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

Here & Where: On The Road & In My Head

Welcome to my blog about travel both internal and external!

My name is Sandy Engel and I am a writer and a traveler. As these pages will show, dear reader, most of my recent travel has been in Vietnam--more than twenty visits since 1998--but I have also been traveling to a number of other locations since I was in high school, which is to say that although I declare in one of the earlier blog posts that Vietnam is my muse, I have to admit that Vietnam is not my only muse.

Travel is not just a geographic going from-here-to-there, but also, when it is going well, it is a matter of significant internal activity.  And so although the first pieces may be about Vietnam, they may also later be about the inner travel that retirement affords as well, as, say, traveling to other locations. Hence the full title of this blog: Here & Where: On The Road And In My Head.

For me the hardest part of traveling is getting off the couch. I always pack at least a couple Moleskine journals and manage to find time to write when I am on the road. At this point I cannot imagine traveling and not writing.

I have lived long enough to realize again and again that people bloom in different times in different ways. At this writing I am in the process of completing a career in higher education and am moving on to other enterprises. If you are looking for the usual introductory info, here it is: I write from New York state and I travel as I can--and often solo for at least part of the journey. I have a Ph.D. in English from a program known for producing (at that time, anyway) good generalists. I was the first in my family to go to college, I am single and childfree, I don't especially like to drive although I have a red Jetta, the decor of my house is somewhere between shabby chic and bourgeois and is happily cluttered, and in my better moments I like to think I know how to turn a phrase. (If you care about these kinds of shorthand identities, on the Myers-Briggs I am INTJ, Introvert-Intuition-Thinking-Judgment, and if you subscribe to the Gallup StrengthsQuest view of the world, I test Strategic-Intellection-Achiever-Maximizer-Deliberative.) I have never suffered fools well, and almost a year ago I stopped wearing a watch.

I am an essayist at heart, I think, and so my intent here is to offer prose and photos on occasion initially and then, later, on a more regular schedule. I can give you the where-I-stayed-and-what-I-ate report if that is information that you want, but that is also available in many other places and it seems to me that other observations might be potentially more interesting. What did I think of what I saw? How did I even see it? And then what happened? These are the kinds of things that interest me as a writer. That said, I would hope that what I post is circumspect and thoughtful enough to not become part of what I think of as the narcissism of the age. I am not one for selfies, but I am one for words and complementary photos.

I intend the writing here--for me, anyway--to feel more like play than like work, and if this blog starts to feel more like work than the right kind of play, I am outta here.

Someone once made the observation to me that people tend to surround themselves with people who support their version of reality, and later he also said that, generally speaking, the more ways you have of looking at things, the better off you are. I like that last part especially. With that in mind, dear reader, I think of you as a combination of many of the bright and personable people I have known. You are intelligent, probably have your share of opinions, and tend to know a lot of people who most likely think as you do. But you are also willing to hear other points of view and to read about things not in your everyday world. So in addition to what I will be posting, I will be asking friends to add the occasional post, with the main requirement being that they write about something interesting, be it their part-time career as a wrestler or stand-up comedian, their hiking in Macchu Pichu, or their building by hand and on weekends their log home. If they are willing, that is.

Travel, then is not just a matter of geography, although geography doesn't hurt.

Also, since I tend to be more essayist than blogger, as a compromise to the expectations of the usual (if there is such a thing) blog reader, I may (or may not, since this is my blog) offer brief information about each entry so as to make it easier for you to read as much and whatever you like. I cannot ignore the realities that the world is increasingly asynchronous and that these days we are all niches in some ways. Who has time to read and how much do you want to read? feel free to skim as you like. I hope you read more rather than less, but you decide. (By the way, for me, the first rule of criticism is to give the writing a sympathetic reading.)

And so: welcome.


Copyright Sandra A. Engel