Where DOES the time go? Turns out, I don't really care...

Well, it’s happened.  I’ve lost track of the number of weeks since I retired. A bunch.  Possibly six.  That brings us, according to today’s fashion page in the New York Times, to two weeks until Labour Day.  I had to read that sentence 3 or 4 times before I figured out what was wrong.  My blood hadn’t run cold.  My only thought was, ‘have I worn white enough? Because in two weeks I won’t be able to any more.’

What have I done with my time? I bought a book of 109 walks in the Vancouver Area, and then went on all the same walks we always go on. (our walks mainly take us from our neighborhood to another neighborhood that has a fantastic coffee place, so that we can be fortified for the return journey…I should write a book about those.) I’ve made jam a number of times…all those articles about how sugar is actually the most dangerous thing in our society prompts me to get rid of it as fast as I can.  I bought a Kindle on Amazon (and now am in a position to prove that UPS delivers only once, but say they try twice.)  I’ve spent hours buying books for my trip to Europe, and only stop when a voice intrudes into my consciousness asking me if we were ever going to have supper.

The biggest effect of retirement right now is that I am no longer in a hurry. Anxiety about being places was like a squirrel in my gut for the 45 years of my working life.  It used to take me two weeks into the summer to realize I didn’t have to be somewhere and could actually relax, and then two weeks into the school year to figure out I had to stop relaxing or I’d be late for everything. That left 2 weeks of summer that was relaxing, until the newspapers started taunting me with ‘back to school’ specials.  Eventually I gave up and just went with fearing I’d be late all the time, so as not to have to face the transition every year. 

I noticed it when I was staining and varathaning some frames yesterday.  I was sitting in the sun on my deck struggling with the battle between my inclination about how to do the job, and my husband’s fierce instructions, happily putting a second coat of stain on the wood.  I felt nothing else but the contentment of putting stain on wood, thinking, ‘well, this is a pretty sweet job. Who’s been hiding it from me all these years?’  Six weeks ago I would, had someone not been hiding the job from me, have been crippled by a gnawing and furious anxiety that I should be doing something else, that the bloody weekend (I called it that in my impatience…now I’ve only the vaguest notion about whether a day is a weekend day or not) was almost over and I hadn’t done the other effing fun things I’d intended. 

It’s not that I don’t get concerned about things.  I have more time to worry about my health, for example.  Only yesterday  I was flipping through viral videos on Facebook  and I learned that all the walking I do does me no good at all…I’m supposed to be doing short intense bouts of weight lifting. Apparently I could die any minute if I don't.  I worried about this for, what, a minute? Two?  Then with a vision of myself dead on the doorstep of the awesome coffee shop in the next neighborhood, with a rim of sugar around my mouth like salt on a tequila glass, I shut off Facebook and went back to the kindle on-line book store.  I skipped straight past the health books to the jam-making cookbooks...I've heard there's something awesome you can do with figs and alcohol. 

A reflection on time...

I’ve just completed two more weeks of retirement, which means I’ve lost a week, because I could swear it was only one week since my last blog.  I’ve looked everywhere, including my sweater cupboard, and it’s really gone.  It must be with my little black cotton cardie that I bought in England 5 years ago that mysteriously disappeared.  But it raises the question; if one of the things that I want to improve in my life, now that I am no longer a slave to the clock, is that time should flow differently, perhaps I should stop looking at calendars and parsing my time out in weeks and days.  I have the fond idea that time will pass more slowly, as it did when we were children, and actually slumped about crying, “will Sunday never end? I HATE Sundays!”  But if this disappearing week is any indication, I’m beginning to wonder.

My best college chum once reminded me that at ‘our age’ (and I think I was in my fifties then) something we think was 5 years ago was actually 10, and something we thought was 10 years ago was actually 20.  I’ve tested this, and she’s right.  If I give up using the calendar, I won’t even be able to be inaccurate properly.  On the other hand, what about ancient man? (well, ancient woman, really…she’s the one who had to figure out when it was dark and get the kids to bed).  People lived by the sun, and the phases of the moon.  (And in spite of their excellent paleo diets only lived to be 40...just saying)  Things would be marked out by descriptions of thing happening. “The time the mastodon trampled Uncle Og”  “The season of the great storm that swept away the annoying people who moved into the valley below” and so on.  What would be the modern equivalent?  “The time we killed that massive rat that moved into our couch and ate my lipstick.” (apologies to my neuroscientist brother who thinks rats are clever…how clever is a rat that eats two tubes of lipstick when with a little effort it could have opened up the bottom drawer in the kitchen and found the chocolate and crackers?)

