Organ Recital, Or My Grandmother's Knees

It seems I spoke too soon.

But let me back up.

Long ago I read that journalist Martha Gellhorn (and incidentally one of Ernest Hemingway's wives) back in the day of land lines refused to answer the phone once she got older since so many of the conversations were what she called "organ recitals."

I know how she felt--and I have for some time. On the whole, I have never been a big fan of organ recitals. And, to be honest, I didn't really think I had too much to add to the conversation. I was luckier than I thought I was.

These days, though, the organ recitals seems a necessary part of getting caught up with friends. Most days we get over them and move on (which may or may not have been the case with Gellhorn's callers). We exchange updates about body parts the way other people talk about their children or sports.

Cataract surgery was a happy prelude. I had something to add to the conversation: I can see! I can see!

And then things went south. My body betrayed me.

My  knees have popped as long as I can remember. Finally, after all the follow-up appointments to the ophthalmologist were over, I went to an orthopedist. (I asked my primary care physician to refer me to someone who perhaps had grey hair and who had more than 1% body fat. I did not think a jogger-thin sports medicine guru would be a good match for me.)

So I had an x-ray on Knee One, the one I fell on in Vietnam in October, and the orthopedist told me most people over forty have arthritis and suggested a cortisone shot--and if the shot was needed too often, then a knee replacement would be in order. I asked about glucosamine chondroitin and the answer was yes. Knee replacement surgery, like cataract surgery, has come a long way, but it is still surgery far more invasive than cataract surgery.  Surgery I would like to avoid.

The shot felt weird but it silenced the pops.

All of a sudden I was aware of my knees as I had not been before. Soooo a couple weeks later, after I realized I was favoring Knee One, I had Knee Two--still popping and popping compared to the silent cortisone knee--looked at.

This time there was no "I'm-okay-you're-okay" from the orthopedist. The diagnosis: "Your knee is shot."

A cortisone shot in that knee as well. I asked about water aerobics and the answer was yes.

No mention of physical therapy or footwear. I took those into my own hands (and my primary care physician did the referral for physical therapy). Knee Two still feels...sore. The muscles around it are very tight, I am told.

So I am going to the open pool hours until the next water aerobics class starts. I wear cushy Teva flipflops at home and took myself to the sneaker store and bought a pair of  very light Hoka (Cavu model) sneakers for their cushion. (They were originally made by and for ultramarathon runners.)  Getting into the space capsule cockpit of my Jetta's driver's seat has never been my favorite thing even in the VW dealer's lot before I bought it, but it is doable.

I ordered a book on safe exercises for arthritis, and I am taking the glucosamine every day; this is no longer a "I try to remember it" kind of activity. I put myself on the Healthy Shit Diet which I have managed to stay on, mostly, except for, say, birthday cake. No Girl Scout cookies this year. I refuse, however, to sacrifice strong Vietnamese coffee (50% decaf unless I really need to be supercharged that day) and sweetened condensed milk for breakfast and through the morning. Life is too short to sacrifice that.

And then.

A year ago we had three feet of snow over two days, and I did my share of shoveling. That was bad enough, but after a week of hip-deep snow, I fell as I was moving groceries from the car to the house, all of maybe six feet.

The good news is I did not hit my head.

The bad news is I fell on my back. And it hurt.

Heat, ice, Ben-Gay, and rest. So much ibuprofen that my ears rang.

Eventually the pain went away, as is the case with many back injuries.

That was  a year ago, and lately my back, either from that last shoveling of a foot and a half of snow the consistency of wet cement or in a perverse anniversary celebration, is again sore.

Creaky knees I can deal with. A bad back I can deal with. But both at the same time?

Back on the heating pad. Ibuprofen. Ice. Heating pad. Ben-Gay. Lidocaine.

I know how lucky I am even if I creak a bit.

In other words, I spoke too soon. The good luck of right now is not as lucky as I hoped it would be for a while.

And then the gods added insult to injury: about the time I went to the orthopedist, I misplaced my passport. It  had been in the modest pile of "I am not sure where to put it" on the top of the rarely-used microwave. But to try out the new InstaPot, I had to move the microwave off the counter in my small kitchen. Where I put my passport in that move I have no idea.

The passport was new last August and the photo actually looked like me. I just like having a passport even if I am not going anywhere right now.

I am just superstitious enough to believe that the minute I complete the paperwork for a lost passport and its replacement, my August passport will show up.

So let me get this straight: the gods gave me new eyes so I can see better, can see distance, and then....slowed down and restricted my movement.

I can only see so far if I can't go anywhere.

I was zapped by The Fates.

I have to face it: I am a woman of a certain age,  and I have my grandmother's knees. And when my legs are the stiffest right when I get out of bed in the morning and make a couple shuffly steps before I get really moving, I am doing exactly what she did decades ago when she was even younger than I.

I know I have little to have a pity party about. I know people who have had cancer, heart attacks, epilepsy, gallbladder and carpal tunnel surgery, and knee and  hip replacements--all of which are far worse than a bad knee and a touchy seasonal backache.

And to be brutal here, I know a lot of people (many of my vintage) who are no longer above ground.

Already.

How fortunate I am that at this point I have nothing more serious. (Touch wood.)

Grandma was tough. I can be, too.

For now I can go places, including to the physical therapy that I arranged and to the blessed watery weightlessness of the pool. For now I manage to do pretty much everything I need to do albeit a bit more slowly.  I don't mind lying on a heating pad and reading for a couple hours a day, and I think a long Easter ride on a heated car seat will do some good. If I look for my passport one more time and then decide to abandon hope, I can take my paperwork to the post office and apply for a new one (right before I find the old one). In an attempt to alleviate back pain, I stand and type this on my laptop which is on the kitchen counter. I religiously do the exercises that the physical therapist gave me for my knee. Insurance will pay for ten appointments with a small co-pay on my part.

It's a start.

And right now, until I know otherwise, I take heart in what a friend says from time to time, a question direct and pragmatic: "Can this be fixed?"

Let's hope so.

The Good Luck of Right Now

These nights, when I look out around 11.30, I see it is not dark out, really: the low cloud cover is white, the snow is white, and when I turn out my light, my bedroom is darker than it is outside. Not that it is deep black inside.

