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 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

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 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



Retirement, Take One

Retirement, Take One

I write this about 100 days into retirement.

At first I kept a journal, numbered day by day, and I still do try to, although the surprising euphoria that arrived on Day One is starting to mellow a bit and I find myself starting to reflect. But still. Workers of the World, know this: I don't have to set the alarm clock! I can keep whatever hours I like! I have the money--not a lot, but I hope enough--and, best of all, I do not have to haul ass into an office any more. No more panty hose and heels. If I want, I can fritter away time, and so be it. Yes indeedy I have had a few Ebenezer Scrooge/Alistair Sim moments at the end of A Christmas Carol, all unembarrassed giddiness and hilarity, happy dancing in the kitchen. Yes, more than once. And I do have two songs, or at least a line of the songs, to this new part of my life: singing R-E-T-I-R-E-D to Aretha Franklin's "Respect". Or I sing "Living on Sandy Time," to the tune of "Living on Tulsa Time".

Go me.

Let's just say this retirement gig is okay. So far, anyway.

Actually--touch wood--that is an understatement. Even if this is the honeymoon phase. And I do know that at some point the novelty will not seem as novel.

For me retirement was a process. I prepared for it the way I have approached a number of things: I thought and thought about it. (In fact, it is fair to say that for a few years I obsessed about it.) I read. The first book I read, summers ago, was The Joy of Not Working, and the one line in the early pages that said I would not have to spend time with people I did not like justified the cost of the book and began my slow conversion to believing retirement might be worth doing. I read Carl Klaus' Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary, and the collected Boston Globe columns by Donald M. Murray on life after sixty, My Twice-Lived Life: A Memoir. (Incidentally, they had both been mentors to me, one in Iowa and one in New Hampshire.) I read Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty in which she mentions the comfort of not having to wear a dress or suit every day. I considered the happy prospect of life without meetings. I scrolled through blogs that always began with "Make sure you have enough money"  even though there was no consensus as to what that amount should be. After the financials, the writers offered advice (and occasionally waxed rhapsodic) about volunteering, driving their RV from Walmart to Walmart, and going on what looked like high-end cruises. One blogger even detailed everything he did on a spreadsheet (time, place, costs), a task so beyond comprehension that I was momentarily speechless. My life in boxes: a mindset, along with the national triumph of corporate data over collegial dialectic, that I was deciding I wanted to leave behind.

Most of the well-intended helpful hints I read were not going to be for me, I knew, but I skimmed them anyway. I made the mistake of discovering the stock market app on my iPhone, but after a while I stopped obsessing about that, too. As time went on, my thinking was I might be able to do whatever floated my boat. For a change. If I ever retired slowly became when.

I tried to imagine my retirement: I could volunteer at the local humane society, but then I would come home bearing a new cat every week and maybe fleas as well. I could learn to cook. Read more. Write more. Maybe learn to swim. Travel not just for work or at the height of the tourist season. I thought for a year that I wanted a three season porch built on the back of my house, but when the time came, the last thing I wanted was a bunch of contractors pounding and clomping around for three weeks now that I was finally home and doing whatever I wanted (and pretty much only what I wanted, which means that I can appreciate how quiet my house really is--and how roomy it can be after I rearrange a little more). So the porch can wait. It was what I thought I wanted in the past, and maybe if it is less what I want now, perhaps that is because in some ways I was not who I was before. Preferences and interests change over time. How had I managed to forget that?

And I consulted friends who had already chosen to retire. Everybody declared they were "busier than I have ever been." Nobody looked sad. More importantly, everybody looked better than they ever had while working full-time. And when I was at my most-waffling-what-if stage, a friend made a very helpful point: "You need to remember that this is about Numero Uno."

And I was Numero Uno.

Maybe for the first time in a long time, or at least for the first time in the recent past.

