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.”

Searching for green...the sequel

I’ve been spending the last few days out at the multi acre farm at the university with a little coterie of painting students, learning to paint en plein aire.  I’m using materials and colours I’m not familiar with.  Painting outdoors looks easy for the lovely young women in the class with their portable easels and pretty summer frocks.  I have a little fold up three-legged stool to sit on that sinks into the dirt and tilts backward, and I balance a board with my paper clipped to it, and my palate covered in desperate attempts at green, on my knees.   I’m covered in paint from swatting at mosquitos with my brush-laden hand and leaning on my palate to squint at the scene I’m painting to determine values. 

The instructor advised us to tuck away our day’s work so as not to be too self critical, because, she said, the charm of the pictures would only be evident after a good night’s sleep.  The three ‘studies’ I did on the first day were of a green house on a beautiful field nestled next to vibrant rows of squash complete with cadmium flowers stretching into the distance. 

These revealed themselves, after sleep, to be paintings of the hideout of desperate revolutionaries in a jungle, hurriedly rendered at night by a journalist concealed in the nearby shrubbery, using the only tools at his disposal; the remains of his dinner.  The instructor was plucky in her attempt to be positive.  “I love this area right here…it’s beautifully understated..” she was pointing to a corner of the canvas left blank when I ran out of time.

As we complete our little daubs we bring them for a group critique.  It’s not as encouraging as you might think to have a group of ten smother little cries of dismay as your painting is brought out, and then stand thoughtfully staring at it trying to find something useful to say, while the instructor says brightly, “anyone?”  Finally,

“It’s quite exciting the way it looks like that browny-green part there is on fire.”  Not for me the little private thrill of relief at seeing there’s someone worse than me.

While I admit that by the afternoon of the first day I was tempted to pack it in and go back to my usual vacation activity of scouring the house looking for my glasses, I was cognizant of the hefty sum I paid for the course, so I have stuck it out.  Day two was slightly less awful, because I nipped out after my course on the first day to pick up a couple of tubes of ready made green, and was able to render, as one kindly course mate said, “a very nice pole.”  It still looked like a pretty nice pole the next morning.  I could get into this.  

The search for green....

I’m about to start a brief but intense course through Emily Carr on painting outdoors.  I have to use materials I have never used; acrylics, after struggling for the last 15 years with watercolour.  I’ve engaged in an epic battle to find the right greens with watercolour, and have come to an ‘almost’ compromise on many of them, and now suddenly this new viscous, thick and unsubtle medium.  “Oh,” says my husband blithely, “you’ll love it.  You can just paint right over anything you don’t like.”  But the greens! They are like squirrels on acid.  I sit before my little box of paints and am overwhelmed.

   The thing about painting outdoors in BC is you need some greens.  I am constantly distracted by the layerings of greens in almost any scene I pass.  I have a little box at the back of my brain that constantly runs a commentary on them; ‘yellow with burnt umber? Pthalo? No…that colour was invented by masochists…how to get that dark forest colour?” all while I’m trying to drive and remember what I’m supposed to be out to pick up.  And then one day I’ll finally sit down and try to use the acrylics to re create the greens in a photo I’ve taken and come out in the end with something lurid and intense that bears no resemblance to a landscape anywhere .   I have failed again, I tell myself, to capture life.  Its intensity, its subtlety, its complexity. 

 

  I am trying hard to catch some real essence, as if in doing it I could hold onto it forever, stave off ever having to leave.  I look at the water colours (still my favorite medium to look at) that I love, I feel as if their painters had stopped time, they, and that scene, are forever.  They are like revisiting a favorite novel.  When you open the pages the characters fly out, noisy, chattering, doing, ready to get back at their lives (and thanks for opening the pages, we were rigid with boredom here!)

 I have a painting I bought in Dorset last year…an early morning scene on a village green, with the sun just spreading warmth across the grass, the house on the left still in shadow, its inhabitants about to have their floors bathed in gold as the sun hits their windows.  I am there, in that morning, every time I look at it; smelling the mid summer green of the shrubbery, washed in my favorite time of day; that moment when anything is possible, a feeling I was suffused with at any time of day or night when I was younger, before my parents started dying in that irresponsible way old people have, but now still feel every morning.

 

  The man who painted that was the now deceased father of the woman I bought it from.  She charged very little to part with it.  Her father is still alive here, just out of the picture. A classic English watercolour.  I want to be him.  Well, more alive, if you know what I mean, but able to paint like that, capturing the shifting shadows and tone changes on an early morning swath of grass.  In a week my course will start and I’ll be out there with my acrylics.  In a desperate attempt to look like I know what I’m doing I’ve made a full page colour chart of all the different greens I can get with the hyperactive squirrels in my paint tubes.  There are only two so far that don’t make me lose the will to live.  Wish me luck.  It’s my whole retirement I’m playing for here…