Retirement, Take Eleven: Cool Enough to Sing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring on the fall.

Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Ten: Eating Off Rocks, Riding on Tires

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

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

It was funny at the time. Sort of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright Sandra Engel
August 2016

Retirement, Take Nine: Material Girl

Material Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I do feel lighter.

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

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

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

Yes, I talk to my cats.

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

Space. Space in my head is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, moving on.

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

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

Copyright Sandra Engel

Retirement, Take Eight: Just Visiting

During the past year of retirement, I have been teaching one class online, but other than that, I have been work-free, which is to say my time has been my own. The exception to this was my role in the recent hosting of a visiting professor from Vietnam. The good news was that since I had done this for the seven previous years, I had a routine of a sort, a schedule for the nine weeks: the trips to and from the airport, the campus and bibliographic orientations, her weekly meetings with the resident directors, the brewery tour. I also had a sense of what I was likely to  do and to hear: yes, on campus it is difficult to tell the instructors from the students. Yes, American coffee is comparatively watery, and a coffee break at work does last only fifteen minutes or so. Yes (again), the weather is cold but it will get warmer and by the time you leave to go home in May, we will not even be wearing sweatshirts. (And all this is hard for them to believe.)

Although I knew things would not go as planned--they never do--I did not anticipate how much time it would take to address an error, a transposition that should not have happened, in the visa paperwork completed by someone else. This  resulted in a good extra ten hours of my figuring out and addressing the error since it had implications for her compensation. This was the bad news, pretty much the only major bad news.

Please keep in mind that I was doing this hosting pretty much pro bono,  If this bad news situation was stressful for me--and it was--no doubt it was also for the guest. And unnecessarily so. And even separate from that, I realized how much I had done in the past; this hosting gig was a full-time job, albeit more some weeks than others.

I knew the visit would be labor-intensive along the way, and that it certainly was. I did have a lot of help, but I also found myself wishing that I had even more help--help with the not-going-out-to-do-fun-stuff but with the daily, more routine stuff, the less-glamorous trips to the supermarket, for instance.

And I knew this as I recognized that I had been spoiled by being retired for ten months, by doing whatever the hell I wanted to do.

Don't get me wrong: I am grateful for all the help I had. And I had a lot. In fact, in many ways, my faith in humanity has been revived  every one of these last seven--now eight--springs. At certain points in the visit my faith and trust in other people is just buoyed.

Being the default  during the visit, though,  got old a couple times, especially when I was sick off and on for a couple weeks. Plus, despite disclaimers, visitors to any location sometimes have expectations. I mean, they left home for a reason. They may or may not be expected to be entertained 24/7 (or say they do not expect to be entertained), but their idea of appropriate activities may or may not include a trip to the post office or the allergist on the way to the Asian market. And sometimes it is just necessary to stop and put gas in the tank, be you at home or overseas.

There is a travel philosophy in here somewhere: life is made of small, real events, and if the tourist why-not-see-even-more-of New-York-City isn't balanced by these small typical events, then I am put in the position of organizing something that is more a trip for tourists than a modest but meaningful representative cultural experience. A cultural exchange is not just about seeing landmarks that you can already identify. There is a difference between a tourist and a traveler.

My name is not Sandy Tourism.

And since my retirement, I have taken up a different role in the work/institution universe. During the visit, another thing I realized resoundingly, almost with a THUD, had to do with the people at the school. Before the visiting professor arrived, I went on campus maybe once a week to pick up my el cheapo educational discount New York Times in the school library. Sometimes I would see a librarian or two--which I was always glad to do--but that was it, pretty much. What I didn't fully realize before the guest arrived was how much I enjoyed seeing, even in passing, many of the people I used to work with full-time. Granted, I don't know all the newbies, and sometimes, although I know someone's name, I have to ask,"Which one is he?"

But for nine weeks and change I spent a lot more time on campus.

I don't know everybody the way I used to, and that's okay. What I have more fully realized, though, more than I ever did when I was trying to detach and go on campus only once a week, is how much I enjoy having contact with the people I know and like. I cannot say I know any of them well, or even that I have friended them on Facebook (or they me). I have never seen most of them outside of work and it is unlikely I ever will.

