Retirement, Take Fourteen: Halloween, Shadows, Trees

Head's up: I am not going to celebrate (or whatever verb you choose) Halloween. I decorate minimally for every holiday anyway, and Halloween is no different: mine is the only house in the neighborhood without seasonal vegetables, ghosts, witches and plastic inflated creatures in the front yard. As usual the last few years, I am going to ignore Halloween.

Let me explain. I don't mean to be a grinch. I don't mean this to be an autumnal "Get off my lawn!" I don't want to be a spoilsport. I really don't. Fall is my favorite season; I like the cooler temperatures and the crunching leaves. Several times over the past few months, I have driven to New Hampshire, the place a friend calls "The Land of Robert Frost", and I have seen the foliage season emerge. I've seen more reds than I expected given the drought, and lots of golds and browns. Just gorgeous. Trees trees trees. And of course some are evergreens. (And as the Sandy Karaoke car went past the golds on Hogback Mountain in Vermont, it occurred to me that my three cats are autumn colored, too: orange tiger, calico, and a Halloween black cat with one eye. None of them, my familiars, has supernatural powers, but black Swishy does seem invisible  when she scoots under the kitchen table after dark. That is a place of shadows, and she is a reminder that Lewis Carroll got the now-you-see-her-now-you-don't nature of the Cheshire Cat right--even if both you and the cat are without the assistance of pharmaceuticals.)

I'm not anti-autumn at all, and I will get to that. I just want to avoid Halloween again this year because it seems too contrived. Commercial.

I choose not to participate in Halloween because life is scary enough. What do I mean? I always close and lock the windows and doors when I am home (at least when the weather is cool enough). Ditto my car even when it is in my driveway. I also always use the parking brake.

Going to a Halloween party or greeting trick and treaters does not mitigate the possible horrors of everyday life.

As the saying goes, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Someone could go postal in the dairy section of the supermarket just as you are putting your yogurt in the grocery cart. Retire one month and then three months later your significant other dies unexpectedly. Cancer can grow slowly, so when you try to get out of a booth at a beach shack where you have just finished your first-of-the-summer lobster roll, you might discover that your legs won't work.

Just this afternoon as I was running errands, I saw an errant larger-than-life balloon jack-o'lantern bouncing down the street in the twenty mile an hour gusts. It just careened along, on the invisible air, plastic and unmoored.

Such an impersonal universe.

Black cat and symbol of Halloween Swishy was brought to the humane society as a stray. She had to have one eye removed, but no one I met when I adopted her knew why. Was the problem with her eye congenital, just a born-with-it wonky eye? Was it damaged in a fight with another animal? Was she harmed by children or adults before she managed to escape? Or did she try to make it down from a high branch and was poked in the eye because of her own misstep?

I don't think of my response to Halloween as paranoia. I don't think I am being over-sensitive or humorless or in possession of an overactive imagination. (Well, okay, maybe a little on that last.) But which way should I bet?

I don't need to make the day fun. I am not going to dress up as a pirate or a cat or Hermione. (Why should I if there is a party going on in my head 24/7 and you are not invited? Please see a previous blog posting.) If someone else--young or old--wants to dress up as Big Papi or a zebra or a mermaid, go for it.

But how many people do I know--correction, DID I know--who are no longer among us in this beautiful world we inhabit? Too many for me to find entertainment in faux graveyards and dancing skeletons. For me the wolf--even if it is a tiny wolf--is at the door 24/7/365. Dressing up as somebody else, real or fictional, will not keep the wolf from the door. I just can't get into the spirit of the Halloween season.

And I have a distant second reason for not participating in Halloween: I don't want to be part of the commercial  corporate holiday it has become with candy in stores right after Labor Day and every house regaled with emblems of the spirit of the season. (Not to mention the neighborhood O-O-O-O-O sound effects and the Halloween mood lighting.) Granted, I do think really small children dressed as ghosts and goblins and Elsa  and any other manner of other Disney/Pixar characters are cute. And this is the one time a year when children can accept candy from strangers. But I would prefer not to subsidize somebody else's kid's sugar habit. If this seems grinchy, so be it.

There was a time when I did do Halloween. At various points I was a beatnik, a witch, and a clown (long before the current clown terrorism and, well, prom queen zombie costumes). I went trick or treating for UNICEF. After that I do remember a party or two and bobbing for apples and feeling grape eyeballs in the dark. But no costumes.