And when I looked around at work, I realized that most of the people I had the greatest respect for--some of whom came of professional age with--were very likely on their way out the door (some happily, some less so) within a few years. We want to protect the things we love, but that collective thing, my work friends, our shared history and our joint projects and all they stood for, were going to be gone in five years at the most. Newbies courted by the institution did not have to pay the dues we had had to and had no history. Plus there were other changes to the institutional culture. (And, for the record, I know such changes are part of a national trend. The mindset is not only local.)

Or as another retired friend, one I have known since we were undergraduates, pointed out, in your childhood you do what your parents want you to do. Then as an adult you do what your job wants you to do. And then finally when you retire, you can do what you want to do. He had relocated to Mexico for the winter and returned to Boston for the summers. His email always sounded happy.

So although I have not yet bought the T-shirt that says "I don't want to/I don't have to/You can't make me/I'm retired", that thinking is part of my current mindset. If I want to paint my toenails purple, I will. Teal green fingernails. I can binge watch Orange is The New Black (the last scene in the final episode is charming, not that that is a word I would use about the series as a whole as much as I enjoy it). Doc Martin. Luther, Peaky Blinders. The Jewel in the Crown, which I had not seen since it was first broadcast in the 1980s. Thus far retirement offers a renewed opportunity for self-possession. I like it. I don't need a focus group; I do what I want to do when I want to do it. Although my container lettuce went to seed quickly and neighborhood critters killed my two post-retirement tomato plants, living once gain feels contentedly organic, as fluid as a late summer rainfall. I can go blueberry picking or to New York City. Or not. Or answer email or call my brother out of state right now. Let me put it this way: I can dare to eat a peach (and I have) or not. I have painted the new window frames and tended to everyday things pretty much as I need to, but this is all in a context of I DON'T HAVE TO.

The issue is choice.

There may be something to Live Free Or Die after all.

The movement I needed was on my shoulder.

As I was making the decision to retire, I framed a photo of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, leaving their formerly beloved place of work, and put it on the stairwell at home so I saw it every day, an Outta Here image if ever there was one. (Granted, Abbey Road was not their final album, but then again it is likely I may work part-time, too, if only to see what it feels like and, frankly, to see how much I need the money.)

Emptying my office took several months, off and on. The early cleaning out was quite the stroll down memory lane, uncovering the old purple dittos of yesteryear stashed in the back of a file cabinet. The experience got more intense the longer it went on until I seemed to get whiplash from the time travel. File cabinets served as Way Back Machines: I marveled at all the names in the grade books, students mostly forgotten except for a few who were memorable for being excellent or, more likely, for being annoying. The former student who now manages the bank I frequent got a B, and one who showed up in my office at least once a week did finally get a C. I found essays students never bothered to pick up at the end of the semester. A lot of the student names meant nothing to me, I am afraid. No faces to go with a lot of the names--and in some cases I could remember faces but had no idea what the names were. I couldn't find the name of the student who had a grand mal seizure in class, or that of the student whose first comment to me was "I am a congenital liar," to which I never thought to say (at the time), "Is that true?" Another had written "Writing is the confessional I never attended, the therapist I never leveled with, and the women I could never trust," a sentence I wish I had written--and he had written it over twenty years ago. I had remembered it over the decades.

I found the newsletters the remedial students wrote as assignments to introduce them to the college and the writing that the student-inmates in the prison program wrote. I taught in a college prison program for seven years, and when, as I was cleaning out, I checked the student-inmate names on the rosters I could find with the New York Department of Corrections website, I discovered that none of them had returned to a New York state prison.

This Wayback Machine travel was not a big Nostalgia Party. Allow me to digress: there were no Golden Days of Yesteryear. A colleague had a giant poster of Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit on his office door. One semester only the female English faculty had eight o'clock classes, but that stopped when we spoke up. There were about fourteen faculty who taught English full-time, but there were only three women including me, and when I asked why there weren't more, I was told "There weren't any who were qualified."

Well.

