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…

Go ahead...retire...the Man will still be there...

I’ve altered my relationship to work in the last ten years.  I’ve tried hard to stop thinking of it as time when someone else owns me. The Man, say.  Kahlil Gibran, that all purpose guru for those in a hurry for a bit of wisdom, says work is “love made visible.”  He suggests that if you’re going to be peevish about it you might as well sit on the stairs of the temple and collect alms from people who are happy working.  To be honest, my work IS about love.  I work in education.  It is true that I have to be at work at 7:30 when I could be sitting at home with a cup of tea and the paper, but I am never unhappy at work unless some little bastard has pulled the fire alarm.  (Where is the love then? my co-workers ask, as I storm through the school looking for the guilty party, who by this time is out of the rain at the local pizza place, doubled over laughing at the sight of 1800 furious people assembled in the wet grass waiting for the fire department, who also aren’t feeling the love, to ring the all-clear.)

I have tried to spend what I have of the summer imagining that my retirement days will be like this; my time will be my own as my hours are now, during my vacation.  But summer’s charm is its contrast to work.  You can fritter time because you think it is part of some rest and recuperation regime that will bring you refreshed back to the Man.  Retirement will be more frightening because, I have discovered from retired friends, when I can track them down (have you ever tried to make a date with a retired person?  If you ever finally get them on the phone you get a long silence in which only the turning of diary pages can be heard, and then finally  “I think I could give you an hour on the 18^th…no, sorry…make that the 21^st.  5 shall we say? But I’ll have to be away at 7.”  They’re like popular restaurants who will grudgingly let you have a table at 6, but they need it back by 7:30.) .., you yourself become the Man.  One of my ‘leisured’ chums, an artist, told me she has to put structure in her day to make sure she gets some work done.  Work.  That’s what she calls it. 

It’s easy for me to be loving at my job.  I’m a Principal, I have kids who need me, and teachers who want things.  I can be of service.  But will work be love made visible when I am the boss?  No one will need what I write.  No one will necessarily want what I paint.  Will I turn procrastination into a full time job? Will my appliances survive the endless shining they will get when I use cleaning to get out of writing?   Will my poor unsuspecting husband become a project?  Will I savagely throw out that threadbare underwear he clings to so protectively? How often CAN you organize your sweater shelf?  Right now I only do that at the weekends and during the summer holidays, but in retirement I could be getting more and more pissed off at myself and less and less loving.

The only good news about this is that I won’t have to be sitting on the steps of the local Anglican collecting alms; I’ll have a pension.  And, clearly,  I’ll have to learn all over again how to use time.  One of my friends retired 5 years ago and was extremely keen.  He was going to re build his deck at last!  I met him in the spaghetti aisle at the local supermarket after that first year and he looked glum.  How was retirement going? I asked.  He told me he’d built the deck and then when that was over the charm of retirement had worn off,  and he didn't know what to do now.  He wondered out loud if he should have made deck building the whole purpose of his life, though not enough, he added hastily, to wish he was back dealing with fire alarm pullers; he had been a Principal as well.  Happily I’ve met him in the intervening years, in the fruit and veg section most recently, and he tells me he’s gotten over the slump and is now improving his tennis game, and has re found a purpose in building new kitchen shelving. 

In other words, the transition from work to not-work finally sorts itself out.  My husbands underwear might be safe, I might find a new balance, find I don’t have to replicate my relationship with my employer in my own life.

I suppose worrying about something that is a year away is like ruining the summer by exclaiming, as my husband invariably does every year on the first day of summer, “God, the summer’s nearly over.”  Some busy psych graduates somewhere have done a study that tells us that the best part of a vacation turns out to be the excited anticipation of planning and looking forward to it, not the vacation itself.  Perhaps that’s why when summer finally arrives my husband is crestfallen.  Mind you, I’ve not found sitting on a patio in the south of France with a glass of wine all that disappointing. Perhaps retirement will be similar, like France, only easier to understand. When someone asks me how retirement is treating me I'll give an impenetrable Gallic shrug and offer them a glass of wine. My new boss won't mind.

boomer retirement...a drink and some ice cream

I read a lovely article by the woman who wrote Marigold Hotel…she was trying to find volunteers among the retired for something in the village where she lives and couldn’t find a single soul…the retired were all off riding motorcycles across Pakistan and hiking in Wales.  It was really to highlight the way boomers, that’s me, were handling retirement…pretty much the way they handled their lives…and I’m going to say their early lives, because the in between bit, if I’m any example, was filled with responsible (ish) parenting and career building. 

I remember when I went to Europe as a 19 year old.  I had my first giddy taste of real freedom…albeit, on my father’s dime...Wiring him for money when I ran out was actually kind of liberating too, now that I think of it.  The freedom, as I think of it, was experiencing myself within the world without reference to the others who defined me: my parents, my friends, the school I went to, and so on.  Suddenly I was alone and without familiar guideposts, feeling my own edges, pushing them out, finding limits that would only be defined by me and my good sense. My heart was huge and full of sunshine.  No…it wasn’t the drugs…I never could see a percentage in being out of control, so I gave them up right after the first time I did them and found I could see my own words coming out of my mouth like dialogue bubbles.