I liked the holiday enough when I was younger. I don't mean to kill anybody's joy. But if you stop and think about the injustices, the horrors and accidents, the vicissitudes and agonies in the world near and far, the scariness of Halloween is potentially every day--not just at the beginning of the darkest time of the year.

I mean, given the ways of the world, who needs somebody jumping out and saying, "BOO!"?

And yes, I did use to give out candy to the few small kids who came by, usually just at dusk. As often as not, their parents, my neighbors, stood halfway down the driveway. As the night wore on, cars of high school kids emptied out in the neighborhood, and the later the evening got, the taller and rowdier the costumed celebrants got. And once when I did stay up and provided Hershey bars to to the 9 o'clock (and later) trick or treaters, I discovered the next morning that my stockade fence had been spray painted.

I guess they didn't like the Hershey bars.

But these days the school bus does not rumble by in the morning, which means there are no nearby little ghosties and aspiring goblins.

Ignoring Halloween is also just a piece of who I am. Setting aside Godzilla, Frankenstein and King Kong (all of which I watched through my fingers on black and white television decades ago), I have seen only one horror movie, The Shining (and I kept my eyes down in the theater through most of it). No Pinhead, no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no Halloween Part Whatever. I did try to finish Stephen King's Mr. Mercedes, but the end got just too nervous-making, so I gave the book away. (I did enjoy King's 11/22/63, though.)

And now to autumn: so this weekend before Halloween I will finally move the furniture from the deck into the garage for the winter and will dump this year's few annuals (they are still partially green as I write this) on the curb. This is as close to a harvest as I will get. And so I will recognize the turning point of one season to the next; my hands will be stiff in the cold, and the smell of the neighbor's wood stove will be in the air. I will want a warm meal afterwards, and, as night falls, a glass of wine. Maybe I will wonder (as I usually do), if it is too late in the season to plant bulbs, just crocuses, but most likely I will let that idea go away as I always do. I like the cold if not the dark that comes early, but the indoors is cozy.

I haven't seen any Canadian geese going south yet, honking in the overcast, but I will. Thanksgiving is less than a month away, one of my favorite holidays even if my decorating will again be minimal at best. At some point before Thanksgiving, the lawn guy will come vacuum up the leaves and they will end upon the curb, too. Thanksgiving means another ride over Hogback Mountain. Good.

On Halloween, as I have in the past, after an early dinner I will turn off the outside lights, close the curtains and make sure only one light upstairs is on. I won't be unhappy if it rains. Because it is a holiday that can be dangerous to cats, I will make sure mine are all inside even though they are always inside.

I will go upstairs and watch Netflix or read. The cats will eventually follow me upstairs. We will stay warm.

Robert Frost, he of New England, wrote "Nothing gold can stay", and he's right as far as he goes. Around Halloween things do die. But Frost does not take into consideration memory (not to mention evergreens) and the turn--and return--of the seasons. We hope that we have--that we will live to have--another autumn, one not unlike the ones we have known before, ones where we learned that the shadows start to come earlier and earlier.

In that cycle is comfort.

Not long from now the leaves will all have turned and fallen. The ground will be too hard to plant bulbs even though the evergreen hedge will not need trimming until May.

Yes, nothing gold can stay. But even with no leaves, the trees still stand tall.

Copyright Sandra Engel
October 2016

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 Ten: Eating Off Rocks, Riding on Tires

In the "Bring out your dead" plague scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, someone tosses a limp Eric Idle character onto a cart carrying the dead. Eric Idle's character protests, "I'm not dead yet," and some days I think I should wear a T-shirt that says just that.

I am not dead yet. I am also no longer thirty. I have to admit I am not sure how much the T-shirt would matter, though. (And whenever I bring up the subject of my eventual demise, I always touch wood multiple times just to be safe. Let's not tempt fate.) I do, however, think there is a lot of truth to the observation that ageism is still an acceptable form of discrimination, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Title IX notwithstanding. Certainly corporate management in many locations has been known to "manage out" the more experienced and qualified employees. (I was lucky; I was offered a retirement incentive.) Let me give you a more personal and quirky example of ageism: in a meeting a few years ago, a relative newbie manager at work (not my direct supervisor) said to another colleague of the same vintage as I and me, "When did that happen? Back when you were eating off rocks?"

