Radical Retirement Review

Since I started this blog, I’ve mentioned more than once that someone told me it takes about five years to settle into a rhythm in retirement. Before I retired I was sure I’d nail it from day one, but my friend was right.

Today marks the end of year five. I think–although I’m not so smug about it–I’m finally getting it right. Not doing too much, not bored. The days are still not long enough, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s better to have a never-ending to-do list than to be bored or idle. I am NEVER idle. A neighbor says I’m “driven.” Maybe so, but the older I get the more aware I am of time running out, and there are so many things I still want to accomplish while I can.

Today I’m looking back over the five years. I’m not re-reading blogs or pulling out diaries. This is just what pops into my memory as I look back.

Year One, 2010: I had the privilege of serving on the search committee that recommended Meg Barnhouse as the settled minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. If it’s possible, her ministry has even exceeded our hopes; the congregation is growing and a capital campaign is raising money to expand the physical space.

2011: Traveling with Texas Choral Consort to Uruguay and Argentina; singing Faure’s Requiem in Montevideo and Colonia, Uruguay, and Mozart’s Requiem in Mercedes and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eating empanadas and drinking malbec. Making new friends, especially my Montevideo Posse.

2012: A chilly spontaneous spring art trip to Washington and Baltimore. Taking the then-five-year-old granddaughter on a road trip to Carlsbad Cavern and San Diego. I became nearly ill from the stress of nine days 24/7 with a young child. My doctor eventually diagnosed me with anxiety disorder and put me on Prozac. That trip made me discover I had been suffering from severe anxiety all my life, so I’m grateful for the trip, and we did have a good time in Coronado, La Jolla, Sea World and the Zoo.

2013: Our four-week tour of England and Scotland was the highlight of the year. Seeing “Matilda” with my New Zealand cousin and her husband, who were in London when we were; visiting the Yorkshire cousins and their families; Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Inverness; Bath; Cambridge; Newmarket (my birthplace) and a very warm London, including museums, galleries and more shows.

2014: Singing Mozart Undead with Texas Choral Consort at the French Legation, and the Beck Song Reader at the Blanton Museum, were peak experiences. A week at the coast with the grandchildren. A week in New York in November.

Most of my creative output has been been writing poetry and blog pieces. It was cool getting a poem and painting in Postcard Poems and Prose this month.

But I’ve mostly just dabbled in art, using my graphics skills for things like the condo association newsletter and publicity materials for my husband’s theater company.

In April I got into a postcard swap and something about the format lit my fire. I have mailed more than 70 cards in a variety of media including water color, marker, collage, monoprint, acrylic, photography, poems and quotes incorporated with art. I have a million ideas I want to try. I launched a second blog solely to show my art.

Newest postcard, “Monkey Shines.” I can get silly and whimsical with the small format. (Water color, metallic marker, sticker)

I’ve also been knitting quite a lot, but I’m not good about keeping photos or records, and I give most of it away.

Current project, a sampler blanket for Chloe, trying out stitches from a book I got at a garage sale.

Now I’m excited about… drum roll… stitchery! I have several pieces working, one of my own design, in a postcard-size format, so someone may get a stitched postcard. For a person who is constantly moving, I find needlework to be calming and meditative (yet productive!).

Sampling stitches from another garage sale book, painting with stitches and cloth.

The best use of retirement has been being able to spend time with the grandchildren, especially the now-eight-year-old, Chloe. She is a ball of fire, light of my life, force of nature. I adore her and she exhausts me. I  pray for the stamina and energy to keep up with her as long as she needs me to.

I haven’t come up with any new year’s resolutions, but I hope to laugh a lot, meditate a bit, get enough sleep, and keep living a healthy and active life. I’m getting a new laptop, replacing my reliable workhorse seven-year-old Dell Inspiron with a Dell Latitude; the only other thing I want now is Google Fiber in the complex–a real possibility this year.

With gratitude, wishing everyone a beautiful, healthy, joyful and richly rewarding 2015!

