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.