It was funny at the time. Sort of.

And of course, when we mentioned his comment to him later, he claimed he had no memory of saying that--an ironic and convenient lapse of memory in someone probably easily half our chronological ages. Neither of us alleged eaters-off-rocks can remember what we had actually said, but I can tell you that for at least the last twenty years I have been careful NOT to say, "In 1986 we tried that...". I am aware of how tiresome the past can seem to some relative newbies.

These days we live in an age of ageism (and sexism, but I will leave that subject for a later time) in a culture that still privileges those whose age is well under the old-timey 55 m.p.h. speed limit. Such is the American beauty pageant. I do know I have more time behind me than I do in front of me unless science changes things soon. I also know that life has been good to me so far (as Joe Walsh and The Eagles sang; if you have been paying attention, you know I am partial to old rockers). And I am grateful. Every day I am grateful. I also recognize the truth of my late colleague Ron Medici's observation as he prepared to retire: wherever he went, he kept finding himself the oldest person in the room. But on the bright side, lately I have come to realize that I usually don't think about how old I am until someone reminds me, directly or indirectly, of my age. This is good. Until.

Granted, I do tend to pay more attention to obituaries than I used to, but mostly I check the years of the deceased's birth. 1932? Okay. Lived a long life. 1987? 1990? What did they die of?

At this point I could give you my version of my Boomer versus Millennial rant. I really could. But I won't. I will say a few things, though: for some of us, life is not about selfies and emoticons. Rather, life is very much a matter of focal length. And chance.

My issues with the relative newbies are two. some tend to ignore the time- and idea-travel  that an active mind tends to do simply as a matter of habit--and this is a rich and wonderful habit to possess, I think. The things--the ideas, the conversations--of this world are not always linear and are often better for not being linear and simple. More than that, Mr. Back-When-You-Were-Eating-Off-Rocks, there are lots of different frames of reference in the world. Nobody is the center of the universe. Nobody.

Corporate slogans aside, we also may not inhabit the best of all possible world now that you have arrived. I mean, do we really think there are new ideas in the world? Or maybe we just never heard of these allegedly "new" ideas before? Maybe that's the case at least sometimes.

I confess that at odd moments at work I wanted to say, "Listen, you should consider yourself lucky if you live to be my age." But I never did and I won't. And I don't think for a minute that things were necessarily better in the past.

In the meantime, we all have the same twenty-four hours a day. Physics suggests that body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

I keep busy...even without a title, even without an office. Even without a full-time job.

Imagine that.

I don't want reverence for my past in the workplace beauty contest. And I don't want to go back to the past. I just want--wanted--courtesy. Respect.

And now to my second issue with the newbies: how vulnerable to chance we all are. The nature of the universe argues for humility, not newbie hubris. Traveling in time with ideas, having a reflective cast of mind--these can engender humility. Granted, actuarily speaking, it is likely that I will be going into The Great Beyond before Mr. Back-When-You-Were-Eating-Off-Rocks does. Age brings physical changes. Fair enough.

But separate from those, I can conjure up all kinds of things that can go wrong, not just for me but for anybody. Nobody is exempt from such possibilities, from chance and accident, from the cosmic zigs and zags that may be more impending than we know. (For fictional examples, read the novels of Charles Dickens and John Irving.) Slipping in the bathtub. Being hit by a bus. A mole that morphs into skin cancer either because I did not use enough sunscreen or because of, well, karma. Choking on a peanut or a bit of beef while I am home alone watching Netflix.  An ankle broken by accidentally stepping into a hole at a bus stop (which I did recently witness). A home invasion. A blown tire that sends my car careening off Hogback Mountain at a least 45 miles per hour.

I mean, the wolf may well be at the door even if we don't know it. Think about it.

But then there are also happy accidents. Call them luck, call them karma.  The truck driver who helped me change a flat tire outside Hamburg, New York, when I was driving ti Iowa. "I would want someone to do it for my daughter." The helpful desk clerk at the small hotel near the Hauptbahnhof in Munich who, it turned out, had not only visited the small city I had recently moved to but who also knew more about it than I did. The expat teacher in Ho Chi Minh City who--surprise!--attended the same high school as I did, albeit some fifteen years later. The bathtub fall I did not take, the cashew I safely munched. The cat I did not trip over in the dark. The psychosis that I did not develop as a result of taking Lariam, a powerful anti-malaria pill. The intestinal parasites I did not have after extended stays in a developing country in the tropics.

