A Few Wrinkles in Time

They should call it re-TIME-ment, not retirement.

After thirty-some years of teaching high school, I’ve been retired for four. The daily joys are many: Getting enough sleep. Awakening to a patch of sunlight bouncing off the wall, not to an alarm clock buzzing rudely way before dawn. Sitting down in my kitchen for a leisurely bowl of healthy cereal and fruit instead of stuffing down a Sausage McMuffin in the car on the way to work. Reading the morning paper in the morning, not after dinner. Telling repair and delivery people that they can come any time. Running errands during the day (though it’s surprisingly busy in the grocery store at 11 a.m. What are all you people doing out there? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?) Learning to water color. Writing newsy emails to old friends. Going out for lunch, a luxury I used to dream about when I was trapped in high schools where I had 22 minutes for lunch, usually way before noon.

And best of all, having all that time to work on my long-awaited writing career, fresh and clear-minded instead of used up from teaching all day.

So by now I should have written, revised, and sold several novels and dozens of articles, right?

It started well. In my last year of work, I’d gotten the idea for a young adult historical novel and managed to do some preliminary research. On the first school day of the year after I retired, I gleefully watched the neighborhood kids climb onto their bus, and then I sat down at my desk. I spent the morning imagining myself on a book trip around America, talking up my novel to rapt thirteen-year-olds who would later write me letters of gratitude for making them think about Life in a way they never had before.

Eventually I got some actual work done—research for the first few months, then the actual writing. I worked on my novel almost every day, reveling in the glorious knowledge that I didn’t HAVE to work on it. And I loved it.

But not enough to work at it eight hours a day, and certainly not enough to go at the insane pace I’d maintained as a teacher. After all, the whole joy of it was that it was MY work and MY day. It had no boss or rules or schedule. No bells rang to force me to start or finish a chapter. I didn’t have to juggle a million things at once, doing none of them well. I could write and relax. I could write and get enough sleep. I could write and go out to lunch. I could write and renovate the kitchen. I could write and have a life!

It took about a year to have a life with no time to write.

I felt frustrated and guilty. After all, I didn’t have a job. Sure, I did some volunteer work, and I joined some clubs and sang in a choir, and I went out for lunch, and my house was clean, and I was exercising regularly, and the dog was well walked, and I often drove a hundred miles to visit my daughter and new grandson. But these were things I had done before, squeezing them around a fifty-hour work week. Why couldn’t I do them now AND find time to write?

That’s when I realized that retirement had changed the entire Space-Time Continuum. I thought of the old Disney cartoon that demonstrated Einstein’s theory through two brothers who aged at different rates. One twin traveled to outer space, and when he came back he was younger than his brother who had stayed home. Their lives had moved at different speeds while they were apart.

Retirement has had a similar effect, propelling me into a different universe, where life moves at a leisurely pace, at least when it’s pleasant. Joys are savored longer, tasks done at a slower speed that allows me to enjoy or at least complete them. Even thinking (gulp!) takes more time. The ironic truth of retirement is that everything takes longer because it can.

So I decided that my 2009 resolution would be to structure my day--oh, the irony!--like a school day, with specific tasks slotted into specific times. At the end of the day, I could look back and see what I had accomplished. So I made some "lesson plans," and I acomplished a lot--just not usually the thing I had planned, and never as much as I had hoped.

I guess I’ll never have enough time for all the things I want to do. But going back to the rat race isn't the solution. I’m going to keep living at a retired pace, which means having time to enjoy it a lot more than I used to. And when the next retirement, the big one, comes, I want it to find me still hoping to squeeze in—slowly—a few more things on my list.

Why Imperfect Offerings?

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

I'm sixty, and I'm feeling old. I have gray hair, which I don't color. I drive the speed limit. When I walk downstairs my knees shriek in protest. I have Cocktail Party deafness--I can't hear you talking if there's background noise. (If you needed the explanation you're probably in the wrong blog.)

I'm retired, so my life's no longer controlled by the lockstep schedule and emotional/logistical/impossible demands of being a high school English teacher. But often I don't seem to have much to talk about, especially with anyone under forty. Sometimes I just sit on my front porch and watch the world go by. Yes, it's lovely to be able to do that now and then, but it's not what my life should be about now.

Not that I'm not busy. I've spent the last ten years writing two novels and trying to get them published. This is a dream akin to those of my students who used to be sure they'd become rock stars or pro athletes, and the odds are about as long. I'm on the verge of putting the novels and writing books and agent directories in the closet and finding more rewarding ways to spend my life. The other day a man I had just met looked down his nose at me and informed me that if I hadn't been published yet, it was because I hadn't put enough heart into my writing. The passion that has kept me going for more than a decade and the frustration of failing to find a publisher roared to life inside me, and I wanted to spew fiery breath on this stranger who had probed the wound of my disillusionment and diagnosed my problem with his ignorant platitude.

Which leads me to Leonard Cohen's wonderful words above. A copy of that verse sits on my dresser below a print of Beverly Perdue's "Youthful Reflections." In the painting a shapeless, gray-haired woman sits in front of her dresser mirror, where her younger self is reflected. Both women look toward and are illuminated by the light coming in from an unseen window. A lot of people would probably interpret this as heaven or an afterlife, but to me it's about this life and its possibilities, which are perhaps more limited at sixty than they were at thirty, but which still abound. We can sit in our rooms and watch them float by outside, or we can leave our comfortable seats and go make something happen.

So this a blog for people with some gray hair (literal or figurative, hidden or not) and the sense that maybe we need a little renewal of the belief that we have much to offer. Even if our offerings are less than perfect.