 

The Burning Bowl and the Dead Bird

We had a burning bowl ceremony the last church service of 2013, writing things to be rid of in the New Year on slips of paper and burning them. Afterwards I told the minister, “I think I wrote the same thing last year.”

My paper said “Struggling with time.”

Starting my fifth year of retirement, I’m finding a rhythm. Despite wanting to sleep late every day at first, now I find I’m more productive waking to soft classical music at a reasonable 7:30 (I rose at 5 when I was working). It’s nice to putter around making coffee, writing morning pages or meditating, rather than racing to make up for time spent in bed.

But there never will be enough hours in the day, and I’m still frustrated by my lack of focus. In addition to all I’m already doing—poetry, writing, knitting, time with grandchildren, household projects—there are other pursuits I want to try.

Quilting has long attracted me, but sitting at a sewing machine seems too much like work. I considered hand quilting, which has more appeal. But one day I was trying to figure a way to repurpose a pair of guest towels given to me years ago, and realized I want to try hand appliqué! Found one book at the library but have only flipped through it.

Would they make tiny pillows?

One day on a walk I was puzzling through this dilemma of too many interests and too little time. Encountering a dead bird—or its parts, the head being separated from the body—

 

Already works of art

I thought about an artist who paints dead animals, tiny bird bones and the like. That reminded me of a blogger who highlights cutting-edge embroiderers, one of whom stitches birds.

Embroidery by Chloe Giordano from The Smallest Forest blog.

All this came together in my mind, saying “Go back to the beginning. Go back to drawing. Just draw for a while, and don’t plan what to do after that.” I took many drawing classes toward my art degree. The teachers said “Draw every day.”

When I cleaned up my studio/office in last month I joked that someone in this house ought to take up art, because we have supplies: pencil, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, markers, water-color pencils, paint, ink, and appropriate paper. My husband gave me a book, “The Yoga of Drawing,” that I’ve barely cracked. That would be a start, maybe with the dead bird.

So that is my “plan.” But: there are knitting and sewing projects pending; always newspapers, books and magazines to read; a Netflix movie growing mold; poems needing revision, and I should be submitting poems for publication. A stack of old family albums to scan and return to my niece. Book ideas. Recipes to try. Most important, grand-kid time.

An elderly friend once said, when I told her I was overwhelmed during a move, “Be thankful you have too much to do.” She is gone now.

New Year, New Look: What I did in January

Into its third year, my blog is finally looking the way I want it to! I’m really excited about the new theme and the header image. (The theme is “Skeptical,” and the photo is one I took of Edinburgh harbor from the Royal Yacht Britannia.)

January is one of my favorite months. I love the clean slate after the holiday clutter. This year I vowed to do a once-every-five-years de-cluttering and cleaning, including reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, cleaning closets and bathrooms cabinets, tidying up my studio, finishing with a grand sweep of the garage last Wednesday. It was fun to visit with neighbors who stopped by, asking us to do theirs next. We put out a full trash can and two full recycling containers; my husband took a huge carload to a junk drive and I took some items to hazardous waste disposal. (Sadly, a birthday gift of a hand-knit hat and scarf accidentally went to the junk drive, but I told the intended recipient we’d laugh about it someday. In the meantime I’m knitting new ones for her.)

I also emptied, dusted and reorganized bookshelves, intending to give some books away. I eliminated only one, but I did establish a whole shelf of books, about 40, I haven’t read, ranging from great classics (War and Peace) to fluff (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), and lots in between, including several dark and nihilistic books from a college philosophy class (Doctor Faustus, The Sleepwalkers). It’s not likely I’ll read them all but I know where to go when I’m looking for the next book to read (in addition to the pile next to my chair that includes Bill Bryson, Barbara Kingsolver and Abraham Verghese).

One thing I learned is we have too much stuff. Even though we’re pretty thrifty, it’s amazing how much we accumulate and then get rid of. 

I also learned that we should never buy an over-the-counter drug or toiletry item without first checking to see if we already have it. I found nine bottles of eye drops, of which eight were expired. We have stim-u-dents, nasal strips, dental floss and hair and foot products out the wazoo. And why does a couple who never plays cards have six decks, including Elvis, Santa-shaped, and round? I even weeded out the toy bins so Chloe can find things without digging through dead markers and ratty stuffed animals.