And my car did not careen off Hogback Mountain but instead had a flat tire a day and a half later as it was sitting in the driveway. (It turned out both front tires needed replacing.)

I once applied for a teaching job in a location and school that I had never heard of before because I wanted to move eastward. The July job interview with only a department head (no committee, no dean, no VP, no HR) went well enough, I thought. The school was looking for someone with new ideas for teaching writing. I had those credentials. The job was pretty much doing what I had aspired to do and went at least sort of in the direction of what these days is called a "dream job".

Toward the end of the interview, the department head took out my letters of recommendation (hard copies at the time) and asked me how Tom Williams was doing.

In my letters of recommendation was a letter from Thomas Williams, one of my writing professors at the University of New Hampshire. Tom's novel The Hair of Harold Roux had won the National Book Award a few years earlier.

It turned out that the department head had been in the army in Korea with Tom Williams--in military intelligence, I think--and had pleasant memories of talking with him about books all those years ago--at that time probably a good fifteen to twenty years previously, actually.

I was offered the job all but officially before I got on the plane to go home.

I don't want to go back to the old days. I really don't. But I do recognize life's vagaries and how I have benefited from them (and in some cases have survived them, but that is a subject for another day). Karma, luck--call it whatever--is an argument for humility and for not dividing the world into the eating-off-rocks people, the people seen as still-breathing fossils, the local anachronisms and, on the other hand, the more highly evolved relative newbies who think they are in the process of inheriting the earth. For some of us the world is richer and more arbitrary than the selfie-rich newbie perspective suggests.

Why should my age be an issue? I'm not dead yet.

And I have always eaten off a plate. Just FYI. :-)

Copyright Sandra Engel
August 2016

Retirement, Take Nine: Material Girl

Material Girl

When I cleaned out my office a little more than a year ago, I put stuff into three piles: the garbage/recycling pile; boxes of books I wanted to save, and finally a couple boxes labeled "sentimental/save for now" which I came to think of as The Decide Later Boxes. I am pleased to report that I have thrown out at least three-quarters of  the contents of The Decide Later Boxes, the stuff--the material--I didn't want to force myself to decide about a little more than a year ago. Very old grade books? Shredded and out. The odd memo or very used textbook that was state of the art at the time and that seemed thirteen months ago  to mark some sentimental milestone?  A no brainer: out. 

What did I end up keeping? Duplicate copies of articles I had published. Small gifts people had given me over the years. A few business cards with my former titles (and identities) on them, plus business cards from overseas colleagues. A dozen notepads with "From the Desk of Sandra Engel" at the top, pads originally designed by a colleague when computers were very, very new.

Also a little at a time I have been going through drawers and closets and easily bagging clothes for the Salvation Army. Did I save the jackets I bought in Hanoi and wore to work even though now the material is very frayed and the jackets almost unwearable? Of course. Did I sort through at least some of my junk jewelry? Yes, but I probably did not throw out enough. I washed and gave two of my father's army blankets to my nephews. I probably still have too many scarves, but oh well.

I think there is something to feng shui, even if I was rearranging things mostly in drawers and closets.

And no, I did not thank each piece for its service or anything like that, as a best seller suggests. I did marvel at how much money I probably spent on clothes even though it was spent over decades. I am not a minimalist. I do know that I could not have accomplished all this a year ago, this latest round of sorting. Maybe James Taylor (and I think Rosemary Clooney before him) was right: "The secret of life/Is enjoying the passage of time." Maybe things happen as they should. Or when they should. Maybe.

Somebody suggested that I take the clothes--in installments if I needed to--to a consignment shop, but that seemed like too much effort. Nor did I want to end up having several yard sales that I doubted would be worth the effort. And for those of you who wonder how my politics align with those of the Salvation Army: well, they don't. But my great aunt found meaning working with the Salvation Army, and the mother of one of my dance teachers was helped so much by the Salvation Army during the Depression that she named her daughter Sally. Yes, I prefer Lowe's to Home Depot and Target to Walmart because of their corporate politics. I have never set foot in Hobby Lobby. (To be fair, I have never had any need to.) But I choose to grant the Salvation Army a little more slack than I do other entities with politics I am pretty sure I disagree with. 