I suspect that I knew nights are not always, well, dark, but over the years I had forgotten. Or I couldn't see well enough without my lenses to notice. Or equally possibly, on some days I was too busy getting to sleep so I could get up and go to work to bother to notice what was going outside my window.

I can see.

Yes, this is still a surprise. My depth perception is coming along without my having to think about it, to be self-conscious about seeing the world, at least most of the time. Vision and movement are a means to an end, after all; I need to reach for my coffee mug, not watch myself reach for it. Although I can see the traffic better in the rear-view mirror--and it does look closer than is used to--I don't worry about it.

I got my new glasses that I certainly do not have to wear all the time: a very slight prescription for distance for the astigmatism in one eye; glare coating so I can see even better at night, and reading lenses that are stronger than I can buy at Rite-Aid. I don't know yet what I am going to do with my old glasses; I will never need them again, and eventually I will probably give them to the Lion's Club, but right now it feels like I would be giving a body part away. Still.

Cataract surgery may be the closest I ever get to being born again.

The first book I finished early this year with my new eyes (so to speak) was a remaindered copy of The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick. The main character narrates the book through letters he writes to Richard Gere. This narrator is a geeky 40-year old who in the past got locked into closets and whose mother recently died. She had taught him "the good luck of right now" idea, and the novel includes Buddhism, synchronicity, the Dalai Lama, a lost father, a priest, and a Girlbrarian. I bought it with a Christmas gift certificate (thank you, John and Colleen), and I bought it as much for the face of the black cat on the cover as I did for the clever title.

How did I not know there used to be a cat parliament in Ottawa? Janet Maislin in the New York Times didn't especially care for the books, but for me it was a fun read, the kind of book that I will want returned if I lend it. I won't care if the last book I read in 2017 is returned: The Old Man and The Knee by Christopher Matthew, a pleasant enough experience that introduced me to Winston Churchill's "KBO": "Keep Buggering On." Although Matthew encourages readers, by the bye, to "stop sitting around for half the afternoon in front of the telly watching rubbishy quiz shows, get up, get out, and do something worthwhile", he also admits that he has never owned a pair of jeans....which loses him more credibility than he can imagine in my book.

Both books are examples of how increasing eclectic my taste in books has gotten since I no longer have to read for a living.

I have been sorting through my books again, which means I have been deciding what to read and reread. For my book club I am about 150 pages into Caleb Carr's Alienist which I did read when it came out over twenty years ago; it still reads well. My To Be Read L. L. Bean tote bag includes The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, a graphic novel on her refugee experience; Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas, a Christmas present (Thanks, Sara and Scott), and Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden; Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Walter Isaacson's biography of DaVinci, which, like the borrowed biography of Bob Fosse that has been waiting for almost two years, I am going to have to read sitting up since they are such bricks.  Books I want to reread: E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictional telling of the Rosenberg case; Dodie Smith's I Captured the Castle, and Ian Rankin's novels featuring Inspector Rebus now that I have watched the British television adaptation on Acorn TV.

One of the great gifts of retirement is that I can read only what I want (no memos, no reports, no email, comparatively little student work since I do teach one class online). I read only what I choose to read, and, these days, I factor into that decision of what and how much to read respect and protection for my new eyes.

I am going to keep a list of the books I read this year as well as those I have started and not finished. This is a first.

*****

People bloom in different ways at different times.

The most interesting reading through the first dozen years of my education was often not assigned in school (and often it was just boring. But I did it anyway.)

The first books I remember reading--or having read to me--are The Little Engine That Could ("Yes I can/I think I can") and Make Way for Ducklings about the ducks on Boston Common (which I don't think I have ever seen, actually). I don't think I could read, really, before first grade, but I do remember feeling weird about learning to read "See Dick run. Run, Dick, run." Who spoke like that? Nobody I knew. Train engines that talked, ducklings that lived in Boston: comparatively speaking, they were very interesting.

The school reading was boring and I now see how prescriptive the writing instruction was. Reading in school was a task designed to answer the questions correctly  at the end of the assigned reading. If there was supposed to be pleasure involved, I didn't see it. And writing? The five paragraph theme which I remember being defined by Warriner's Grammar Book: five paragraphs or none at all.

Not surprisingly, one of the first things I learned as an undergraduate was the literary world--reading and writing, even my reading and writing--was far wider. And not surprisingly in hindsight, in graduate school I found myself gravitating towards the essay--the essays of Montaigne and Thoreau and others, essays that have fractures, that wander and follow the movement of the writer's mind-- nothing like the writing I had been taught in high school.

As often as not, I chose to teach writing, and the students wrote many drafts and revisions, all of which I read.

A lot of reading. No wonder my eyes were tired.

*****

With my new eyes has come joy. I finally took my workplace parking sticker off my car and replaced it with a vinyl sticker of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road: a walking away statement. (And part of me wonders as I iron a flannel shirt if the exhaustion from work all those years was in part introvert hangover from just too much constant human contact.)

Right before Christmas and during the ice storm, I took Amtrak to Boston and ended up with many other passengers sitting in the café car with my backpack on the table in front of me. The train was just packed full. In email I asked Amtrak for a partial refund since I had made my reservation a full two weeks ahead of time, not the day of the ice storm, and Amtrak quickly gave me partial credit for me to use for another ride, and that is, in the grand scheme of things, okay. My plane ticket to Vietnam in October was screwed up (I will spare you the details), and after an email to them that got no response beyond an automatic "We'll get back to you within a month" (which they never did), I wrote them an old-timey three page letter and mailed it to Delta headquarters. Delta refunded my money, enough to pay for another trip (or to replace some of the upstairs windows). So someday I will take the train again and I have taken Delta off my Do Not Fly List.

The cats seem healthy (touch wood). I took the knee I fell on in Vietnam to an orthopedist and got a shot of cortisone, and then a couple weeks later, got the same treatment for the other knee; I can't remember a time when my knees did not pop.  But bum knees are not contagious, and nobody ever died from them, and  I take some heart that I have always responded well to whatever treatments have been prescribed. I will begin water aerobics classes again after Easter when the classes start, and I am long-finished with the surgery-related eye drops.

My potted chicks and hens which I did not know could have stayed out all winter sprouted in the kitchen, and the cat grass has grown into kitty salad, just as promised. Since I don't need to carry my glasses and contacts lens solution with me any more, just in case, I bought myself a smaller pocketbook less than half the size of the one I used to use.