See now, about that rat.  If I ask myself, or my husband, who wouldn’t thank me as he’s asleep right now, when we put out the trap that killed that wretched animal, he’d say, “six months ago.” And I’d agree with him.  But this morning I just wandered through my bookshelf and found one of my embarrassing diaries, and there it is: “October 14, 2012… “About that rat we dispatched…”  Almost two years ago! 

I suppose the point about treating time differently is that we have to be prepared to have it just go along, and try to enjoy where it takes us.  I am shocked that when I sit down to write a few words at 4:30, and I look up after a couple of minutes to wonder where my husband is with my gin and tonic, it is 6:30.  Two hours compressed out of existence!  I ask him to make it a double, and sit with my feet up wondering, in retrospect, if my cotton cardie has been gone for two years as well, and whether the rat took it.

     

The end of my first week of retirement...

I have just completed the first grueling week of my retirement.  I know, my one reader will wonder how I jumped from two months to go and the many domestic and structural surprises I encountered each evening when I came home, to the present moment where I am stretched out on a lounge chair in a post World Cup stupor, under a welter of fans trying to keep cool.  And now, with a cold compress on my forehead, I find myself wondering if my first fearful question about my ability to cope with both leisure and the loss of the thrill of my job, asked ten months ago, has been answered.

Let’s deal with the latter problem first; the thrill of the job.  A characteristic of June in education has traditionally been its winding-down quality.  Exams done, the students leave us in peace and people start coming to work in flip flops, in direct contravention of Health and Safety admonitions, and pottering around in a leisurely fashion.  People have time to talk. In the hallway, you hear happy voices raised saying “I’m going for sushi…anyone want anything?”  Then on the second to last day a mad flap of handing the little darlings their report cards and yearbooks, a weenie roast to bid adieu to the retirees and the annual legions of the laid-off, and then an eerie silence descends upon the place.   By noon the school is empty except for the management, and the whorls of dust in the slanted shafts of sunlight.

Not this June.  This June the teachers’ union broke the tension of a 3 month work to rule, the upside of which was no meetings with management…and brought their teachers out to the picket line.  I always used to wonder when big auto company workers went on strike and management were left to make cars, how they did it.  In fact I always wondered if the lemons I kept buying WERE cars made by management.  I never realized till this strike what a lot of swanning about signing papers and smiling encouragingly to the workers my job involved.  While the hapless teachers were out impoverishing themselves in the sun, in a doomed effort make the government see reason, we, the management,  were inside the darkened school emptying garbage bins, shifting heavy boxes off the sidewalk because unionized drivers wouldn’t drive into the receiving area, doing everyone’s marks, running exams that in a normal year take 20 people to do, moving furniture, cleaning things, and waiting for our keepers at HQ to shoot along any good news they might hear.  

Twice a day we went to the picket line with donuts and coffee, hoping their keepers had good news.  The union had nothing to offer but strident and hopeful solidarity, and Head Office news consisted mainly of instructions to present ourselves to mark exams all weekend, and get prepared to teach summer school.  No hope for an end to the strike.  Honestly, if 4 of us could do the work of the 120 or so staff that usually populate my former school, I can’t see why we bother with all that hiring and laying off we’re so fond of.

Needless to say, by the end of the first week of July, when I handed my keys to my successor, I felt I needed to go to a sanatorium in the Alps to recover.  Which brings me to the  ‘leisure’ part. Within the first two days, ‘would I come for drinks?’ X 1, ‘would we come for dinner?’ X3, would we take the kids? X 4, 'would I consider coming back to the mothership for a little contract work later in the fall?' X1.  Tucked in among those are doctors, tax men, a children's birthday party and the search for a new phone provider, as I am no longer able to sponge off my employer.  I honestly think I’ll need another week before I can speak authoritatively on the subject of leisure in retirement.

