Today was my mother's 88th birthday, and to celebrate, Lindsay decided that her grandma should have a party.  Although my mother worried all week about food and drinks and silverware (none of which she was in charge of since Sue, Lindsay, and I were organizing the whole thing), I think that she was genuinely pleased with the results today.

I say "think" because with Mother, one never knows what really delights her.  She is the type of person who is not happy unless she can complain about something, and I think that she really has forgotten how to do much of anything other than to complain.  That has become her normal method of communication, and those of us who know her are used to her fretting by now. 

At any rate, she was surrounded by family and friends today, and that seemed to make her relatively happy.  She was by far not the oldest person in the room.  The winner in that category was my Godmother Ruth, who at age 96 was sharper mentally and physically than some of the others in attendance.  My Aunt Gertie also is older than Mom but only by 6 months.  Ruth and Gert get along better than the other older relatives who came, and the key to having a good old age was once again illustrated by their willingness to exercise and to control what they eat. Ruth told me that even at her age, she exercises every day.  She is thin, walks with assistance due to balance issues more than anything else, and she was pretty sharp mentally. She ate a small meal and was content. Those relatives who were overweight and couch-bound were far worse off. 

Rick declared on the way home that we MUST keep active if we want to have a good old age.  Although we cannot control what diseases might afflict us, we can  control how much we eat, what we eat, and how much physical activity we get.  The key to weight loss is well known: eat less than you burn off, and keep moving to stay strong and healthy. 

A healthy future is within my control, and I just hope that I am smart enough to learn from my elders and to keep moving toward a more promising future.  Genetics are on my side as far as longevity is concerned; who I am in my old age is still up to me.

The Latest Dirt

My mother told me yesterday that my grandfather Will, who apparently was a font of wisdom, used to say, "Company is good for a house."  What he meant by that was that when we expect company, we spend a great amount of time picking up and cleaning in the pretense that our homes always look that good.  Everyone buys into this myth because everyone is guilty of perpetrating it.

Yesterday, just because I could no longer stand to look at the crumbs under the kitchen table or the dust bunnies that skittered across my laminate floors, I cleaned my house to within an inch of its and my life.  Or I should say that I cleaned the den from top to bottom (so that we do not die of dust inhalation the first time I turn on the ceiling fan), and I did the same for the master bedroom.  The other rooms got a good sweeping and mopping in the hopes that we will survive with the rest until I finish packing what is stacked in the living room.  Those goods, of course, are staged to go into the U-Haul next week, destined for Florida.

Modern man is the one who screwed up this whole notion of clean.  God had the right idea.  He put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with good, rich dirt underneath their feet.  No need to sweep, and no need to pull out the trusty wet mop.  When something got too dirty, God sent the rain to hose it down.  No scrubbing necessary on Eve's part.  Food grew from the Earth (the original vegan diet), and fruit was plentiful on the trees.  What waste there was from what was consumed just got discarded in the bushes where it rotted and nourished the soil. Even human waste was deposited somewhere in the bushes to act as fertilizer.  Eve never laid hand on a toilet brush  or a can of Lysol.  No wonder they refer to the Garden as paradise.

Now that we messed everything up, we have this notion of having to make things clean.  I have been cleaning a house since I was a child back in the late fifties, and guess what -- the dirt just keeps coming back!  We drag it on on our feet, haul it in on our clothes, slough it off when we sleep, and generally make a mess of things each waking moment.  Adam and Eve did the same thing, but no one cared because it was all a part of nature.  Maybe if there had been more people around back then, Eve would have felt the need to trim the bushes for company, but I doubt that anyone would have noticed. 

I have to stop being so paranoid about dirt and trying to keep things picked up and clean. I am in the process of moving half og my household from storage in the basement to staging in the living room and garage.  Neither environment is spotlessly clean.  Dirt happens. And after all, if dirt was good enough for God, who am I to argue?

A Measure of Success

Why do we, as Americans, equate the accumulation of material possessions with success?  My primary task today is to start to sort and to stage boxes, furniture, and "things" that we want to take to Florida. As I look around my house and basement, I am absolutely astounded.