So I focused on getting stuff to the car and to the curb.

And I do feel lighter.

And it occurred to me as I was bagging things up that I do live in my head more than I used to since I finally CAN. There are days when I live in a Happy Sandy Bubble. All day. In this Happy Sandy Bubble, I can do whatever I want.

Maybe David Bowie was right when he said that "growing older is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been". So maybe I am back (back?) to who I should have been had I not had to work to support myself. In order to keep even my modest roof over my head, I had to compromise and socialize. At least for a good chunk of time, I enjoyed it all. I really did.

Recently a wise friend of mine gave me a mug that says, "I AM ONLY TALKING TO MY CAT TODAY", and yes, that does describe some days even when I am not sorting and packing things up. I read. I write. (And I am not writing memos and reports that may or may not get read, I might add, even though they were requested.)  I listen to podcasts. I make the occasional list. I putter around the house. I listen to music. I enjoy my own company without many interruptions. Mostly. My time is my own. I like my own company. I like peace and quiet.

Yes, I talk to my cats.

And nothing feels rushed. NO RUSH. This is a very big change. And I am not doing things I might not otherwise choose to do since I am not being paid.

Space. Space in my head is good.

Maybe there is some room to grow now. And if I can finally locate myself firmly on the introvert side of things, so be it.

And as I was busy with this episode of cleaning out, I also had routine blood work done.

I have learned again that the mind and the body are connected. One largely unrecognized issue is not the effect of the workplace on stress (we know they are connected, workplace-->stress) but on corporate management's moral responsibility to minimize stress if  at all possible--not to simply offer wellness programs and then call everything good. Yes, indeedy, I have felt better, all told, in the past thirteen months than I did in much of the last thirteen years. People tell me I look better.

I will spare you the other medical (and irrelevant) details, but I will tell you that my cholesterol has dropped fifty (yes, 5-0) points since I retired--the major change in how I live being retirement. Yes, I do eat better although I do not deprive myself of  hot dogs or ice cream cones, and I do do a better job of taking prescriptions on schedule. But I am in no way getting any more exercise than I used to when I was working, especially during this unusually hot and steamy summer.

This lower number is no small change especially when you know that I have outlived my parents by at least ten years.

I don't want to think much about the likelihood that working for forty-plus years shortened my life. (And I  was lucky and had good white-collar jobs.) We'll never know. But.

Anyway, moving on.

I don't need more stuff. I still have more than I need and that is okay. Eventually I will hoe some more out, probably when the weather gets cooler. All my little aches and pains have pretty much vanished in the last thirteen months (just as they used to whenever I went to Vietnam). I am grateful that I am still here. 

I am still here, flesh and bone, lipids and cholesterol, most body parts functioning (as far as I know anyway), and so a little more than a year into retirement--touch wood, always--grateful every day, I find myself content to be a new kind of material girl.

Copyright Sandra Engel

The Sisters in Liverpool

I was a George girl.

At the height of the British Invasion in the 1960s, movie magazines asked their teenage girl  readers who their favorite Beatle was: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr. John was supposedly the smart one, Paul the cute one, George the quiet one, and Ringo was, well, Ringo (also the short one and the last to join the Beatles, right as they were making their first record; the others had been mates since they were teenagers). Some days I thought maybe I was a John girl since he was the cheekiest and was the leader, and other days I was smitten by Paul's doe eyes in the black and white teen magazine photos. (I liked to think that when he said "I Saw Her Standing There" that he was singing about me.)

But I always kept coming back to George. He was quiet compared to the others (as the youngest, he was the equivalent of the kid brother), but he also did play lead guitar and sang. Usually their albums featured a song or two he sang.

I think I knew even then that the quiet people are often the most interesting, but let's set that aside for the time being.

And if I knew it then, I certainly could not have articulated when I was 14 that women compete with each other. In the mid-1970s, once I was well out of my Beatles phase and on my own a thousand miles from where I had grown up, I read somewhere that when a woman walks into a room, every other woman in the room immediately knows where she stands in relation to that new woman. (So much for sisterhood.) At the time, in my twenties, I thought the notion had some value, and I still do, although now I think there is a wide variety of ways in which women gauge status: in terms of conventional beauty (which I think is what I understood when I first came across the idea); in terms of professional or financial status; in terms of age or originality or of style in general. And probably in a variety of other ways. (And the comparisons and judgments about women are not done by women alone. Take a look at Amy Schumer's sarcastic video "The Last Fuckable Day" on YouTube.)