Two Months and Counting

Two months and counting.  I have to confess that I am already wearing thin from the eager questions people ask me when they see me, because everyone knows that I am retiring.  Do I have any big plans? What will I do first? Am I excited? Am I counting the days?  One more perspicacious interlocutor suggested it must be bittersweet.  I don’t know why I have trouble with these questions.  I have a plan; I’m going to Europe in September…a month picked in case I pine or sigh too much on the first day of school.  Or die of a heart attack…apparently teachers are the least likely to use their pensions, and I have heard of actual human teachers who died on the first day of school the year after they retired.  This shows a devotion to the work, as excellent as it is, that is over-wrought.  My plan is to use my pension to its fullest, and maybe some of theirs as well.

But by far the most alarming thing I am told is ‘oh, YOU’LL be fine…you will have so much to do you won’t know where to turn,’ as if they have some special knowledge of my apparently many pastimes that even I am ignorant of.  I want them not to say that in case it is a kind of curse.  In case what happens to me is that I don’t whip out my computer to write my next book, or my paintbrush for that next canvas.  In case what I do is what I have feared all along; I stay in my pajamas all day and never wash my hair.

One thing that has taken the sting of anxiety out of retirement is the realization that my ten year old grand son is right; I am going to get money for doing nothing.  It is so ingrained in me that I can’t quit my job no matter how grim it is, because if I do I will have to live in someone’s basement and eat beef jerky, that it has taken me some time to realize that I can quit my job because I will get money.  I worked for forty five years, and like the faithful retainer in an aristocratic family, I will always be cared for; my reward for years of unquestioning service.

So, am I excited?  I used to be excited by things coming up; trips to Europe or Mexico.  Now all I think is ‘God, eight hours on a plane…’  My excitement now is that first breath of foreign air, and a ‘pinch me now’ feeling about the miracle of being somewhere else fully on the ground.  It’s what I have to go through that worries me.  The goodbyes, the tears (I’m a contact crier), my own sinking realization that I am walking away forever from something that gave my life structure and purpose.  I know that on the other side; when I’m in my PJs reading the paper at 10 in the morning on any day of the week, I will thrill to the miracle of being somewhere else fully in my own life and won’t have to worry about where my next meal comes from.

I’m not worried about how I will spend the final weeks; whoever comes into this office will be tidier than me. A gorilla would be tidier than me.  It will take two months just to remove the Scotch tape from the cupboard doors where I tape up important memos from head office so that I don’t miss deadlines.  I won’t have deadlines where I’m going.

New Hazards of Retirement Come to Light

When we last left this retirement saga, my husband had recreated a part of the apartment to accommodate the new washer and dryer.  He has been retired for two and a half months, and his enthusiasm for new projects is undimmed.  He has created a new bar table for us to eat at, finally putting to use the bar stools that have had many serviceable years as storage units for magazines, junk mail and the lost cable bill.  He has fixed a bit of the floor we have regularly tripped on, eliminating the need for a swear jar which chiefly funded our regularly Sunday brunch.  He’s gotten rid of the couch so we have a lot more room for our studio, and nowhere to sit.  He’s put wheels on everything so that you can’t lean casually on any surface with any degree of safety.  But by far his biggest enthusiasm has been reserved for lighting. 

It started innocently enough by replacing the single light bulb hanging from a frayed wire model of lighting we had in the spare room.  Then he put a light in the overhead fan over our eating area so we can actually see our food in the dark winter months.  But then something came unhinged.  I arrived home one day to find that the kitchen was lit like the runway at Kennedy airport.  It was blinding.  I could see everything, and it all needed a good clean.  “This is nice!” I said.

     “You’ve always wanted a bright kitchen!” he said proudly, detecting no hint of irony from me.  He had, instead of replacing the existing hoary track lighting from a bygone era, added a brand new track on the opposite wall.  I gave the place a good scrub and settled in to enjoy my new bright kitchen.  And then one day, no doubt while I was at work battling with some computer problem, he must have been gazing with pride at his handiwork and was stunned to notice a tiny section of slopped ceiling in the kitchen that was absolutely bare of lighting.  He must have rushed back to the hardware store that is his new second home, and, enthralled by the brilliance of the lighting section, been overcome by a desire to replicate these very conditions in our kitchen.

      Lights have sprouted everywhere like missile silos in a cartoon of Spy v. Spy. Now I stagger home from a day of battling the ever present threat to order and good government that is our district’s head office, and stand mesmerized in the kitchen wearing sunglasses, with a handful of junk mail and magazines, wondering where to put things.