Dress Rehearsal...

In this continuing exploration of my upcoming retirement, I give you exhibit C: the winter break.  As my reader knows, people who work in education typically get a winter break of two weeks.  I won’t lie…it is always welcome…there is something soothing about not being surrounded by 1800 people every day, some of whom may lack the social controls we consider desirable in a democracy.  But this year I have taken it as a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

I have sketched out a fairly ambitious daily schedule for when I retire 6 months from now.  I am an early riser, so I will be up by 6, I will have written for two hours and had a nourishing, yet slimming breakfast, all by 8:30.  Then I will take advantage of the morning to pop outside for an hour’s exercise and return to some serious reading, Kierkegaard perhaps, until it is time to clean a cupboard.  Lunch, review morning’s writing, paint. That will bring us to nourishing but slimming dinner, a couple of hours of serious PBS-type TV and a bracing early bedtime.

I have to admit, with a week of the hols gone, that the dress rehearsal is not going well.  Take that word ‘dress’ for a start.  I haven’t managed to actually dress before 11 am on any day except Christmas, when I thought it best not to greet my 15 luncheon guests in my tattered dressing gown.

I seem to have the general idea…it is the details that concern me.  For example, I have been writing.  So far a couple of e mails and a number of texts which have all been returned to me swathed in question marks because of auto-correct.  And I have been reading.  I seem to have mislaid the Kierkegaard…perhaps it fell into the fire, but my old Agatha Christies have been standing in nicely.  Cupboards. I have not been idle here either.  I have identified each and every cupboard that wants cleaning, and have made a list.  I’ve lost the list, but am confident it will turn up.  Painting, again, not as I imagined it, but I did pop down to the art store to buy a paintbrush and a kind of eraser that promises not to smear pencil marks, but actually erase them.  Slimming meals have suffered a tiny setback.  It turns out that when you’re not rushing off to the salt mine at 6:30 every morning, there’s plenty of time to make French toast. 

Exercise I do get.  That’s because someone, who no doubt kindly has my health in mind, has given me a Nike Fuel.  If you don’t know what this is, it’s a little black band you wear on your wrist that harangues you, in a silent sort of way, by contemptuously showing you how much actual exercise you’ve gotten, forcing you into runners and making you go outside so it will be proud of you.

We do actually go to bed, eventually.  I’ve managed to scrape myself out of the barka lounger by midnight most nights after a gluttonous evening of binge watching shows on Netflix accompanied by left-over fudge.  

My kindly husband, watching me fret over my failure to manage the schedule for even one week, has pointed out that it is a vacation.  You’re supposed to lounge about in a tattered dressing gown eating fudge.  But here’s the problem; he’s actually already retired, and he’s doing the same thing I’m doing.  It’s no good his saying he’s taking a vacation from his grueling retirement schedule to keep me company.  I fear the future.  Our grandchildren will come over one day in a year’s time and find us overweight and wedged into chairs in our pyjamas, TV blaring and the sink full of unwashed dishes and burned pots.  They will have to phone the fire department to free us.  So undignified.

Washing machine. The post script.

I am very happy to report to my reader that two weeks after my last post, in which I threatened to replace my husband with two Yorkshire terriers, I am wearing a pair of black socks and a turtleneck laundered in our brand new 2013 washer and drier.  While I am slightly sad about not having the terriers; they were to be named Ronny and Esmarelda, I am ecstatic to see in person the truth about the mightiness of the pen.  The very day I posted my last blog offering, he allowed me to drive him out to the suburbs to a mall, where we signed off on a couple of machines teetering on the last day of a Black Friday sale.

I, of course, am still at work, but he has just finished his first full week of retirement, and thank heaven.  No one had to give up a day’s pay to wait at home for the delivery to arrive 6 hours after it was supposed to and he had plenty of time to install the shiny new machines.  It took plenty of time.  It turns out, according to him, that it was not just a matter of slipping the old machines out, and sliding the new ones in.  Apparently it required re constructing the apartment.  I arrived home every day to a scene reminiscent of a tornado-struck hardware store, with sawdust, tools, weird shaped board feet of wood and duct tape rolls littering the house.  There was an awful moment on the day before my annual dinner party, when he was musing that he thought the new washer and dryer looked really nice in the living room.

To be honest, I wasn’t here for the sawing and banging and swearing and frantic search for Bandaids.  I did get numerous texts about…well I don’t know, really, as he’s given up his work phone and hasn’t figured out how to activate auto-correct on the new one, but the liberal use of exclamation marks told me things were pretty tough at the home front.  At one point I was under the impression that the long, meandering dryer vent was found to never have been cleaned and was stuffed with soggy lint and the skeleton of a plumber from some bygone era.

All I know is that last night he was excitedly sorting his first pile of laundry .  I had a black t-shirt I wanted done.

     “What colour are you washing?”