And the memos I found in the cabinets! The evaluations I wrote. The letters of support for promotions. The minutes of meetings that were either so general it was hard to tell what actually transpired or were detailed play-by-play. Matters decided, matters undecided. Discussion ongoing. Budget requests. Resumes. Curricula. Drafts and more drafts. Reports that probably nobody read but that had to be written per the institution. The lingo of the time: "student-centered," "goal-oriented," "excellence," "standards," "integrity," "team player." And so on. These days the lingo and the values have changed some to "strategic planning," "data-driven," "deliverables," "thought leader,"  "branding," and "elevator speech." You get the idea.

No wonder my eyes got tired from doing all that reading. No wonder I felt as if some of my brain cells had gone poof. No wonder I had burned out.

And how quickly the time had passed.

I threw out a lot. Some items I did not have to decide about right away, at least not yet, and those I put in a box labeled "Sentimental-->HOME". The prison writing, for instance. I would look through these boxes one more time before I stashed them in the garage, basement, or garbage can. For a change, I thought, I might have the time. And I had to find places for at least some of the framed photos I had taken during my travels, photos that had been on my office wall: Christo's wrapped Reichstag in Berlin; the three monks in the window in Luang Prabang, Laos; incense sticks from Thien Hau pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City, and the woman on the boat in Vietnam's Halong Bay. The photo of my friends and me on the beach. Santayana had been proven right: we live not on things but on the meaning of things.

I am still surprised at how relieved (and relieved is not overstating it) I felt after I hauled many of my work clothes--suits, blazers, dresses, shoes with heels--to the Salvation Army. And as I was thinking about retirement--that is, as the decision got closer to being made--I had the presence of mind to stop buying clothes that were for work only, and instead I bought clothes that would also be retirement-ready, more sweaters and jeans.

It may be that preparing for retirement was far worse than retirement itself. But I tried to engineer a gentle transition for myself. When my watch stopped working a year before I retired, I never got a new battery for it. Right now it feels like late summer/early fall vacation but without limit: I don't have to rush to get the living room wall painted because I don't have to go back to work full-time. I have rearranged a few pieces of furniture here and there, and in an attempt to get more into a routine, I have started to get some exercise, going for a walk or two every day. Okay, so I can get up at eight in the morning rather than at six--a small change that feels positively luxurious at this point--but then I do know I need more structure to my days. I don't want to happily fritter as much as I did those first few days although I would prefer that things develop organically (albeit with the necessary nudge) as I get used to being retired. Let me put it this way: I do know that, for a change, I do finally have time to read the funnies and the obituaries (the obituaries, especially after you get beyond the local, are often the best writing in the major newspapers--the dead beat, if you will). Being accountable only to myself in a way I was not when I was working is not a small responsibility.

I do take a certain amount of heart from reading about people who made it into their nineties. But yes, accidents do happen and life is unfair, unfair, unfair. A friend of mine who died of cancer in his forties, long ago, probably the first person of my generation I ever knew who had cancer, told me of his diagnosis and singularly lousy prognosis: "I haven't wondered 'Why me?' because, really, why not me?"

I can measure the decades I have lived by who died when.

I am sure that to some of the millenials (but certainly not all) I was content to leave in the workplace I looked like a geezer, but aside from the odd ache and pain, I don't feel old. (I assume I am not the only person to ever finally get cajoled into attending a high school class reunion and then get there, look around and wonder, "Who invited all these old people?") And although there are fewer lines and less waiting at the supermarket on a weekday afternoon than I used  to encounter after work, the place seems to be busy with people who look a lot older than I think I do.

About eight months before I retired, one day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my car was rear-ended as I was stopped at a light on my way to work. Five feet further and I could have been T-boned into cross-traffic, possibly into the Great Beyond. My parents died in their fifties; I outlived my mother nine years ago, my father seven years ago. I am told that although I take pills for genetic middle age ills--cholesterol and high blood pressure--they are the lowest, generic dosage and nothing to worry about. Carolyn Heilbrun was right: time is a gift.