When I was a teenager, I would have been ecstatic to see the Beatles in person, and my adolescent fantasy of meeting George Harrison and eventually marrying him was not really a bad idea. Mind you, looking back I had absolutely no idea, practically speaking, of how to accomplish this. Nor did I have the confidence necessary for doing so. My fantasy was singularly devoid of details: how would I get a ticket to see the Beatles? How would I meet him? What would life with George Harrison be like? What would it be like to live with a rock star? I had no idea.

But marrying George Harrison was a nice idea at the time.

As it turned out, George married somebody else. He was the only Beatle to marry a non-pregnant girlfriend: Pattie Boyd. (And in fact Pattie was unable to have children. George was not the last Beatles to marry, though. Paul was.) George chose to marry a model and extra who had one word, "Pirates?" in A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first movie. She proved to eventually be the inspiration for the Harrison song "Something", and later, after she divorced George and married Eric Clapton, she served as the same for "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight". She was blonde, Twiggy-thin, had a gap between her two front teeth and had big blue eyes. Since divorcing Clapton, she has been a photographer but has been in many ways invisible except for her book Wonderful Tonight:
 George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me written with Penny Junot as a co-author. In her book, she admits that she lived on diet pills and snacks when she was a model. The uppers and downers, the liquor, the cocaine, the LSD. Boarding school bred, she had been so enclosed for much of her adult life that after her divorce from Clapton, she learned she "didn't know how to buy a tax disc for my car or a television license. I didn't know about water bills or rates, and I had never paid an electricity or telephone bill" (261). In the book she does recognize that hers has been "the most extraordinary life" (ix), one moneyed enough that she had the resources and interest to once fly to Hollywood from the U.K. for an auction of art nouveau chandeliers.

At the time she was living her rock and roll life, I was learning to conjugate Latin verbs, learning that y=mx+b, and later going to a university to figure out how I was going to support myself, including insuring a car, buying a television and much later arranging for health insurance and making sure I had heat and electricity. I knew how to pay rent every month. Along the way, I had an SLR camera or two and learned what I needed to learn about photography. I can't say I have ever wanted to be a model (or a model anything), but I have over the years learned to speak in public, to schmooze just enough. I know I can be funny.

Most women learn along the way one way or another that we cannot rely mostly on our looks.

Life skills travel,  and so when I arrived in Liverpool (Liverpool England, THE Liverpool) at the beginning of International Beatle Week in late August, I went to the local Marks and Spencer. I did this because I realized upon my arrival that I had for some reason neglected to bring much more underwear than what  I had on. Not all lingerie dries overnight in a hotel room, and though I like to shop when I travel, this purchase seemed more pedestrian than usual. But I needed to do it.

Marks and Spencer (M&S) is an old British standby. I had heard that the Liverpool store was the biggest M&S outside London, and I knew hat M&S was also where the late former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had bought her underwear. I checked online to see how the U.S. and U.K. sizes compared (bra sizes the same, knicker sizes different) and then I took the sisters shopping.

I bought basically invisible-to-most souvenirs. The lingerie department was huge, as were the choices. Strapless and multiway bras. Sports bras. Mastectomy, maternity, nursing. Balcony, plunge, longline, spacer. Minimizer. Padded. Underwire. Padded underwire. Colors. Florals. Abstracts. M&S versions of Victoria's Secret and, on the other had, lingerie that was more, um, utilitarian. Beige. (Perhaps for Margaret Thatcher a form of beige under-armor.) So too with the undies: boy shorts, thongs, high-cuts, regular (that is, Bridget Jones granny panties), lace polyester, cotton. Colors and patterns. Wisps of lace: the less fabric, the more expensive.

I will spare you the details, but I bought one set, purple and red as a cheerful and useful souvenir, and then, facing the reality that I needed a less-visible color to wear under light colors, I bought a pair in beige.

I tried not to think of this as Old Lady Beige or Industrial Beige. The clothes were comfortable and offered support. (I am a woman of a certain age. At one point not long ago, when I asked my gynecologist what happens next, he said, "Everything shrivels.") I like to think of my clothes as affirming who I am, a reflection of my personality, even if beige is not my favorite and probably never will be.