I feel lighter.

Fear not: I am not turning into Little Sandy Sunshine. By inclination and training I am used to seeing things from multiple points of view--the difference being that I can now actually see.  I can see the dust and otherwise unnoticed shadows that do slow time down; I notice the shadow of the blender on the top of the refrigerator: in the morning the shadow is on one wall, and in the afternoon it is on the other wall, albeit much fainter. I don't just hear the neighborhood crows at suppertime, but I can see them if I look. I have always been able to see both the forest and the trees, but now I see both much better. I can see the dust better and I have removed the cobwebs now that I can see them. I notice my cats' whiskers, my chipped nail polish, the frost on the inside of the windshield. The tree at the lunchtime restaurant now has St. Patrick's Day decorations. And I have a better sense of what needs to be done: replace the windows, get the dripping faucet fixed, clean out the basement.

I like where I am, and where I am includes other places, too. (I have done my holocaust tourism: Dachau; Tuol Sleng and the killing fields in Cambodia; the touristy Clink prison in London; My Lai, Hoa Lo (Hanoi Hilton) Prison, and the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. I have been taken to a couple orphanages in a developing nation and I have seen a half-dressed child squatting near a fire trying to roast what looked like a dead bluebird on a stick.)

I have been looking through old photos of places I have been.  The first time I went to Vietnam, twenty years ago this coming October, I took a manual Pentax SLR. The result? "Your pictures are great, but some of them are a little out of focus." Well, they weren't out of focus to me. I thought I was being an artiste with my manual focus camera, but before I returned to Vietnam I did buy a camera with autofocus capability and never turned the autofocus off.  I wisely never shot in black and white.

And I do think that now I see the colors differently than I ever did before, even nineteen years ago. Everything's brighter (yes, still and even two-plus months post-surgery). I should probably celebrate more than I have, but I have to admit that in many ways good vision is pretty much its own reward.

Last week I framed three of the photos of my last visit:  a hotpot, a barbeque, and a shot of the ice in the metal ice bucket in Light Hotel on Hang Bong in Hanoi, a tribute not only to the heat but also to my regular icing of my knee. I have some catching up to do--at the least I have to go back and look at those photos: this is what I saw.

So much of life is a matter of focal length, which is to say of light and color. How many times over the years have I learned--and told myself--that things last as long as they last? My new eyes and the reading glasses over them lash my eyes to the page, this page, this yellow pad of paper. And these days, reading or watching or writing, I find myself still marveling at what I can see: look, look.

The good news of right now.

Still Retired: New World, New Year

"Let there be light," God said after creating heaven and earth.  Let me add another line: and then there was color.

Cataract surgery: it's what I had. And yes, my world, my seeing it for the first time, really, in a long time, has been right out of Genesis. My right eye was done on the fourteenth of December and the left on the Thursday right before Christmas--on the day of the winter solstice, as it turned out.  This was less an Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller at the well kind of moment than it was an Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol scene. Being happily whiplashed into the seeing world, now able to see distance (where "distance" means anything more that a few feet away without any kind of lenses) easily has made me into a character in my first grade reader, Fun with Dick and Jane: Look, look. See Sandy look.

"I can see you," I said to my brother.

Before the surgery, without lenses of any kind, I had maybe a four inch vision range. My eyes used to be -14 or so but correctable to 20/20 with hard contacts and reading glasses. (I started with pink cat eye glasses for reading only in elementary school and things slowly progressed from there.) Vision changes as we age and I have had cataracts for some time, or so I was told. But late this summer my very slow growing cataracts were finally declared "ripe"  which meant they were bad enough that health insurance would pay for the necessary surgery. This judgement meant that my sense that my driving at night was unsafe was not irrational at all. I was vindicated!

As I write this, I have 20/25 vision in my right eye. (New York state requires that drivers have only one eye--and this vision--to drive without corrective lenses.) My left eye is still healing but is well on its way to catching up with the right eye (almost). I can see laugh lines, bigger smiles.  I can see farther (the snow on the top of the neighbor's Christmas wreath on their front door), and in general things look much closer and brighter. I can stand in my dark kitchen at night and see shapes and details, including my black cat Swishy. (I can see much better where the light hits her fur.)  And the photos I have taken overseas over the decades? They look brighter and are going on the walls as soon as I can get them enlarged and framed.

I have a lot to look at.

Mostly because I can.

Yes, this is all very trippy.

During the week between the surgery on my right eye and on my left eye--Cyclops week which was not as bad as I imagined it would be--I could see the difference not just in vision but in color: through the eye with the cataract, yellows were more grey-yellow, dull, and whites were, well, dirty.  (Think of an old biology book with the body part overlays. Think of Mary Hartmann's "waxy build up" on her floors.) Nothing was as clear and bright  as things were through the new lens in my right eye.

Now with two new lenses: so this is what the world looks like. Wow.

I can now see dust and cobwebs. There is a curious architecture to the cobwebs when I put on my drugstore reading glasses to peer at them. I think of them  as having been made by one of my own little Charlottes (the most benign characterization I can think of for the critters who, I assume, like Charlotte, have now moved to that Great Cobweb in the Sky). But although I can see cobwebs, I don't have to manically take them down right now. In this annual time of endings and beginnings, the cobwebs are old news. I will get to them. Newer news: the color I tried out on the living room to make an accent wall last summer now looks dingy and blah; I have already picked up paint chips and a test pot of a bright coral to replace it, a color rich and celebratory.  I don't know how long it has been since I saw motes of dust in the sun coming in the front windows. And why is there schmutz at the bottom of the refrigerator door?

Vision restored.

I can see snowflakes. On the way to New Hampshire  I could read billboards with a glance: "Gift wrap a torso" and "Give them a squat" for a company selling athletic clothing. "Breakdown lane open for traffic." "The shortest distance between two people is a story." Christmas lights were brighter. I turned on the television for the first time in a long time. Yes, I could see it. (And then I turned it off.) I may not be able to see detail as calico Moonbeam comes in for a nose touch (without my wearing reading glasses, that is), but her caramel, white and black colors are vivid.