Honeymoon period though this may be, I am surprised at how much I am enjoying this time. One of the very few decisions I made fairly early on in my life was that I wanted a job that provided a way of life--as naive as that sounds now. I didn't want a job that resulted in my coming home, sitting in the La-Z-Boy and watching television. The Quakers say "Work is love made visible," and I wanted that, too. I saw the value of Robert Frost's notion (and I am sure others have had the idea) of uniting vocation and avocation. This all worked for a while--a pretty good long while, actually. I was so happy, felt so damned lucky to be doing my job, that it didn't matter to me if on occasion I heard that people doing the same job in more upscale locations or even in other departments were making more money than I was. What I was doing, teaching writing, had meaning: I was making it possible for students to better learn how to follow and develop an idea, to develop a voice and locate themselves in the world through language. Many were the first in their families to go to college and few had any ideas about what their options might be besides flipping burgers at McDonald's. Learning how to write would not get them high-paying easy jobs, but at least the process of thinking things through was not a bad habit to have.

I loved what I was doing. I worked hard. I cared. Call this altruistic, naïve, green beyond belief, and even stupid. I have.

Only later, so gradually that I am not sure it was happening, did I come to realize that yes, money and equity did matter, and, after a while, maybe I wanted to be paid in more than in more work. By then (if ever) there was nothing much I could do about the situation if I wanted to keep my job. The powers that be were the powers that be.

I loved my jobs--all of them--and to some extent the jobs in their way did love me back. For a while. The work was its own reward. But as time passed, the jobs were no longer new. Politics, change, luck. Call it whatever. Newbies were courted and promoted. I got cranky. Eventually professionalism had its limits, and I found myself driving home hoping there was such a things as karma so that X would come back as a toadstool.

At the beginning of my career I had wanted to have time to do more reading and writing--not administrivia, not marginalia, but writing of my own. But as time passed I found myself coming home as often as not with a fried brain. I had a circle of friends, some (but not enough) free time, and a mortgage.

I had a house but no real room of my own.

I had become a writing teacher--and later, an administrator--and eventually I spent my time (sans La-Z-Boy) using television as a post-work anesthetic. Not what I had planned. Granted, I was very fortunate to be able to do some of my work, at least for a while, on my own schedule. I never paid a cent for health insurance (but I do for Medicare) and I have a retirement plan: I know how fortunate I am to have those. Many years I worked only ten months. Later, the management style changed, but at least for a long time my jobs were with people I genuinely liked (although we often disagreed) and we all understood that part of our responsibility was to have opinions and to engage (long before "engage" was a buzzword). As the national culture changed from the old school shared decision- making academic to the more corporate, experience counted for less. Institutional history was seen as mostly irrelevant (despite occasional protests to the contrary).

At least I never said "We tried that in 1990 and it didn't work" out loud, although I did think it a couple times. The new workplace seemed history-free (except for occasional lip service), although a mandatory in-house professional development session began with an ice breaker that required  participants to line ourselves up according to seniority. After a while I realized that being among the most experienced (and the oldest) people in the room was getting, well, old. We are all dots in the matrix--I do get that part--but this was a matrix I did not want to be a part of any more. As I watched yet another Powerpoint that didn't seem to tell me anything I did not already know, I thought, "I have paid too many dues to have to listen to this shit." (On the bright side, I was never on the receiving end of what I think of as The Circle of Life Speech by a younger supervisor--that is, a slightly more oblique version of  "Maybe after all these years, maybe it is time to move on, don't you think? Here's your hat. What's your hurry?")

I had served thirty-nine years. Outta there.

And somewhere in the zen office cleaning, I remembered what a colleague had observed about me a dozen years ago over a beer: that I had outgrown the place where I worked. At the time I agreed, but neither he nor I could think of a reasonable alternative. I did have to make a living.