But if the place I invested thirty-nine full-time years is on a trajectory to become a place in many ways unidentifiable to me within the next five to ten years, so be it. At least for a while, good people, work friends of a sort, will continue to be there: Paul K., Jason, Mark R., Sharon Z., Jean L., Jill H., Both Sergei's. And others. And there are some who are comparatively new: Mary N., Gloria K., Jim and Norma, Joann D., Carolyn D. Jake.

I cannot list them all.

It is always great to see them, even fleetingly. But even so, I would not go back to working full-time. (And every once in a while  I am not sure I even want to work part-time although right now I don't want to think about not  going in once in a while to get my newspapers.)

These days. as I approach the anniversary of my retirement, I realize that I have walked away. In some ways I am a visitor, too. And that is just fine.

And Then There Was A Slight Interruption...
And this is what I was doing:
http://uticaod.com/article/20160515/OPINION/160519776

Retirement, Take Seven: New Fiesta, a Quiche, and David Bowie

My earliest food habits when I was growing up in New England were very much of their time: meat and potatoes, and a roast for Sunday dinner; Boston baked beans and hot dogs on Saturday nights; Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs; grilled cheese sandwiches on Sunday nights. Meatloaf. Later on, my parents favored what nutritionist Gayelord Hauser called "nature foods," freshly juiced carrots or celery, B vitamins and fish oil capsules. (That juicer caused the lights in the kitchen to dim, I swear.) The candy drawer in the kitchen was filled with early versions of protein bars that were composed mostly of blackstrap molasses. But no matter the food, I insisted that I eat off the red plate (each of the set of plates was a different color).

As an adult I have been a picky--that is, selective and probably a little lazy--cook. And thus eater. My initial idea of cooking, learned at home, was adding an egg and water to a Duncan Hines spice cake mix. A tuna-out-of-the-can sandwich on toasted white bread. Campbell's tomato soup. Beans and hot dogs (I had learned well) with brown-bread-out-of-a-can (still a treat). Early on, on my own as an adult, I learned to make a quiche, a quick-enough one-dish meal if need be. Plus it could serve as breakfast, lunch or dinner. I snacked on apples and bananas. But as the years passed, later, after busy days at work, I often ate microwaved meals on a plastic tray out of a small cardboard box. Lunches at work tended to be cheeseburgers, maybe an occasional salad, but more likely a slice of pizza that was so greasy that I sopped up what grease I could with a napkin before I ate it. At least breakfast once in a while was healthy: plain yogurt and fruit, or oatmeal.

Since I retired, one of the most successful changes I have made is to my diet. I eat better. I cook more--which is to say I very likely cook less than other people, but I do cook. I put a slab of fish in the fry pan, boil or steam fresh veggies, and I make broccoli salad. Carrot and raisin salad. Spinach salad. Even what I think of as the retro three bean salad. My small crock pot  has become my friend. And last week I made a vegetable quiche.

I have never been much of a material girl. If I have a choice, I will choose to spend my money on experiences (such as travel) rather than on things (such as dishes, or even expensive food), but I am coming to understand that healthy food, if funds allow, is worth the expense. I am certainly not one to value presentation, presentation on a plate anyway, but I have to admit it is nice to have meals at home on other than a trough. Of course I speak metaphorically here; I have never had a trough. (My inherited Wedgwood and the silver tea service remain safely stored and unused.) But I have my limits. As long as I don't feel deprived, I'm okay. I am not out to impress anybody at this point--and certainly no one will be impressed by my limited culinary skills.