The new lenses that replace my corneas are less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Unlike glasses, they don't fog up. They don't require soaking or cleaning solutions although I will be putting in eye drops several times a day until my eyes are completely healed. I will not lose them down the  drain as I am washing them. Although I no longer have to take my contacts  or glasses off before I go to sleep--a nice fuzzy departure to the day--I do have to wear eye patches at night for a few more weeks to protect my eyes. Just in case.

And the surgeries were paid for by health insurance except for a total of $600 for better-than-basic lenses for my -14 eyes. (Abbot -1 in the right eye, -1.5 in the left. The lenses have barcodes for identification.) I agreed to the surgery in August although the soonest it could be scheduled was December.

It turns out cornea surgery is one of the most common procedures in the world, and I had about three months between the decision and the procedures to consult Dr. Google: half of Americans have cataracts by the time they are eighty. NOVA has a two minute video under "Gross Science" called "Ancient Cataract." Monet had cataracts. Mary Cassatt and James Joyce had successful cataract surgery. Less successful was the surgery on JS Bach (he went blind and died four months later).  Early treatment included basically pushing the cornea into the vitreous part of the eye ("couching"); doing this got the cloudy lens out of the field of vision but didn't do much else. The first artificial intraocular lens in the US was in 1951, and phacoemulsification (breaking up the lens and taking it out) started circa 1967. Howard Ridley, a British ophthalmologist, noticed during World War II that shattered windshield fragments in the eyes of fighter pilots did not always lead to infection. Still, old timey US cataract surgery involved incisions, stitches and time in bed with your head between sandbags. (My dissertation director sat through my defense a few days after cataract surgery and with a felt eye patch under his glasses. At the time, he was much younger than I am now. He did once tell me that in general the more ways you have to see things, the better off you are.) Why is it called "cataract"? Because it was thought--correctly--to be opaque, like a waterfall.

I had no big incision, just drugs that made me happily loopy, a slightly scratchy eye for a couple days, and no pain.  The surgeon's work itself took maybe ten minutes per eye. I have started for the moment to shut up about the medical-industrial complex, but I can still rant about the prices Big Pharma charges. When I thanked the ophthalmologist who did the surgery, he was modest, marveling with me at the move from -14 to 20/25 but also giving most of the credit to the technology: "It's amazing what you can do these days."

Recently in the New York Times Jane Brody discussed cataract surgery changing peoples' lives. Certainly I am not going to start running marathons, but I am looking forward to getting back into the pool in a few months after the risk of infection passes. I do find myself eating better, more vegetables: I mean, carrots, as in "Have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?"

And there is still the matter of depth perception. I am still learning how far away the coffee cup is. How quickly or slowly I need to downshift to stop at the stoplight. If the walls and trees and people all seem significantly closer, they also seem more brilliant, vibrant, alive--even if  they are inanimate. And these days it seems ungrateful to close my eyes on a world I can finally see. I look around just to see what I can see. In the supermarket the lights seemed to have been brightened just because I had arrived. Fruits and vegetables were beautiful.

My naps are shorter and fewer. I've always been a slow driver, and I have to be careful not to slow down even more because I am looking around.

Cataract surgery is one of the best things I have ever done.

I didn't realize that the second eye was scheduled on the winter solstice until the day of the surgery. This is the season of light, after all, and I am pretty sure I have been staring and gawking even more than I know. I have not been hopping around the room singing "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens" but I am taking less for granted than I used to: Colors. Size. Close and far. Detail. Angle. Light. Dark.

I don't want to say "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, but maybe something secular along those lines. Richard Wilbur wrote, "Love calls us to the things of this world," but these days the things of this world call me to the world.

I can see.

Not that any promises come with my new improved vision. We can all be hit by a bus tomorrow. But I marvel at the world: so this is what it is like to wake up every morning and see the world without lenses and wetting solutions, without fog. I had forgotten.

Christmas lights are crisp and sharp. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, " the song goes. "From now on our troubles will be far away." "Through the years we'll always be together" is followed by the most chilling words of any Christmas song, after all: "If the Fates allow."

I can see stop signs from afar. Faces. Comparatively speaking, the world seems nearby. And the shadows, both early in the morning and in the late afternoon, are more vivid and dramatic than they were, say, on December 13, the day before the first surgery.

Although I can't see around corners to see what comes next, I can now see colors and shapes,  lights and darks and seemingly infinite shades. My ophthalmologist assures me the world as I see it now has always been here--I just haven't been able to see it for a while.

I'll settle for that.

A new year, a new world.

Copyright Sandra Engel

January 2018

Retirement, Take Twenty-Two: Music in the Rain

Wow.

I can't believe how many times I said this both out loud and in my head a week or so ago at a John Mayer concert at Lakeview Amphitheatre in Syracuse, New York.

And let me add a disclaimer here early on: you had to be there. What I have to say will not do the experience justice; the music, the lights, the shared transcendence. And yes, the rain. But I am going to write about it all anyway.

When I bought the tickets five months ago, I thought that I would get a bluesy hour and a half or so, but by the time of the concert, I knew better: he had had a series of hits, some more poppier than others and he had won seven Grammys.

For at least the last decade I have been pleasantly oblivious to popular music and maybe to a good chunk of popular culture as well, but I decided I wanted to see John Mayer because I had come across him in a YouTube video of what I think of as Old Blues Guys. I mean, there was this kid up there in the finale of Eric Clapton's 2007 (okay, a while ago) Crossroads Guitar Festival alongside Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmie Vaughan, Robert Cray, Johnny Winter and Clapton for "Sweet Home Chicago." Who's the kid? The kid, one John Mayer, seemed earnest and self-conscious; he looked over towards the others on the stage than they did at him. Clapton had called him "a master" of the guitar. Not too shabby of an endorsement.

I had seen Clapton and Buddy Guy in person. Next stop: John Mayer.

And I had heard that he had spent last year touring with Bob Weir and the reconstituted (sort of) Grateful Dead. Not a bad credential to have. Plus I heard Mayer was better live than he was in the studio and that he was basically  Slowhand Junior. Rumor was he had the best guitar face in the business.