For the last 35 years, Rick and I have purchased enough material possessions to literally fill two homes.  We have, for many years, had a fairly lucrative lifestyle, so when we wanted something, we bought it.  And when we grew tired of something or our lifestyle changed, we did what ever other Midwestern couple does: we stored the goods in the basement.  Thirty-five years later, we have a full gym downstairs (that is not reflected in the size of my behind!), we have tables, lamps, dressers, book shelves, tools and more tools, bicycles, and boxes upon boxes of kitchen goods and other items from our hopefully soon-to-be-sold camper.

To illustrate how out-of-control our lifestyle has become, I need only to look at the hall closet that holds, among other things, six flashlights!  Who in this world needs six flashlights?  We are only two people.  If we each held one in each hand, we would still have an excess of two. I suppose I could tuck one under my arm facing backwards as I hold the other two, but does a person really need two headlights AND a tail light?   Maybe if I were outside walking at dusk such illumination would make sense, but I hardly think I need three lights to navigate through my kitchen.

Of course, the excess does not stop there.  I think I have the "Noah syndrome" because I seem to have many things in multiples of two:  two bicycles, two brooms, two bread pans, two cake pans, two pair of winter boots, and the list goes on.

At least with the Florida house, sanity may rule for a while as I scale back to one item per household.  Egad!  I just realized that I now have two houses! 

Is excess really a measure of success?  Why do we feel the need to have more than one of a useful item?  Will the world end if we only have one cake pan or one flashlight per person in the household? In watching the devastation that recent tornadoes have caused across this great land, I heard a person say, "The house is gone, but we are all still here.  Everything else can be replaced."  She was right.  Thousands of people are heartbroken to lose much of what they have worked for, but only people really count. Material goods can be replaced. 

Learning to live with less and to live simply is a lesson that Rick and I need to remember.  Our income is not what it once was, nor will it ever be again.  But we have more than enough worldly goods to get by, and the true measure of success, in my eyes, is being able to be content in living simply.

Building the Future

The last two days have been days of building. Yesterday Rick and I spent most of the day at Denmark building the vanity for our Florida main bathroom.  The glory of being married to a technical education teacher is that if we purchase the wood, we can go into the shop on the weekends and build whatever we want with a wonderful wood shop at our disposal.  Rick took dimensions for the new vanity when we were down in Florida in April, and he was able to draw the plans in CAD.  We purchased cherry wood for the face frame, drawers, and doors, and maple plywood for the rest.  We chose cherry because it is easy to work with even though we plan on painting the main vanity white.  Writing those words pains me since we are both opposed to painting any wood that has a good grain pattern, but in this case we think that cherry would look out of place against the floors if we chose to stain it. I want this house to be bright, clean, and filled with light.

We had already done the exterior and interior walls of the vanity and the drawer boxes. Yesterday we finished the face frame, toe kick, drawer fronts, and simple flat-panel doors.  We brought the component parts home because we are not going to assemble the vanity or have it painted until we get to Florida. Building the vanity gives us two advantages:  we can have exactly what we want (six full-extension drawers with double doors in the middle), and we can have it for a fraction of the cost.  We priced a similar vanity at an area cabinet shop for almost $3000, and even with expensive drawer slides, good wood, and pricey hardware, we will have a beautiful vanity for less than $1000.

We both would rather assemble the vanity here, but we are trying to move a household of essentials in a 12 foot trailer, so that particular piece will travel better flat, as will the beautiful cherry tables that Rick is in the process of making.  Our southern household is going to be decorated in "early American attic," -- a mixture of camp chairs, old lamps, ancient dressers, and blow up mattresses for now.  One set of tables will be resurrected from the basement since they were the first furniture we bought right after our marriage 35 years ago, and the other set of tables will be the ones we are building, circa 2011.

Today I tried to build a little organization into the stacks of files and office decorations that came home with me last Friday.  My goal was to get the paperwork filed so that I could have access in my upstairs office to the folders I think I may use in the fall.  The rest of the folders would be "inactive" files, stored in the basement, that I will have as backup if I ever am desperate enough to teach a one-credit vocational diploma class or a writing class again. If that urge ever does come, I will have to call good friends so they can talk me out of such foolishness.

As usual, my goals were greater than the time I had to fulfill them.  Other needs like laundry, baking bread to use up over-ripe bananas, trips to the grocery store, and calls to make appointments for later in the week all took up time.  I had a delightful lunch with my friend Bonnie whom I had neglected in trying to finish this last semester; however, that put me further behind in the paperwork.