One thing that helps me get-‘er done is my new to-do list system. I have two clipboards, one for everyday tasks and one for creative ideas for writing or art projects. On each is a stack of notebook paper, with a week’s list on top. Each day gets its own items, and anything else I want to get done that week goes on the right. It gets messy and scribbled and marked out, and then it’s discarded (although I probably should keep them as some sort of weird historical record). Even when I have several projects going at once it helps me stay on track with priorities, and also pick up the little items that might be forgotten. Of all the organizing systems I’ve tried through the years this has been the most successful for me.

When I did the kitchen re-org, I decided to hang the stemware to free up shelf space. Although he griped throughout the process, my husband now takes credit for how nice it looks. It’s so pretty it’s like decorating the kitchen with bubbles.

Hanging stemware, installed by proud handyman Gary Payne

Update on New Year’s Eve: We told Chloe she could stay up to watch the ball drop in Times Square, which is 11 our time, but she wanted to stick it out till midnight. She snuggled in bed with her new tablet and gave me time updates every five minutes. We turned everything off at 12:05 and went to sleep, but maybe she’ll remember New Year’s 2014 as I remember 1954.

New Year’s: Peaking at Nine?

Technically I was 8 1/2. We had been in the U.S. for about six weeks and it was the first New Year’s I remember, the first one I stayed up to greet, 1954.

My mother had quickly become friends with another English woman, who invited us to their party. I remember almost nothing of the evening but it remains a treasured New Year’s memory.

The other “best” was 1995, when my husband and I had been dating about three months. He had a murder mystery gig at a hotel in Fort Worth. Afterwards the manager sent a bottle of champagne to the cast table. I wore a borrowed black cocktail dress, there was a band, and we danced. Later, I did my first (and only) karaoke, “Leader of the Pack” with two other women. It was terrible, but great fun, both of which I attribute to the champagne.

The absolute worst New Year’s was 2001, when Gary had another gig, this time a private party that I attended with him. We left before midnight “to beat the drunks,” but we were hit by a pickup running a red light, totaling our car and sending us both to the ER, where we greeted the millennium on side-by-side gurneys. We got home at 5 a.m., lucky to be only slightly injured, but the repercussions (physical, psychological and financial) continued for months. We ultimately had to get an attorney to reach a settlement from, yes, I’ll name the insurance company: USAA.

The year before, with the Y2K “scare,” a friend joined us to celebrate in the condo hot tub with a bottle of bubbly.

I’ve missed many New Year’s celebrations, including a couple (1990 and 2008) when I was deathly ill, once with the flu and the other with a violent stomach virus. The best “miss” was Savannah in 2012. After dinner and a bottle of wine at Paula Deen’s restaurant we went back to our b&b to rest, intending to go back out. I awoke with the clock reading 12:00, wondering why it was so quiet, then the fireworks and horns began. We didn’t get up.

Lately we stay home and don’t even last till midnight. This year we’ll have Chloe overnight. I’ll let her stay up, but at age seven she probably won’t make it till midnight. We’ll go to a couple of New Year’s Day parties.

Saying goodbye to a mostly very good year, I am putting my blog on hiatus for a short while. I have some deadline projects, including the print publicity for the next Paradox Players show, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks; I am about six months late in getting out a condo newsletter (not that anyone but me is counting); and being OCD I am desperate to do a massive cleaning and reorganization of the house. We are coming up on 15 years in the condo, the longest I’ve ever lived in one house. I believe God intended us to move every five years, so it’s time to pretend we’re moving and do a major purge. I even have a sage-sweetgrass bundle to smudge and purify afterwards. I’m hoping for a year of music, poetry, travel, good health and new experiences.

I also plan to refresh and redesign my blog. In the meantime, thank you for reading the ups and downs (mostly ups) of “Radical Retirement.” I wish everyone a healthy, happy and blessed 2014.

A spiritual practice of mindfulness and meditation will be part of my 2014.