I didn't know at first that he had been a heartthrob who had been involved with a number of young female singers and actresses whom I have difficulty keeping straight. Oh well. Then again, what teenage girl would not find "Your Body is a Wonderland" worth listening to? I may have been one of the newer people to his music, but I was not the oldest, for the audience last week was a mix: a father and daughter (although Mayer did not play "Daughters," a song, which after I first heard it, made me wonder, "Why hasn't anybody written this song before?"); adult couples; small groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and a few ageing teenyboppers, among them Sam and Jamie who stood behind us as we were finally in line to go in. At least where my friend and I were, the audience did not seem very rowdy. (Few people hollered out song titles, for instance.) Yes, the phones were up and recording. People bopped around and applauded. Old and young, some with families with small children on the upper lawn. A family-type event on a rainy last summer weekday night. (But at some points the stage had the fog machine working anyway.) People sang along.

Perhaps the audience was appreciative in part because of the rain and the logistical ordeal of getting to Lakeview. The entire region, 200+ miles in any direction, was under a storm and tornado watch--and it had monsooned off and on all day. Rain whiteouts were so bad that traffic on the Thruway (including my friend and I) pulled over and waited them out. Even when we got to the venue a good two hours before the concert was originally scheduled to start, there was only a single, slow line of cars into the parking lot of the venue for 15,000 people. And we were lucky; others spent at least an hour in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic after Lakeview changed the start time from 7 to 8 and then back to 7.30--the result being some people barely getting to their seats after hiking the mile from the wet gravel parking lots. After the doors opened in the drenching rain at 6.30: a slow line with no metal detectors, no check of ID, and a security check that consisted of someone opening my glasses case.

And then another hike on pavement past and to the predictably overpriced merch and food stalls. (A woman wearing a sign saying "FREE HUGS" had no business.)

On the bright side, the seats were comfy and we were in out of the rain. Lakeview is not the amphitheatre version of the cheap seats in a long-haul 747.

"I can do concerts," my friend said, nodding as he looked around and sipped his beer. We were stressed and drenched, but we had arrived.

By that time the opening act Dawes (to my ears with a sound similar to The Band) was playing away. They pitched their CD entitled "We're All Going to Die."

The rain stopped for the intermission. We got another beer. The sun went down and all the seats slowly filled up.

John Mayer came out. The audience stood up and stayed standing for the hour and a half.

Let's just say that in normal life I tend not to be much of an everyday wow-er. The next morning, I had a raw throat from whoohooing. Why? I knew at least some of the songs' lyrics, but I was also dazzled by what I was seeing--on both the stage and the Jumbotron, including the musicians' hands.

I had known it was unlikely that I was going to hear a lot (if any) takes on old blues songs, probably not much jamming or improvisation, and that was okay. Although Mayer regularly changes his setlist, I had a sense of what I was getting into.

There were four chapters, each announced in neon and which he  said someplace are four chances to start over. Not a bad way to think about it: full band, acoustic, trio, full band.

If he wasn't in The Zone--Zen--as soon as he opened his mouth, he did an excellent imitation of being there. And he did not stand still, literally or figuratively.

Mayer came out roaring with "Helpless," a song that makes him sound anything BUT helpless with it Rolling Stones' "Miss You" type riffs (and presence). "If I'm helpless/Tell me now/Tell me now." Anything but helpless.

Wow.

In "Moving On and Getting Over" there was jam of sorts,  it turned out, and it was just fine. "We're in a  groove right now and I want to take some time to investigate it."

Wow.

In the acoustic set he played his first hit, "Your Body is a Wonderland," not one of my favorites since I prefer his later-in-his-career bluesy numbers. But I can imagine Sam and Jamie, wherever they were in the audience, thinking of it as I did the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" when I was not much younger than they were. (And I did see Paul McCartney play it live before he took it off his setlist.) And my guess is Sam and Jamie sang along.

Wow.

And during the John Mayer Trio (probably my favorite part): "Vultures," and the scorching metal version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads Blues." "Who Did You Think I Was" was loud and proud. The musicians seemed more engaged than before--but then I am partial to drumming- and guitar-driven music.  Mayer and his partners Pino Palladino (about which I know very little) and drummer Steve Jordan (who has played with Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, among others) were tight. No slouches.

Wow.

The full band returned for a couple songs including the country-ish ballad "In the Blood" and then the screaming guitars of "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room," which was a metaphor I wished I had thought of. And I don't say that very often.

There is something other than possible resulting commercial success to be said for versatility: county-ish, folk-ish, pop, metal, bluesy, rock-y. Love and despair, celebration, and whatever else. Breathy, roaring, plaintive,  emphatic. Sometimes understated but with flourishes. There is something to be said for making what he was doing look effortless and far less practiced than it actually was. (But I know I have heard some of those guitar licks before: Eric Clapton? Stevie Ray Vaughan?)

Mayer's patter was minimal: "I write a lot of songs in hotel bathrooms," and, about "Your Body is a Wonderland," "I didn't know this could go that far, and I thank you for that," and "All first songs are novelty songs."

The former teenage heartthrob boy John Mayer whom I saw was all growed up now that he is pushing forty. No more baby fat but he sports hipster scruff. He has great hair. (I notice hair. And I always have.) No doubt he was focused and tuned in (no pun intended)--and that is something of an understatement. Broad shoulders, lean angular lines. A sleeve tat, the veins and muscles in his forearm visible as he played.

Hands to fit his guitars. A note never missed. (I was reminded of the life-size photo of I think the hand of Kareen Abdul Jabbar in Esquire in the later 1970s. One look and you had some idea of why and how he was successful.)

 And yes, John Mayer's guitar face, a face that did not seem the least contrived. How do you tell the dancer from the dance? The sheer pleasure of seeing people do something spectacularly well NOW, in this moment, in a world of often well-intentioned (well, maybe) mediocrity. Everydayness. Live music done this well rewards abundantly.

Even if John Mayer never grinned, the audience did. (Guitarists, or at least the intense ones, tend not to grin, I think.)

As the Alan Arkin character says in Little Miss Sunshine, "It's all a beauty pageant." Define beauty however you like, but for that time with John Mayer, everybody there was a part of that beauty.

Beauty and transcendence.

For some, the music may have been Mayer's Greatest Hits--and that us what they came for. For me that is not the point, more the means to the end: the man has guitar chops. As did the others on the stage. And therein lies the beauty.

