scheduled six months ago) for, say, a meeting that just cropped up.

I am in many ways (but not all) comparatively employer-free.

Similarly, I am for the most part supervisor-free.

Think about that.

Forward.



Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Two

Retirement, Take Two

I am trying to be brief here for a change.

For a change, I finally have big chunks of time to myself. Yes, I am still in the "I don't want to/I don't have to/You can't make me/I'm retired" stage. Maybe I will grow out of it somehow, but right now doing so is not a priority. Some not totally random observations now that I have time to actually think a thought:

Over the years, I had forgotten how much I like poached eggs and how much my cats like catnip.

Since I am eating far better (that is, less processed food unless you count yogurt, white bread English muffins, and Vietnamese Trung Nguyen coffee--"Inspired Creativity"), I may need to buy a small freezer when the snow flies. My refrigerator, like the rest of my house, is small. Cauliflower and fish take up more room than Lean Cuisine used to. But where to put the freezer?

Facebook and other social media can be an even more powerful time suck than when I was employed full-time. I like keeping in touch with friends and getting glimpses into the lives of people (by far mostly women) I grew up with and haven't seen since I went to college. Also, say what you want, but there is wit of a sort on the interweb: for example, the person joking that since the VW diesel problems were discovered by someone in WV (West Virginia), there must be a conspiracy. Someone else is waiting to see if his sister is having a girl or a boy so he will know if he is going to be an aunt or an uncle. Neil Armstrong was an alien because Neil A backward is...You get the idea.

Even though I am trying to live comparatively time-free, since it is fall, months into my retirement, it is time to get into a routine. Please don't call before noon unless it is an emergency. Let's plan ahead.

Looking back, I would like to thank the people who listened to me ad infinitum, ad nauseam about the timing of my retirement. I am sure the conversations were even more tiresome than I now suspect they were. Thank you.

I never learned to type as I was told I needed to way back when--and without it I managed through my career and through more education than most people want. I did the typing all with two fingers that did build up speed over the years. If I had learned to type, I am not sure where I would have ended up, since there was a time when typing was one of the job requirements for most positions held by women (say, secretarial positions). Yay me. Yay universe.

I was warned that after I retired, most people I worked with would forget who I was. Well, so far I have gone into work all of four times, mostly to pick up my daily el cheapo New York Times that the Library saves for us who do not go in every day.  When I duck in, at least some people holler out to me and do not appear to have relegated me to the pile of old, obsolete and faintly remembered emeriti--an academic long-dead Jurassic Park, let's say. This reaction lasts as long as it lasts. I was glad to see them, too. So good, so far.

The other day I lost a contact lens. I had been getting ready to go for a walk, so I had been closing windows and such when all of a sudden my Superwoman vision was curiously blurry.

The lens could have been anywhere downstairs. I went on my hands and knees almost everywhere looking for it but decided to wait to call to order a replacement lens. (These are rigid gas permeable lenses, not water-soaked saran wrap.) I do have a second pair, but I was not happy. But, wonder of wonders, when I looked again a couple hours later, TA-DAA! There it was on the floor by the door. Sometimes things do show up.

You never know. Then again, sometimes I do.

 Copyright Sandra Engel