What do you make of a diminished thing? Carry on, be professional, and see what else may be available. Put on a happy face and hope they don't know you're schizoid. I asked for slightly different responsibilities and was granted a few, but the basic work situation did not change. Looking back, I think Janis Joplin was right: "You are what you settle for."

And lately I have been thinking that Mad Dogs and Englishmen were also correct in "Space Captain": "We all forgot that we could fly." That is, I had.

And so once the money seemed to be in order, the people who had told me "You will know when it is time to retire" were proven right. It was time. I was very ready to retire. Declare victory and move on. Everybody kept telling me that I would love retirement.

Thus far the most difficult part of retiring except making the decision has been going against tradition and insisting: no retirement party. I let it be known that no, please, no party. I said it again and again: no party, no party. But I would be glad to have lunch or coffee or a beer with anyone--that is, my work friends--after the new semester starts once I make it through this retirement transition. We can get caught up and reestablish the friendship on new grounds. (A former colleague even asked our mutual hairdresser: "I heard Sandy is retiring, but after all those years the schools is not going to have a party for her?")

Why no party? I imagined retirement in part to be a moving on and a return to the genuine. Genuine: no platitudes. No bureaucratic generalities. No faux sincerity. Nothing that smacks of eulogy. (No roast, either.) At this point I have no patience with false sincerity, the kind of thing that comes with putting in the institutional CD and mouthing the words (an out-of-date metaphor, I know). I didn't want to have to go to a retirement party for me any more than I wanted to go to another meeting. Enough.

I wasn't even planning on moving house, for crying out loud. I was still going to be working part time (albeit online). I had paid enough dues. I was going to morph my strong work ethic into a retirement ethic. And in this ethic--mine--I can call bullshit. Even if only privately.

Nor was I dead. Not yet, anyway. Touch wood.

Lately retirement feels something like the best part of adolescence: that time when you do not know exactly, exactly, what is going to happen next, but you do know--since, all things considered, you have been and are pretty lucky--that you have some choices and at least some means. And some time. Retirement may prove to be a time of  fashioning or refashioning myself at least a little, a time of a certain reinventing--even as I am aware that in many ways I am who I am and am already formed: brown hair, blue eyes, introvert, bitchy resting face, over-educated for where I live, but funny, not shy about sharing opinions (and now with candor rejuvenated), a traveler with one very cool passport full of visas and stamps, and, in the past, a frustrated essayist. This is a kind of adolescence informed by adulthood. I no longer have to mouth management buzzwords or speak in pop culture psychobabble. I have time to revise and rewrite.

Still, there may prove to be other options I didn't feel I had even a hundred days ago. Someone said about me when I was an undergraduate: "Give her a piece of string and she can play with it all day." True then and true now, mostly. I do like to think about things. So at this point, given time and space, I am content to land in, to dwell in, my new-adolescent version of John Keats' notion of negative capability: "when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason".

I can unclench. I can relax.

In the moments when I am not doing an Alistair Sim happy dance, I can, well, just enjoy.

Most writing teachers teach the importance of clear subjects and verbs, and those parts of speech are important, but to me the connectives--e.g. and, but, because, although, since, then and such--have always seemed to me at least as important, if not more so, because, finally, they are how we put things together--not only ideas but also the stuff of our lives. And so I am aware that, Keats and retirement funds notwithstanding, I still live in a material world that includes doing the laundry, taking cholesterol pills and deliberately getting exercise in part to ward off mental decline.  (I come from a long line of list-makers, so only rarely do I feel as if I am forgetting something.) Since I tend to be home more often than in the past, I realize sooner than before that the litter box needs cleaning. I have also noticed that I am taking out loud to myself more than I used to: "Where did I put my iPhone?" (On the charging dock.) I have always spoken to my cats, so I will not worry about that until I find myself believing they are answering me in English. But the possible (I think) new normal for me lacks the impatience of my first adolescence--the wanting-to-hurry-up-to-be-a-grown-up-part even though ironically enough no doubt these days my years are more limited than they were when I was, say, fifteen. In my case all this does come with a certainty of sorts--or call it crank: I have no patience for millennial (and other) solipsism and the varieties of celebrity culture. There are things to be said for spending time with people with the same frame of reference. At this point I do know some things even if my ideas change along the way.