Because the concert was on a weeknight before a work day (not mine), and the ride there had been something of an ordeal, my friend and I agreed to leave before the end when the other 14,998 members of the audience would be hiking to the parking lot as well.

Still, leaving was difficult. Mayer was only a couple songs from the end of the setlist, I knew, and we made our way to the exit to the tune of "Waiting for the World to Change." We were going to miss "Dear Marie," where the audience would no doubt be singing along, especially at the end with the oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh part. His finale would be a nice farewell, gentle "You're Going to Live Forever in Me" before the encore of "Gravity," a downer and not a downer at all ("Keep me where the light is/ Keep me where the light is") and my guess was it would be played with full screaming guitars for a big finish.

At the top of the amphitheatre, where the people in lawn chairs sat in the sweet and wet summer air, I couldn't not look back at the stage.

But as the rain began again, we moved quickly to the parking lot, a place where we couldn't hear the music any more.

But still, even now: wow.

Retirement, Take Twenty-One: Time--And Time Again

This blog has taken a mini-sabbatical this summer for reasons unexpected. First, Doodle The Cat died. A tree in the backyard keeled over--and this would not have been a problem had it not take down the internet and TV cable. The windshield on my car got dinged in Brattleboro at the end of two years of road work on the bypass from Route 9 to Route 7, and although the ding was initially small, it ended up being enough to merit complete replacement of the windshield. That at least was free, unlike the replacement iPhone I needed to get since the port where the phone recharges had somehow gotten damaged so the phone had problems charging. One of the bridges on my heavy duty backup glasses needed replacement and then repair. The weather has been cooler than usual for the most part but with a downside of regular monsoon-type rainy days, and the basement has been damp all summer even with the dehumidifier going like gangbusters.

At least lately the summer sun is up from 5.30 in the morning to 8.30 at night, which gives me  a lot of time to do things--or not. Someone told me as I was retiring that I would grow more sensitive to demands on my time, and lately that has been true, in part because my work is not just flextime but my entire LIFE is flextime. There are no more days of morning meetings, of hours dodging bullets and putting out fires followed by a two and a half hour meeting in the afternoon followed by a run to get an allergy shot before teaching a class at night after a fast Lean Cuisine microwaved for dinner. Strangely, these days any event that imposes itself on my time--whether I have plans for that time or not--seems to be more noteworthy and disruptive than such events used to when there was always always something that needed doing and when in many ways  I was juggling more than I am now. (My dental hygienist once gave me a Superwoman toothbrush. Let's just say I kept up pretty well with all I had to do.) These days--and I write this on Day 811 of my retirement--there isn't much reason to multitask or to plow through things to be done without much thinking. This is a pleasant change: I mean, who used to have time to think very much?

So these days interruptions seem to matter more. Somehow. But I still--as I did when I worked--begin every day by making a To-Do List. Buy groceries, pick a prescription and a sympathy card, go to lunch, pick up the book for book club, fertilize the plants, maybe go to the gym or the pool, pay bills, clean out the upstairs closet and haul the next load of stuff to Salvation Army. (Yes, I am still divesting.) Some tasks get carried over from one day (or week) to the next--and sometimes it feels as if I don't have to do them if I write them down. Far more than when I was at work, priorities sort themselves out every day. I have a new kind of flextime.

And so I am still celebrating that I  can choose what I do. And despite all the unexpected events that have occurred recently, other things have gone well. (Touch wood again and again.) My container lettuce flourished, and only recently have the local critters started munching on my Walmart tomatoes which are almost four feet tall. (The geraniums must also be unusually tasty this year.) Cats Moonbeam and Swishy have worked out a newish feline time-sharing routine since Doodle died, and they both got clean bills of health. And so did I. My retirement guy reminded me I am financially in good shape (almost without my doing much over the decades). I have started taking glucosamine chondroitin for my popping knees, and, placebo or not, at least one of my knees pops less. I have begun a water aerobics class one night a week in my off-and-on search for a sports-type activity besides walking (one knee still hurts) that I actually enjoy.

I had a lobster roll on the beach in Maine and fell asleep listening to an unusually high ride coming in.

I am only now realizing that in my retirement I no longer HAVE to get up at eight in the morning, almost willfully, because for the better part of forty years I got up at six. And I have started treating weekends as weekends, which is to say I can sleep even later if I am so inclined. I am still as organized as I was at work. I am  just...more time-flexible. And I have come to realize that the grow-up-some-and-get-educated-for-twenty-years followed by work-for-about-forty-years followed by however-many-years-of-retirement life cycle--so to speak--is proving to be a really good deal.

In the next few months I will get back to the tree guy, get typhoid pills, get the furnace serviced, paint an accent wall and the deck railing and maybe touch up the wrought iron on the front stoop. My list of books to read gets longer every day. I will get back to this blog and other writing projects in a more focused way.

At least until life interrupts.

At least I did get a summer pedicure. It seemed important at the time.

In the next few months I will attend a wedding and go to John Mayer and Paul McCartney concerts. I will meet John Cleese and later hear Chicago play (no doubt) their greatest hits. I will listen to podcasts, watch the latest Endeavour, Hinterland and Grantchester episodes; I have finally started The Wire. (I will go to my deathbed never having watched Game of Thrones and True Blood.) Book club will meet and my online class will start again.

Today after about a season's worth of rain already, the sun is out (well, off and on), and it is breezy enough that I could put on a light hoodie if I wanted to. The weather will get hot and steamy again, I know, before the real crispness of fall arrives.

I sit here in my Official Rocker that marked my retirement, just inside the screen door to the backyard deck. The screen keeps the bugs out and the cats in. I watch the shadows from the trees (they definitely do need trimming) on the lawn. All told, a nice evening after a nice day. There are arguments for no surprises--no dinged windshields in my life--but those will go unheard by the assorted gods, I suspect. "Man proposes, God disposes," someone wrote in the eighteenth century.  More recently, John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans."

Fair enough. But still.

A thought: I am going to add having another lobster roll before the snow flies to my To Do List. I like that idea. Let's hope it happens.

I was made for retirement, and I have things to do.



Copyright Sandra Engel
August 2017

Retirement, Take Twenty: Two Years In

   

     Two years of retirement already.

     Even though the time has zoomed by, I can certainly say my time has proven to be my own.

