transport metaphors...

There has been a development in my progress towards retirement; I am having symbolic dreams.  When I first was promoted to Principal, I very often woke from harrowing dreams that I was driving a bus out in the country somewhere along impossibly angled roads.  I would clutch the steering wheel and look hysterically down the embankment that fell away to nothingness thousands of feet below, thinking, “who put me in charge of the bus?”  The buses weren’t your nice European tour buses with plush seats and scented bathrooms and fabulous sound systems, either.  They were the old fashioned nose buses with broken windows and doors that flapped ominously open at every bump.  Now that I think of it, I don’t know if that was a commentary on my school district, or the fevered memory of buses I travelled on during my childhood in Mexico.

 

The question of my suitability to lead has been more or less resolved by my trying never to think of the import of my position, though sometimes when I drive by my school at the weekend I am suddenly awash with the fearful thought “I’m in charge of the safety of all of that, and everyone in it.” And I require a stiff drink and a hot compress to recover.

Now that my bus driving days are coming to an end, I have started to have a repeated dream that I am on a bicycle hurtling down a steep hill on a badly pock marked, gravelly road, in the dark.  In the latest version of this I’m starting down the steep hill on the bike, and it’s dark, and this time I resist.  “I’m not having this bloody dream again,” I shout in my dream, “I won’t do it!”  So I try to get off the bike, only it’s stuck to me, so I force myself awake.  Clearly I have an obsession with the life-as-transport metaphors, or a fixation with bad roads, but I’m pleased by my ability now to tell my dreams to piss off.  No doubt I gained this ability through my years of coping with dubious passengers on my bus. 

Everyone is afraid of something.  I can cuddle up to a snake or a spider with the affection of an eager scientist, but I’ve had a life long fear of riding in buses on bad roads, a product of seeing headlines in newspapers my whole young life in Mexico. “Bus plunges over cliff, killing all.”  My second great travel fear is going down hill on bikes.  I clutch the brakes and squeal down hills with my heart in my mouth.  My husband is in the next county by the time I make the bottom, lying under a tree napping.

I try to tell him that the bike is symbolic of my new sense of vulnerability as I head into the unknown.   I don’t want to say ‘going downhill’ so I skip lightly through that part.  “I thought we weren’t interpreting dreams anymore.” He says.  He must have read something that said dreams were just the result of the cleaning crew going through your brain at night sweeping up refuse; jumbled images being tossed into recycling.  “But since we are now, last night I dreamed…” When we were young boomers we kept journals full of obsessive dream images, thinking one day they’d mean something, or form the basis for the next great new science fiction hit.  They never amounted to anything but a way to get through our 20s.

Or it could be an unconscious reminder that my new economic status will require downsizing.  Hand in the keys to the bus, here’s your bike. It was left by a fellow that went downhill fast, but it’s in pretty good shape.  Nothing a spot of paint won’t fix up.  

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.

Washing machine. The post script.

I am very happy to report to my reader that two weeks after my last post, in which I threatened to replace my husband with two Yorkshire terriers, I am wearing a pair of black socks and a turtleneck laundered in our brand new 2013 washer and drier.  While I am slightly sad about not having the terriers; they were to be named Ronny and Esmarelda, I am ecstatic to see in person the truth about the mightiness of the pen.  The very day I posted my last blog offering, he allowed me to drive him out to the suburbs to a mall, where we signed off on a couple of machines teetering on the last day of a Black Friday sale.

I, of course, am still at work, but he has just finished his first full week of retirement, and thank heaven.  No one had to give up a day’s pay to wait at home for the delivery to arrive 6 hours after it was supposed to and he had plenty of time to install the shiny new machines.  It took plenty of time.  It turns out, according to him, that it was not just a matter of slipping the old machines out, and sliding the new ones in.  Apparently it required re constructing the apartment.  I arrived home every day to a scene reminiscent of a tornado-struck hardware store, with sawdust, tools, weird shaped board feet of wood and duct tape rolls littering the house.  There was an awful moment on the day before my annual dinner party, when he was musing that he thought the new washer and dryer looked really nice in the living room.

To be honest, I wasn’t here for the sawing and banging and swearing and frantic search for Bandaids.  I did get numerous texts about…well I don’t know, really, as he’s given up his work phone and hasn’t figured out how to activate auto-correct on the new one, but the liberal use of exclamation marks told me things were pretty tough at the home front.  At one point I was under the impression that the long, meandering dryer vent was found to never have been cleaned and was stuffed with soggy lint and the skeleton of a plumber from some bygone era.

All I know is that last night he was excitedly sorting his first pile of laundry .  I had a black t-shirt I wanted done.

     “What colour are you washing?”

      “Vaguely darkish, underwear, that sort of thing.”

I realize that the laundry has always been his domaine, but still… I happened to pass the machine when it was done, and tried to sneak a peak inside to see how wrung-out the cloths were at the end of a wash in a modern machine..only because there were more than a few times with the old machine that I’d had to pull out sopping towels and wring them out by hand.  My curiosity is understandable.  But he heard me.  He leaped like a wounded stag out of his lounge chair crying, “What are you doing? Don’t touch that! You can’t imagine that I spent all week and gallons of blood installing them only to have you touch them?  Mine, Preciouses!”

At the end of that inaugural wash I was proudly presented with tree pairs of near- white underwear, a black turtleneck and two pairs of black socks.  Some things haven’t changed, at any rate.  But I'm not going near the new machines.  

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…’