I do know, however, that this time, during this adolescence, I am not sleeping in rollers.

The first thing I did when I got my first full-time teaching job, one thousand miles away from where I grew up, was to adopt an orange and white kitten, one I named Rudder, daughter of Motorboat. (This was on the banks of the Mississippi.) Since then I have lived with generations of house cats.

The cats I have never tired of. For the past hundred days I have been spending as much time with them as I used to with the people at work--and more. The cats are my familiars, and in some ways I would not mind much of in my next life I came back as pampered a house cat as Doodle, Moonbeam and Swishy are.

Moonbeam the calico has always been a drama queen. I adopted her nine years ago from the humane society, and the story was that her previous family brought her in because she was pregnant and they would not be able to afford kittens. But then she miscarried and I found her crouched in the back of her metal cage; with some coaxing, she was willing to nose-touch my finger through the bars. Calicos are known for being quirky, I now know, and she is, although initially I thought she was just suffering from post-miscarriage sloshing hormones. But Moonbeam is lunar--moody, picky, a cat of little reason and a lot of attitude. Although she is a lap cat, she has always been high maintenance, a "me, me, me" cat compared to Doodle, a ginger tabby, a mellow big moosey guy, a linebacker of a cat, a snoozer, adopted when Moonbeam was. Swishy I adopted two years ago, a long-haired, long tailed cat that the humane society could not find a home for since she was adult, black, and had only one eye. I thought she was cool. She needed a home.

Moonbeam is the cat who slept at the foot of my bed and used to let me know when it was time to get up and get ready for work by walking on me. For years she followed me into the shower at six in the morning and sat on the corner of the sink. Her job was to keep me company. Or maybe she was supervising.

But my retirement has changed her routine, it appears. I do my best to get up by eight. I go to bed when I feel like it. I am home more than usual, and no doubt that small rearranging of furniture that came with retirement and the boxes of books that were parked in the living room before being relocated changed her geography, too. I left my office, my location for 35+ hours a week, to move home which to her must feel like full time, pretty much. I mean, I invaded her space.

Time and space.

A few weeks ago when she went to the veterinarian for her annual visit, the vet discovered that she had lost a little more than a pound. Since she was only nine pounds to begin with, that was a lot.

I was concerned but nowhere near as upset as I would have been had I still had full-time work responsibilities. I did not panic the way I might have a month or two sooner.

So there were tests: blood tests. X-rays. A fourteen hour fast followed by urine tests.

Forty-eight hours later: everything tested within normal range.

And then the process of elimination began. Has anything changed? the vet asked. What could be the cause of this? Moonbeam Drama Queen was eating in her usual picky fashion and she was sleeping a good eighteen hours a day. In some ways, the cats had their own separate places to snooze, but they were also doing, as they always did, what looked like kitty time sharing of the furniture. But I was home more often, in her space, and the schedule was not what it had been. I was living on Sandy Time, after all, not on Moonbeam Time.

So some days, now that the novelty is not as novel, I try to get up even a few minutes earlier than I did a hundred days ago, and when I do, Moonbeam does accompany me to the shower. When I put wet cat food on my fingers, she can be persuaded to eat a little more than she might otherwise.

I have discovered that I actually have time to think, and maybe it is good if in some ways this new adolescence never ends. I have time and space, for a change, to take at least some of the time to think and rethink, to write and rewrite, to travel inside and outside of my head to wherever I want.

And I like being able to believe--in better, quieter moments--in this retirement adolescence, now that I finally have time and space for the first time in a long time--that, one way or another, everything will all work out.

September 2015

Copyright Sandra Engel