What I Do
A friend of mine gave me a tide log for 2021. The graphics, by M.C. Escher, are beautiful, and I find myself perusing it each morning, discerning patterns, newly aware of the moon and the planets, the timing of dawn and sunset, the movement and majesty of the universe. If the curve of low tide dips down into the negative at a reasonable daytime hour, I make a point of wandering to the beach then. When the tiny printed notes at the bottom of the page mention a meteor shower, I jot that in a calendar and hope I can rouse myself from bed and go outside to scan the skies; sometimes I do, but less and less in recent years. In any event, looking at the tide log, a “graphic almanac for southern California” has become one of the ritual starts to my day.
Yesterday someone actually posed the dreaded question, “What do you do?” I never have an answer. Does monitoring the tides count? I also tend to my lupines like a proud mother, knowing that I harvested, dried, and sowed the tiny black seeds, watered and waited, and was ridiculously elated when seedlings began to appear. Now they have burst into lascivious bloom. How could so much life and color be programmed into such a small capsule? And yet.
I inhale orange blossoms, walk the hills, and try to write. I reach out to others from a safe distance. I sort macadamia nuts, gather fallen fruit, and putter a bit indoors. (Puttering is a pastime that covers a lot of ground, and may be just another word for idleness.) A few days ago I sat in the sun with two friends on a neighbor’s driveway, just hanging out, chatting and philosophizing. I felt like I was twenty, because that’s so often what we did when we were young: hang out with friends, just playing it by ear. And it occurred to me that this is what retirement is for the privileged among us: a reversion to our free-wheeling twenties, or maybe the first time we ever were free-wheeling. What’s more, many of us are fully vaccinated now, another humbling privilege, and we are beginning to anticipate a partial re-entry into the world, while at the same time realizing that the world will never again be as it was.
I’m grateful to be retired. I worked hard in my working life, and I don’t miss it. It saddens me that my beloved father never had such an island of time for himself, dying as he did at the age of 67, still doing physically demanding work and weighted down with worry and responsibility, and with never a respite of fun or idleness. I am learning gradually to appreciate my idleness, even to respect it. I need not measure everything in terms of achievement. I am, in my idleness, perhaps more fully alive and attentive than I have ever been before.
On some level, I’ll never stop feeling guilty and ashamed that I have landed here while others only suffered. But here is where I am, and my self-flagellation does not change what transpired. The stars are shining, the planets aligning, and the tides coming in and out whether I watch them or not, so I might as well have a look.
