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
