Two Months and Counting

Two months and counting.  I have to confess that I am already wearing thin from the eager questions people ask me when they see me, because everyone knows that I am retiring.  Do I have any big plans? What will I do first? Am I excited? Am I counting the days?  One more perspicacious interlocutor suggested it must be bittersweet.  I don’t know why I have trouble with these questions.  I have a plan; I’m going to Europe in September…a month picked in case I pine or sigh too much on the first day of school.  Or die of a heart attack…apparently teachers are the least likely to use their pensions, and I have heard of actual human teachers who died on the first day of school the year after they retired.  This shows a devotion to the work, as excellent as it is, that is over-wrought.  My plan is to use my pension to its fullest, and maybe some of theirs as well.

But by far the most alarming thing I am told is ‘oh, YOU’LL be fine…you will have so much to do you won’t know where to turn,’ as if they have some special knowledge of my apparently many pastimes that even I am ignorant of.  I want them not to say that in case it is a kind of curse.  In case what happens to me is that I don’t whip out my computer to write my next book, or my paintbrush for that next canvas.  In case what I do is what I have feared all along; I stay in my pajamas all day and never wash my hair.

One thing that has taken the sting of anxiety out of retirement is the realization that my ten year old grand son is right; I am going to get money for doing nothing.  It is so ingrained in me that I can’t quit my job no matter how grim it is, because if I do I will have to live in someone’s basement and eat beef jerky, that it has taken me some time to realize that I can quit my job because I will get money.  I worked for forty five years, and like the faithful retainer in an aristocratic family, I will always be cared for; my reward for years of unquestioning service.

So, am I excited?  I used to be excited by things coming up; trips to Europe or Mexico.  Now all I think is ‘God, eight hours on a plane…’  My excitement now is that first breath of foreign air, and a ‘pinch me now’ feeling about the miracle of being somewhere else fully on the ground.  It’s what I have to go through that worries me.  The goodbyes, the tears (I’m a contact crier), my own sinking realization that I am walking away forever from something that gave my life structure and purpose.  I know that on the other side; when I’m in my PJs reading the paper at 10 in the morning on any day of the week, I will thrill to the miracle of being somewhere else fully in my own life and won’t have to worry about where my next meal comes from.

I’m not worried about how I will spend the final weeks; whoever comes into this office will be tidier than me. A gorilla would be tidier than me.  It will take two months just to remove the Scotch tape from the cupboard doors where I tape up important memos from head office so that I don’t miss deadlines.  I won’t have deadlines where I’m going.

New Hazards of Retirement Come to Light

When we last left this retirement saga, my husband had recreated a part of the apartment to accommodate the new washer and dryer.  He has been retired for two and a half months, and his enthusiasm for new projects is undimmed.  He has created a new bar table for us to eat at, finally putting to use the bar stools that have had many serviceable years as storage units for magazines, junk mail and the lost cable bill.  He has fixed a bit of the floor we have regularly tripped on, eliminating the need for a swear jar which chiefly funded our regularly Sunday brunch.  He’s gotten rid of the couch so we have a lot more room for our studio, and nowhere to sit.  He’s put wheels on everything so that you can’t lean casually on any surface with any degree of safety.  But by far his biggest enthusiasm has been reserved for lighting. 

It started innocently enough by replacing the single light bulb hanging from a frayed wire model of lighting we had in the spare room.  Then he put a light in the overhead fan over our eating area so we can actually see our food in the dark winter months.  But then something came unhinged.  I arrived home one day to find that the kitchen was lit like the runway at Kennedy airport.  It was blinding.  I could see everything, and it all needed a good clean.  “This is nice!” I said.

     “You’ve always wanted a bright kitchen!” he said proudly, detecting no hint of irony from me.  He had, instead of replacing the existing hoary track lighting from a bygone era, added a brand new track on the opposite wall.  I gave the place a good scrub and settled in to enjoy my new bright kitchen.  And then one day, no doubt while I was at work battling with some computer problem, he must have been gazing with pride at his handiwork and was stunned to notice a tiny section of slopped ceiling in the kitchen that was absolutely bare of lighting.  He must have rushed back to the hardware store that is his new second home, and, enthralled by the brilliance of the lighting section, been overcome by a desire to replicate these very conditions in our kitchen.

      Lights have sprouted everywhere like missile silos in a cartoon of Spy v. Spy. Now I stagger home from a day of battling the ever present threat to order and good government that is our district’s head office, and stand mesmerized in the kitchen wearing sunglasses, with a handful of junk mail and magazines, wondering where to put things. 

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.