      “Vaguely darkish, underwear, that sort of thing.”

I realize that the laundry has always been his domaine, but still… I happened to pass the machine when it was done, and tried to sneak a peak inside to see how wrung-out the cloths were at the end of a wash in a modern machine..only because there were more than a few times with the old machine that I’d had to pull out sopping towels and wring them out by hand.  My curiosity is understandable.  But he heard me.  He leaped like a wounded stag out of his lounge chair crying, “What are you doing? Don’t touch that! You can’t imagine that I spent all week and gallons of blood installing them only to have you touch them?  Mine, Preciouses!”

At the end of that inaugural wash I was proudly presented with tree pairs of near- white underwear, a black turtleneck and two pairs of black socks.  Some things haven’t changed, at any rate.  But I'm not going near the new machines.  

Retirement...the appliance version...

It was bound to happen.  We are having a little domestic dispute on the subject of retirement.   I’d like to retire a couple of appliances, and my husband, who has been longing for retirement for himself, has no such liberal view for our hard working, but dysfunctional washer dryer and dishwasher.

“They aren’t ready to retire,” he says, “they still work.”  If by that he means that they still make noise, consume vast quantities of hot water, and jiggle about, then yes, they still ‘work’.   But if work means actually producing clean items according the manufacturer’s instructions, then I beg to differ.  The washing machine has decided it doesn’t want to bother with cold water, so everything is washed and rinsed in the entire contents of our hot water tank, and, while I don’t mind rewashing all the glasses and cups when I take them from the dishwasher, because the dishwasher’s idea of getting rid of food scraps is to spray them in a fine mist back into all the drinking vessels…no…that’s not true.  I do mind.  I want new appliances, I tell him.

  

“There’s probably a kink in the hose,” says my doughty, appliance-fixing husband, as he dives behind the washing machine to have a look.  “Have you got a safety pin?” he calls out.  I read that the 2010 version of washing machines is 83% more efficient than the 1990s version.  I tell him this.  “What?” he says irritadely from behind the machine.  Maybe it’s the violent bang on the head when he tries to stand up to hear what I’m saying, but he’s not receptive.   He goes back down with the safety pin in his mouth.  He comes back, more carefully.  He has a new solution. He doesn’t see what’s wrong with it.  No, true, he hasn’t been able to fix the problem, even with the safety pin, but he’ll wash all the hot water items first, and when the tank is empty, we can wash all my sweaters in the nice cold water, which is all that’s left.  “You can have a bath tomorrow,” he says cheerfully, wiping his hands on his pants and pushing the machine back into place.

He knows he’s fighting a desperate rear guard battle, so he calls upon the ghosts of the Greatest Generation.  “My parents never threw anything away,” he says.   

   “We don’t throw things away, nowadays,” I remind him.  “These appliances will be recycled and become Ferraris.  In fact that’s probably all they want.  You’re keeping them from retiring and becoming something fabulous.  You want to retire and become an artist.  Why shouldn’t these machines have the same opportunity?”

    “I tell you what,” he says, now grabbing at straws,  “we don’t know if we are going to stay in this apartment when we retire.  Let’s give it a year or two, and see how we feel.”

     I know how I feel right now.  “Really?  Really? You’re so determined to prove a point that you’re moving us out of our apartment now?  I tell YOU what.  I’m not moving.  Your parents never threw their house away because your dad couldn’t fix the dishwasher.  And if you decide to move, I’m replacing you with two Yorkshire terriers and some new appliances.  Now where’s my wallet? There’s a sale at Sears…”

     

an anniversary...

Recently it was our 35^th wedding anniversary.  I know I don’t usually include my husband in these blogs, as he may wish for some peace and quiet, but I don’t really see how I could leave him out, as you typically don’t have these sorts of events on your own.  No, I’m wrong there.  By the time my parents were married this long they were definitely having them on their own.  They had drifted, like ancient Pangea, continents apart by then.  She was in France and he was in South America.  It’s as good a reason as any not to opine that your marriage is as solid as a rock. In fact, I blame geology for the whole sorry mess.

If my old dad hadn’t been a geologist, in love with the long, slow impermanence of the earth layering and folding, bending and sinking, melting and drifting, he would have been home some of the time, instead of standing around on mountain tops with his eyes on the distance.   She told me once she got very quickly tired of being alone and then, after years of waiting around she suddenly realized she could go where she wanted and eat when she felt like it, and decided she liked it.  I COULD have pointed at my brother and said, ‘Hello.  We’re right here,’ but I imagine that being alone with a couple of aliens you’ve produced when your husband did swing into town, who now require food, shelter and society, is as good as being alone, I don’t know.