I have never been a trendsetter or a fashion plate. But we are all what we wear, after all, and I usually choose other than beige. Oh well.

I doubted very much that Pattie Boyd would have shopped in M&S. My guess is that the more upscale John  Lewis department store or a boutique featuring French lingerie (Givency?) would be more her style. And price range.

But by taking care of myself as I had learned to since the days when I aspired to be Mrs. George Harrison, I had developed some self-reliance, and, as problems when traveling go, this one was not very bad at all.

And the next day I went to International Beatle Week and saw Pattie Boyd twice that weekend.

The first was at a largely under-promoted book signing at the cafe in The Beatles Story, basically a museum for the Beatles on Albert Dock along the Mersey, a wise re-use of a red brick building initiated in part by Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, another British Invasion group. (One of their hits was "Ferry Cross the Mersey".) The line formed a half hour before Pattie, now seventy-one, and her small entourage arrived through the back door: the person I took to be her personal assistant;  and a man who may or may not have been her third husband, Rod Weston, a property developer whom she had known since the 1980s and who was almost ten years younger than she, and whom she had married a few months previously. (Even a number of years after her divorce from Eric Clapton and the death of George Harrison, those two had to be difficult acts for him to follow.) The crowd, a mixture of male and female, young and old, was fairly subdued, and the  Canadian university student in front of me was working on a social history and the Beatles thesis.  The women behind me were local and commented how much Beatle Week had grown since its beginning twenty-five years ago. "Pattie Boyd," one said. "I never imagined they would get anybody of her reputation here."

And then it was my turn.

Pattie didn't initiate a conversation, but then she didn't have to. She's Pattie, a celebrity, an image, and a photographer herself.

I asked her to sign it to "Sandy with a Y" and she was attentive and smiled, not objecting when I asked for a photo. I told her I found her book a good read.

The gap I remembered between her front teeth was gone. She did have excellent posture, just as she said in her book. She was wearing a black cardigan and slacks and the whitest white blouse I have probably ever seen. Near-cleavage. In one word: gracious. In that I-am-next-to-Pattie-Boyd moment, I sensed that there was somebody home in there. Moneyed? Of course, but also doing her job in her own style.

The next day at the convention I saw her again, this time for an hour and twenty-five feet away, when she was interviewed to a full house in the  Adelphi Hotel ballroom by writer Mark Lewisohn. Her interview, as the rest of the convention speakers were, was projected onto two screens. (The Adelphi is a monument to the past, a place of chandeliers, winding staircases, oriental rugs, high ceilings, and dust.) Pattie's interview followed that of photographer Bob Gruen (who did the John Lennon photo in front of the Statue of Liberty) and was before May Pang (the woman with whom John spent his "lost weekend"--eighteen months, actually--exiled from Yoko Ono). If May Pang seemed to have New York hustle and came across as an entrepreneur (and she said she had never tried drugs), Pattie seemed understated. Refined, even.

I don't know what the British equivalent of softball questions would be, but Lewisohn began gently. Eventually  Pattie did say that she had found George Harrison "quite exotic" because he had come from the north of England. She told the story of meeting him on the movie set, a story that probably everyone in the room already knew, and about going to India to meet Ravi Shankar. She said she had loved to work before George asked her to stop, and that "Magic Alex" who had proposed a number of outlandish and doomed-to-fail projects to the Beatles "was a bit of a con merchant." George was closest to Ringo of all the Beatles. Jane Asher was the one of the Beatle women she felt closest to. Although Beatles' manager Brian Epstein got a lot of criticism after the fact, "he did his best at the time." George was "a man of opposites", a hundred per cent one way and then a hundred percent another way, and living with such a person of extremes could be difficult. She admitted that at the time, the Beatles were very much  part of her life, so much so that "I can't say 'wow" every time they pick up a guitar." She was again classy, again in dark clothes and a white blouse.

As the interviews went on during the day (with Donovan and Peter Asher), Lewisohn mentioned that Pattie had told him she was very nervous and really didn't want to do the interview. She had not appeared to be a professional speaker, but she had done a credible version of celebrity interview. In a few months, the Beatles Story would have  a permanent display of her photos from her time with the Beatles, and a newer and improved edition of her book would be out next year. The woman next to me in the audience speculated that Pattie was looking toward her legacy, and maybe so. On the screens in the hotel she looked as if she might have had a little Botox. Maybe. The wireless microphone was clipped to her blouse, near the cleavage. She had class, but she didn't look like someone who had worked, worked the way most people do, most of her life. (I am not going to bother to google how much she is worth.)