Over the last fifteen or so years, I have finally bought grown up dishes to replace my ancient Corningware; once I bought Fiestaware, I stopped eating on old maybe-good-for-a-student dishes. For those of you who do not know (and for most of my life I did not know), Fiestaware is the only American-made dinnerware company left. The bold, solid color dishes do catch your eye, and they are the right kind of hefty. Classy, the dishes are both comfortable--that is, informal enough--and substantial. The colors: marigold, poppy, sapphire, sage, lemongrass, plum, shamrock, cobalt blue, ivory, and many more. (Check out www.homerlaughlin.com  in Newell, West Virginia.) Initially, not knowing better, I bought over half a dozen dinner plates of various colors, each of them ten and a half inches across, and which were just too big for everyday use and which are now in a box in the garage. I also have a few nine-inch luncheon plates, but mostly what I eat out of are the Fiesta rimmed soup bowls, nine inches across. The bowl part of the dish helps anchor the food--the salmon and the spinach, for instance.

But the two rimmed soup bowls that I have used for years have hairline cracks, and they are both in the now-discontinued apricot color--a pale pink-orange--that I have to admit I do not really find, well, compelling. So recently it was time to replace them, and, in a circling back to my golden days of yesteryear, I ordered two rimmed soup bowls: bright scarlet and poppy colors, even though my very favorite color, if I had to choose, is juniper, a snazzy dark teal, a color out of Fiesta production for years. The scarlet is just that, and the poppy is a bright orange-red. If a rimmed soup bowl can be cheerful, these certainly are.

These two everyday-use kinds of dishes will complement what I have already accumulated, which is far more than I need: a dozen or so Fiestaware  mugs of various kinds and colors; four glasses; and four sets of silverware that look increasingly mismatched and worn.  I have a loaf pan, a casserole dish, and a pie pan--although I did not use that last when I made the quiche. Rather, I bought a crust already made and in an aluminum pan. With eggs much more expensive then they were when I first made quiches, plus spinach, mushrooms, a little cheese, and onions, the quiche tasted much like I remembered it tasting, and later the leftover were certainly as rubbery as I remembered as well. Oh-- and I have a small red tea pot and a larger sapphire blue one and a few completely impractical disc pitchers that were impulse buys. (Why in the world did I buy an orange disc pitcher? What could it serve as other than as a dust catcher?)

Much of this has been purchased in the Fiesta outlet store in Newell, West Virginia. A small flaw on the outside of a ceramic mug is not a problem to me. (Note to Homer Laughlin, though: you could develop a whole new market if you took some of those seconds, contracted out to starving artist jewelry makers, and then sold the results: vivid jewelry. But perhaps doing so is not as business-savvy, or as much as a tax write-off, as selling as many of the seconds to people like me is.)

Other people collect and use Fiesta. I only use. But I do understand the passion of the collectors. A while back, someone added me to the I LOVE FIESTA Facebook group, and the other people there are enthusiastic and informed the way any kind of fans or devotees are:  cat people, Beatle people, vintage train people, Star Wars people, Deadheads. The object of their passion is different, but the nature of their passion is not. Every once in a while someone posts before and after photos of a collapsed display shelf (even my rimmed soup bowl weighs two pounds), but for the most part, the online exchanges are about good buys, place settings, and questions about the tasteful and eye-pleasing collectors' market. Ebay? Kohl's? Dillard's? Estate auctions? Some items ordered online arrived in smithereens. Some members seem to aim for complete sets of all (or maybe as many as possible) of everything that Homer Laughlin makes--or has ever made since 1936.

I am not a collector. For me, the plum canister without its lid is a pen and pencil holder. (If I didn't have the canister, I might well use a coffee can. Well, maybe not, but you get my drift.)

If I have a choice--and I am fortunate that I do, at least at this point--I am going to choose what I like, even if I chose modestly. I did not order a collection of rimmed soup bowls, after all, but two that will be of daily use. And I am certain the way I am about few other things that this purchase does not augur more Fiesta. There will be no Fiesta-binge on my part. Even if I did have room for more dishes, I am ever the student of literature, and I appreciate the Victorian William Morris' idea:  "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know how to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

And as you know, since these days I am partial to old rockers, so let me put this in more contemporary terms. I think David Bowie was onto something when he said ageing is "an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."

I lived most of my life without red plates and with what might generously be called uneven (and at some points genuinely unhealthy) eating habits.

And so I bought two reddish plates. I cook some. I eat well.

And here I am.



Copyright Sandra A Engel, 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