Now, when I travel alone, as I did one summer to Bulgaria when I was in my late 40s, I sometimes feel that same sense of heady re-discovery of finding out who I am outside my relationships.  In real life, by necessity one pulls in, accommodates, makes room for the others…the balance of happiness seems to be in accommodating just enough to allow the other person some room on the bed, without ending up clinging to the edge.  Even now I am far more likely to ask, “what do you want for supper?” than to think about what I might want.  When I travel on my own I have to really think about what I want.  Soft ice cream followed by a stiff drink at the hotel bar?  Why not?

So how is this related to retirement?  I have been deeply defined by my job.  Though I have won two major awards as a Principal, one national and one local, I can scarcely recognize that person as the essential, soft ice cream eating me.  I never did anything to excel, I just went along, and was startled every time I ended up with an opinion about something.  Others called that ‘leadership’.   Without work, without awards, what will I be?  Will I be able to even lead myself?

I’m hoping it will be like being a teenager again, a reprise on self discovery of my essential self.  Will I tell my husband to piss off, we’re having a cocktail and crackers with Nutella, and if he wants something else he can pop round to the pizza place?  In a way, I hope so.  With any luck I’ll be too busy re building a 1932 roadster like Nancy Drew’s to cook for him anyway.  I’d like to drive it on small, little-used asphalt highways through the Midwest and South.  He can come if he wants.  There will be room in the rumble seat for one extra small bag, but we’re not camping, and I’m eating whatever I want.

A new, more sinister response: you need to keep busy, or else!

It’s been a few days now that I have not blogged…interesting…that is how Catholics start their confessions, ‘It has been two years since my last confession’…or in my case, 20 years.  I’ll tell you straight up; my greatest sin is worry.  Why else would I have a blog, but to worry out loud, yet in complete obscurity?   So, In the last week I have been on vacation, learning again how to move within time, pushing out its borders to suit my activities and mood, constricting it only when I have to, like when I needed to get the grandchildren home because I had to come back, make dinner and get to my band practice.  All of this rather than being driven by time, or being its servant as I am during my working year.

This reflection on time is important in this blog about my impending retirement, because my relationship to time will be different; I won’t continuously have to be places at certain times.  And to be honest, I’m not minding my vacation right now.  I don’t stay in my pyjamas all day, and I feel one or two tasks are enough to tackle.  For example, making breakfast and then moving my deck chair in or out of the sun, as the mood strikes.  Or cycle with the children to the local university farm, lie around (with intermittent cries of ‘stop throughing clumps of dirt!” and then cycling home.  Perhaps it is a model for the days of my retirement?  But of course, it is a vacation, which by its nature gets its pleasures through its contrast to work, and here in the northern clime where I live, it is summer; the days are long.  And then there is the question of purposefulness.  Pressed though I am by time like icing through a nozzle during the working year, my life at work is purposeful; and it is a type of purposefulness that I like.  I feel that I am important in the little realm in which I operate, and that what I do is important.

When I imagine retirement, I think on the one hand of the type of life I am living while I’m on vacation, and on the other hand I think of the short winter days, and the potential purposelessness of what I do with the time encompassed in those days.  In other words, a vacation is pleasurable by virtue of its contrast from work, but what will retirement contrast?

At first when I told people I would be retiring in a year people expressed happiness for me.  “You’ll love it!” “ You’ll be busier than you can ever imagine!” “Someone like you will never be bored!”  Now, I’m hearing a different chorus.  The 95 year old lady downstairs said to me, “Oh.  Well.  You’ll need to keep busy.  You’d better get out and volunteer.  If you don’t keep busy and find things to do you won’t live long.”  Ominously she’s been busy for as long as I’ve known her with a series of grim-seeming health problems.  And a chum on my band, who is an architect and therefore effectively self-employed, said, “Hmm.  You’re going through with it then?  You know, for every year you work past so-called retirement age, you extend your dementia free years by a factor of…oh, I don’t know…five.”  And then she looked at me with a slightly smug expression that said, ‘you won’t catch me retiring!’

And finally I read my friend Max’s blog.  He retired two years ago and has been in Rwanda with CUSO, with the avowed goal of one day running the whole Africa branch.  Examples like his keep me awake at night wracked with guilt.  I want to write books and maybe do a little contract work as a Principal mentor. In other words two highly risky enterprises in terms of whether anyone will want either one of these products of my retirement activity.  Whereas if I were to volunteer my time, I would be as purposeful as all get out, and people would have to accept me and bear it no matter what a pain in the ass I might turn out to be. 

Oh…it’s breakfast time.  I have to get dressed and do one of my activities.  I will mull over what the second activity will be over my poached egg.