     I can say no in a way I didn't used to be able to. And there may be some truth to the observation that once free from work (mostly), people become more themselves, more who they really are. And if I learned nothing else working in open-door community colleges for most of my adult life, I learned that people have an incredible capacity to bloom at different times in different ways. If we're lucky, we do contain multitudes.

     Two years ago I really WAS a recovering employee: I used to sleep until eight just because I didn't have to get up at six to get to work. But these days: hey! I'm retired! So some days I get up when the birds are singing (which I assume is because the sun is shining, a comparatively rare event where I live), and other days I sleep in. Some days I have to remind myself what day it is.

     I am still grateful for all the opportunities my places of work afforded me even as those days are receding in the rear view mirror. More than that, I am grateful that I made it this far. When I had lunch with a former colleague who had retired voluntarily six years ago and when I think about those who recently were "realigned" (management speak for their positions being abolished), I am certain that I retired at the right time.

     What's changed?

     I am aware, or more aware, that I need to get exercise, as much for my brain as for my body. And I do. I get enough exercise to know I feel better when I do, but I also know I have no aspirations to be An Athlete.  I also listen to Slow French on my iPad (intermediate level, and most of which I do understand). I read. I write. 

     My time is my own--and it is mine to fritter away if I like. My routine is good until it is not, until it gets interrupted by, say, a phone call or the new episodes of Orange Is The New Black.

     Now that I am home and refocused, the seasons seem to matter more than they used to. Or at least I am more aware of them than I used to be. I no longer have to drive on unplowed streets to get to work. I can stay in. I can go out. Where I go is up to me. I actually notice when the weather is nice in part because I am not in an office eight hours a day. I am no longer exhausted at certain times of the academic year (say at the end of the first week of classes or at graduation).

     I no longer have to suffer fools the way I had to in the past. And, to be fair, perhaps a few of the fools are not grieving that they have found themselves Sandy-free for a couple years.

     I am no longer offended by being given the senior discount, most often at Dunkin Donuts. Not that I have ever asked for it. I have other things to think about. And when I am home, and, for example, the power goes out, I am the person in the neighborhood likely to know when it is going to go back on. I have been known on occasion to watch what goes on in the neighborhood, but I don't see myself ever saying, "Get off my lawn". Yet.

     Because my time is pretty much mine, my using it wisely is more important than it used to be. I left full-time work two years ago, and since then, others have left as well, either to the Great Beyond or to other locations--this last so much that there are very few people left to swing by and say hello to except, maybe, my annual Girl Scout cookie supplier. Otherwise there is little reason for me to visit quickly because I am in the neighborhood and taking a book out of the library on the floor below. So maybe there is some truth to the where-we-are-is-who-we-are idea. Or who we are determines where we go once we retire and realize time has passed for everybody else, too.

     More than that, maybe in a recent synchronicity-type occurrence the Universe reminded me to continue to pay attention to what matters--or maybe it just was a random event: I read a telling obituary the last time I was in New Hampshire. I happened to be sitting in a coffee shop and I came across an obituary in the Manchester Union-Leader (which was far less right wing and vitriolic than I remembered it). I didn't write down her name and I haven't been able to find the obit online, but the 90-plus year old woman had died after a life that included a husband, several children and grandchildren, and a successful business that sounded like she had made wrapped-submarine-sandwiches-for-supermarkets. Though she had grown up in a local orphanage and the obit made reference to "her orphan sisters", it also gave the name of her birth mother, and said about the deceased: "She always wanted to be a nurse." 

     Which she had never done, apparently.

     How much of our lives do we make and how much is a matter of luck and circumstance? She must really have wanted to be a nurse for her family to mention that fact. (Unless, of course, she wrote the obit herself. No matter if she did.) Maybe we contain multitudes, and, well, maybe we don't. I don't know for sure. I just kind of toodle along with whatever purpose and interests I have.

     Even though my left knee pops more than it used to, I am fairly content in my SandyNiche as I define it for now.  Few things are as calming (not that I need calming) as a snoozing cat. I still think that you can never have too much flannel and and that it is wise to never underestimate the power of Vietnamese coffee, cafe sua da, iced espresso with sweetened condensed milk as a power drink.

     I have never encountered anybody who was unhappily retired although perhaps they exist. All I know is the locus of control has made a tectonic shift to moi. I have a certain social (and personal) security that I never had in the full-time workplace. When I think about it all, it seems like I have done a lot along the way, including in retirement. But I don't want to be a nurse, and I don't want to find myself thinking that way in a few years. 

     Still, complacency is not good, for  as someone told me long ago, if you are complacent, then you are in a rut, and if you are in a rut, you are close to being in a grave. That may overstate things a bit, but still. 

     I have a loose and expanding list of things I want to do and that will happen: paint the deck and the wicker love seat; get the car inspected and the trees trimmed; decide what to do with oldish cameras and organize thousands of photos. Pick up an el cheapo chair for the beach. Buy the tickets to see John Cleese. Other occasions and ideas will appear, evolve--maybe will bloom--and I will do what I can to move things along. So good, so far.

     And if all these things seem small and ephemeral and whatever else--well, hey, what I did at work (and not at work) all those years was equally and cosmically small and ephemeral even as it all looked Very Important at the time. So things go.

     And so, as the T-shirt says:

                                    I don't want to

                                    I don't have to

                                    You can't make me

                                     I'M RETIRED

Copyright Sandra A. Engel

May 2017 

     

Retirement, Take Nineteen: A Fine Fellow

Ten years ago I went to the local humane society just to look at cats after I had to euthanize 20 year old Camden. I waited a couple weeks and initially thought I would wait longer, but the time seemed right just to go look. For the first time in many years I was without a cat. So I went.

And a couple days later I went back. The cat I wanted to see again was named Misi, a one year old calico who had miscarried three babies and who had been brought in allegedly because the family was moving and couldn't take her. Misi would be spayed later, but when I met her, she was cowering in the back of a cage, clearly the model of a nervous post-pregnancy cat--and, I now know, a drama queen calico to boot.

But her calico markings were striking and she looked nothing like the recently-deceased brown tabby Maine Coon Camden. After I stood outside her cage long enough, she came over and rubbed her whiskers against my fingers. When the vet assistant opened the cage, the cat was willing to be held. She looked to look around; she was nothing if not alert.