Just as travel does, the screens magnified things. At the end of the hour, as Pattie got up to leave, her blouse moved a bit, and for a couple seconds it was apparent that she was wearing a beige bra.

Most likely it was not from M&S.

I do all my own writing, I have no co-author, and I have been paying bills and registering my car almost as long as I can remember. I even paid off  a mortgage. For my camera I have no celebrity subjects or status to make the photos I take commercially marketable. I do get a pedicure now and then and have my hair done, but usually I do my own manicure, ragged though it sometimes is. I am on husband number zero and I am a non-celebrity.

After a certain age, I have learned, women in my non-celebrity world become invisible. It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that this invisibility has an occasional advantage: freedom, which means that I can do whatever I want and most people don't care (or even notice).
Some days it is okay that I seem to be wearing an invisibility cloak. Other days, not so much.  This cultural  ageist and sexist attitude is unlikely to change.

But still we live in the physical world. Alfred North Whitehead called it "the withness of the body," and my sense is that most people, including women of a certain age, might prefer to be more frequently recognized and on occasion affirmed and even celebrated. I mean, we're all on the same face of the earth even if our individual bodies constitute the immediate environments of our lives.

Pattie Boyd and I  are not sisters except that we are both women. Sort of the same vintage, give or take.

She was a model. I am certainly not although I look presentable enough on most days. I doubt someone dresses Pattie every day; I assume she puts her knickers on one leg at a time and clasps her bra much as I do mine. But in that unlikely venue, surrounded by Beatles fans of many ages, that one quick, unplanned accidental glimpse brought to mind our unlikely, tiny, temporary commonality at this point in our lives as women of a certain age: from time to time we both need support.

Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Six

A friend of mine who had been reassuring me for years that I would love retirement said to me over lunch a couple weeks ago, "You really have become the poster child for retirement," and I was surprised at how pleased I was at that characterization. Setting aside the fact that those of us who have retired are in many ways invisible to the rest of the culture for a minute, I can say that retirement thus far has been one of the happiest surprises of my life. (I write that sentence with some trepidation since I know that my luck can change at any moment; we are all one slip in the shower away from that big retirement home in the sky. Fate, I do not mean to tempt you.) I think I am healthier now than I have been in decades. I suspect I look better. I was even thinking that, if I had any background in counseling, I could be a retirement coach, helping other people make the transition, helping them figure out what they are doing as they move forward inductively, making-it-up-as-you-go-along as I have been doing. Although nothing will come of this idea, I can say that even coming up with that idea  out of nowhere--that leisurely thinking--is a luxury I did not feel I had when I was working full-time.

And I suspect that I look happier, so much so that a long-time colleague said to me by way of greeting last week, "Stop looking so smug!" She was only partly joking, I think. I took it as a compliment.

All things considered, I think I have a right to be smug. I mean, thus far I seem to be doing this retirement thing pretty well, much better than I thought I would. Better than I see some other people doing it, to be honest. But okay, okay. I will see what I can do to ratchet it (my smile? my exuberance? my happiness?) down. A bit. Well, sometimes.

And then, as they are wont to do, the gods helped me to remember that I am an expert only on my own retirement, and, after all, I have not made any dramatic moves. I have mostly been improvising from the comfort of my small living room. My plans were to sort of go in a direction and see what that direction yielded--and what it had to offer me. To me. (Not to be solipsistic, but...)

I was not the only one who retired when I did from the place I worked. Most of those colleagues I have already pretty much lost track of. But I did hear about the former Facilities guy John (for years knew him only by his first name and only to say hello to) who since retirement packed up and moved to Kansas, got married in December, and seems to have a very clear sense of what it is he is meant to do. I will let the article from the January 1, 2016 Kansas City Star tell his story: www.kansascity.com>article52618785  . Check it out. (If you can find a version with photos, so much the better.)

At the least, I am reminded that there are many ways to do anything, including this gig called retirement.


(And the photo at the top is of a doll a colleague and friend made for me years ago. The doll is me dressed for work--red shoes and all--and at the time of the photo, she was standing in the driver's seat of my car. )

Copyright Sandra A. Engel

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