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.