Between the first and the second visit, I had decided that maybe I would adopt two cats. Which two I had no idea. I do remember a couple grey and white sister cats together in a cage, but their eyes were rheumy. Kittens I did not want, but two almost-adults sounded good since, hey, I worked all day.

After I held then-Misi, I asked the assistant what cat she would recommend as a second cat, and without hesitation she said, "The Dude," who was already so big that he was in a double cage at ground level. He was big, he was smoky orange, neither of which I had planned on, but she assured me no, not all male cats spray, and sometimes a male and a female cat are a better pairing than say, two females.

He was an armful even then although his records say he was only 8 1/2 pounds. He had big bones, and he seemed cautiously obliging to be held like a baby or to be plopped in my lap as I sat in a chair. He had a good purr. (It never occurred to me to test drive him--so to speak--with Misi, but given her calico drama queen personality, she might not have easily approved of any other cat, really.)

So I filled out the paperwork, and, as things worked out, I brought then-Misi home a few days earlier than the then-Dude since he developed a case of the sniffles and had to stay a couple extra couple days to get better. Misi came home and seemed to adapt well enough.

The following week, I went back to pick up The Dude but neglected to bring the cat carrier since I left right from work. No problem since the humane society had a cardboard one for him (and me). He looked fine, and there were smiles all around except for The Dude, who, within the first mile, had clawed a hole in the cardboard carrier. As I shifted into traffic, I saw an orange paw reaching for the glove compartment.

But we made it home and he reverted to his calmer self once he was out of the box. The papers from the humane society pegged him right: "This animal has a friendly demeanor and has demonstrated good health during his time at the shelter...We hope he adjusts well in his new home and that your vet confirms good health at his post-adoption re-evaluation. Thanks--good luck with this fine fellow!"

The first night at home, there were no fights even though we did not get much sleep. The Dude had been named wisely: he was mellow. He let Misi (renamed Moonbeam because she was so lunar, so calico nutty) do the theater. He wasn't a look-at-me, look-at-me cat. Not the least bit ostentatious. I changed his name to Doodle, and he proved to be a next-to cat, not a lap cat, and he snoozed next to Moonbeam and later near to new sister Swishy. He liked the top platform of the cat tree and he moved with ease from the top of the roll top desk to the top of the six-foot bookcase. He was big but fleet of foot. He was always happy to play with a wand toy, at least for a while, but mostly he just wanted to hang.  He met me at the door regularly enough, but he only once decided to try to go out one slushy winter day as I was hauling in bags of groceries. Doodle got down the couple stairs into the driveway into an inch of slush and then bolted full speed to the distant other side of the house, as if screaming, "Wet feet, wet feet!"

When I came home after being away, Doodle was the slowest to forgive, but when he did, he was the coziest. Doodle was an introvert--one difficult to ignore at almost 16 dusky orange pounds. He loved to be brushed, and he hated the 7 minute ride to see the vet once a year; he yowled on the way there but assumed the loaf position in the carrier on the way home and then bolted upstairs. He had a oink nose and a cute smile (and no, he did not spray). He was big but he was healthy, and he was a sensitive dude: if I dropped a metal dish in the kitchen or if a door slammed in the wind, he came to see what happened and to say a hello meow, although whether he was protesting or trying to calm me I was never sure.

Doodle's usual place on the coldest winter nights--and we had a lot of these this year--was next to me on the bed, which was fine except, cat-style, since he trusted me, after his nose-touching, he often lay on one side and faced away from me. Granted, his back end was discreetly covered by his tail, but still. Sometimes I tried to turn him sideways so at least his paws or his back were closest to me, but usually when I gave up and rolled over and slept on my other side, he didn't seem to mind.

Doodle was my favorite cat the way every cat I have had has been my favorite cat.

Over the years, the cats managed to do kitty time-sharing, which is to say they had their favorite places to sit but also took turns in their way: the bed, the cat tree, the couch. They managed their own routine.

Then one day after breakfast--after their breakfast, too--Moonbeam followed me into the bathroom, Swishy went up to the spare room window, and Doodle stretched out on the foot of the bed. I did the dishes, did some work online, and then went upstairs to put on sweatpants to go to the gym.

Doodle was on the bed, on his side as usual, but when I went to greet him, he wasn't moving.

He had been to the vet not six weeks previously.

First, disbelief. And then it was awful.

Once I could get myself together enough, I called the vet to say I needed to bring in Doodle. For better or worse, the person who answered the phone at 11:55  told me the office was closed between 12 and 2 but I could bring Doodle in at two. Over the phone I arranged for cremation and a post-mortem paw print (which made little sense, but I was not my most cogent, so okay). I said Doodle and I would be there at two.

I sat with Doodle for a long while. Moonbeam sat and watched from the hallway; Swishy slept through it until I got Doodle downstairs. Like Moonbeam, she sat and watched from a distance.

After a while I had to decide how to move sweet Doodle. He had been sleeping on an old flannel pillowcase, so that was the first layer of what ended up being a  kitty burrito. More than other cats, he liked cozy places. I didn't have a cardboard box (which he would not have liked anyway); I wasn't going to carry him in my duffle bag even if he fit: he was 16 or so pounds and pushing 3 feel long. At the end, telling myself again and again that he liked cozy places, I wrapped him loosely in bath towels and pinned them in a couple places. Once I got him downstairs, I slid Doodle burrito into a couple clear plastic bags lest any bodily fluid escape in the 7 minute drive in a friend's car.

To the veterinary clinic's credit, Doodle and I went to the front of the line when they opened at two. In the examining room, a very young vet tech handed me a form and said, "This just says that Noodle hasn't bitten anyone..." and there was another "Noodle" before I sobbed and corrected her and she looked totally abashed.

While she went out of the examining room to process my credit card, I slid Doodle in his kitty burrito out of the plastic bags, and, because I didn't know what else to do, I started to unwrap the burrito just to take a last peek, a last quick look at his pink nose.

Doodle wasn't much of a joker--he was too mellow for cheap cat jokes like trying to trip me or hiding his  toys--but he was a sensitive dude with a cat smile, and I like to think he would have appreciated how fitting it was that without intending to, I happened to open the back end of the burrito first--derriere with tail modestly down--before I finally got to his pink nose.

A fine fellow indeed.