It is customary to reflect on what keeps us together, you know, love, companionship, support, and I’m sure these all play a part.  But let’s face it, marriage is a pairing between two completely different people.  It’s amazing they ever work at all.  One of you could come from a nice, stable home where it was understood that you make your bed, and you lie in it.  The other one could be me.  No one ever made beds at my house.  In fact for much of my childhood I slept in campsites on a WW2 army cot, as part of my mother’s ‘hey, I can go wherever I want!’ program.  

I think it is being together that keeps us together.  When you’re together you develop a space that you both inhabit, and you fill it with things you both like; similar politics, wine, rattan furniture for inside, though I’m wondering about the furniture just now.  And just off to one side you have the place you don’t have in common filled with stuff only one of you likes; antique dinky toys in my case, bits of wood that will come in handy one day in his. And then every now and then one of you brings a part of yourself into the common space that is unexpected and you have laughter. 

I think, it’s things that happen or get said, that you realize you would have missed if you’d not been together. It is the time in Spain when my husband kicked his camp stove into a field when it wouldn’t light and he couldn’t get breakfast, or when he looks at one of my desperate daubs and says, because he’s an artist, ‘water is flat, you know’, or when I go to the door of my son’s house to drop off a forgotten sock, and our youngest grandchild flings open the door and looks past me and says crossly “Where’s Grandpa??” because a man who has that kind of love from a child is worth a lifetime of loyalty.

I’ll be honest,  I was a bad prospect with the kind of modeling I had of marriage, where I learned that it’s just easier to pack your army camp cot and drive away.  If I pulled a stunt like that my husband would have stood by the car and said, ‘drive away where? You hate camping.  Much better come inside and listen to my new idea for lowering heating costs…it involves wooden buttresses…’

On turning 65

Turned 65 on Friday.  Have yet to collect on a senior’s discount.  I’d like a reduction of 10% on the agro caused by my work computer, just for a start.  Or a 10% discount on the number of people who don’t read the bulletin at work and are outraged by anything at all that happens there because they weren’t notified.  A similar reduction in the amount of torrential rain that falls at my grandson’s football games would equally be in order.  So far, I haven’t realized one of these savings, so I’m not entirely clear, as yet, on the benefits of the whole thing.

I am, as my one reader knows, retiring in 9 months.  Wow.  It took me that long to cook up a son when I was 20, and I was no more prepared for that event than I expect I will be for this one.  Then, a child of the ‘60s, I really did look at the lilies of the field, and, encouraged by their lifestyle, I was as unworried about the future as a baby myself.  They looked great and had pretty solid careers.  I assumed that their fathers had paid fully for their college education, as had mine, and that they might have undergone several shifts in career choice as they went along, before they settled on field work, as I did.

I was lucky.  I ditched the idea of being an archaeologist as being impractical with a baby, and a lack of science education, and selected teaching instead, and this lead to a series of jobs in a youth detention center, a group home, and alternative school, a degree in creative writing, another teaching certificate, and ultimately with a few jogs in the road, a job as a high school principal.  Back when I was 20 I never could have imagined a job that required leadership, and to be honest, I’m a bit shocked by the whole turn of events even now, as I’m 9 months away from becoming a civilian.  If you scan a field of lilies, you never really see a head lily, but, here that lack of a science degree may be impeding me, for all I know there are head lilies, and like me, they too must retire.

I confess, if I’d spent less time nodding in the morning sun, and soaking up whatever came, I’d have reached this point owing less money to my local credit union, and maybe insulated my house a bit better.  I say this last because I remember once seeing a filmed biography of CS Lewis, and there was a scene of him as a much older man sitting in his snug cottage by the fire reading, perhaps an enormous mug of tea at his elbow, and I thought, that is how I want my old age to be.  At the moment, in my vacuous, airy apartment with 18 foot ceilings, if I sit by the fire in winter with a book I require several feather-filled duvets to achieve that same sense of snugness I imagine he enjoyed.

When I was in my thirties I was reading a National Geographic article about Cornwall, and there was a picture of a local community theatre director, a woman of 90 with a shock of white hair and enormous rubber boots, standing on the side of a hill in a stiff breeze waving her arms, presumably directing a production of Lear that was unfolding just out of camera range.  She was my other great model for aging.  Be 90 doing something wonderful on a rainy afternoon, and then go in for tea by the fire.  If she’s still alive, she’s 120 now.  She could be.  She looked like she was in for the long haul.

Of course, the point is, I’m not sure I’m ready for this, but like finding myself 44 years ago with a baby and some obligation to keep it fed and clothed, I will likely find a way to get keep warm and amuse myself when I retire.  There is the painting, and the walking around Cornwall in rubber boots in the rain still to be done.  Although the top advice from experts is ‘do not try to write books’ when you retire, I may ignore that advice. Unlike in some of my earlier posts, I’ve begun to accept the idea of retiring a bit more.  It might just be that I’m not getting that senior’s reduction in agro at work…because now instead of thinking, “should I have picked archaeology after all?” I just think, “next year, I won’t have to do this.”