Late afternoon found me building more toward the future. An appointment at the bank to close on our loan for the Florida house helped us step closer to that dream.  After dinner, I found a message from Cengage regarding my forthcoming contract with them -- once again building toward the future. In the midst of all that activity, the paperwork got little of my attention.

 But I guess that is what retirement is all about.  If goals exceed time, I will always have tomorrow.  My life for the past 29 years has revolved around paperwork-- either creating it, reading it, or grading it.  Now I have to deal with the consequences of those actions, and I will... but not until tomorrow.

A Window Opens

I was feeling pretty low yesterday trying to figure out why retiring from my job (rather than being forced out as so many have been in this horrible economy) has left me so unsettled. 

Perhaps that feeling comes from really believing I have been forced out of a job I love.  Wisconsin's new governor, Scott Walker, is the worst thing to happen to Wisconsin in many years, and he is probably the most vile man alive when it comes to protecting fair working conditions and education.  He and the Republican legislators have effectively lined the pockets of big business with money while declaring a crisis in the state budget.  Yes, Wisconsin's budget is in crisis, but Walker's "Budget Repair Bill" is not the answer.  Among other things, his bill strips state workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, removes even more state aid from education, and promises to change and to rob the state Retirement Trust Fund both of money and of the ways in which it distributes retirement benefits.  Walker has promised he would do this, and so far he has tried to make good on every promise he has published.  If he carries out his plan, I would stand to lose hundreds of thousands of retirement benefits in the next 20 years. I cannot afford taking that risk, so I had to retire now to try to preserve by rights to my retirement funds.

Rose Marie asked me yesterday if losing the potential to make almost $100,000 a year in salary is what caused me to be so upset.  Undoubtedly, yes.  Rick and I had planned to buy a second home in Florida, to pay it off in two years, and to have enough funds to remodel it.  We found a "fixer-upper" in March, attended the inspection in April (where we learned what a true "fixer-upper it really is!), and we are set to close on it in June.  The house is not large (1354 sq. ft.), but it has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, Florida room, and eventually a laundry room (as soon as we build the wall to separate that space from the one-car garage).  The house comes complete with a palm tree out front, a cactus in the back yard "jungle," and what seem to be great neighbors.  So what's the problem?  Money, of course.  With my loss of salary, we will not pay off the small mortgage even in two years, and our funds to remodel the house have been severely compromised.  We will need an amount equal to the mortgage just to remodel the house, and those funds are no longer as readily available as they would be if I continued to work.

Another element that adds to my sadness is the loss of working with colleagues that I enjoy.  I am an extrovert, so I like people, and I get my energy from being around people.  If I end up mostly just interacting with Rick and a few others, I think I will lose my mind.  I need to be with others and to feel useful and alive by helping others.

Displaced workers have told me that the worst thing about losing their jobs was losing their identity.  I am afraid of that also.  "What do you do?" is always the second question people who are trying to meet you ask -- after your name, of course.  What do I do?  "I'm a retired school teacher" sounds really foreign to me at this point.  I enjoyed the respect, the power, and the self-worth that I derived from teaching for the last 29 years, and I will miss that.  I am not sure I know who I am without my work. 

Maybe vanity also plays into my mood.  I am 57 years old.  I am too young to retire!  Retired school teachers are supposed to have all grey hair, lots of wrinkles, and a cane!  Although the hair is a little grey at the temples, and the wrinkles have been coming on for years, I do not feel I am anywhere near the age at which I should retire.  I have too much to do yet.  I want to continue to teach people and to help them learn.

OK, enough self-analysis.  After all, the title of this blog is "A window opens."  So what's up with that?

The first window to open is the chance to return to work on a part-time basis, but at this point I should not publish my plans because I have to maintain a break from my employers for 30 days.  I have no guarantees of any work for the fall at this time, but I hope that the potential is there.

The real "window" that opened actually happened on the day that I retired.  Rose told me to look for signs that retiring was the right thing to do.  I was still feeling pretty glum when I got home after a wonderful lunch where Rose consoled me and made me briefly smile.  I did not log into my computer, and I did not try to relax.  When I am really upset, I clean. Cleaning is my way of trying to gain control of my life.  So I started to sweep the floors, to organize the mess in the kitchen, and to pack office items and files away.

When Rick came home from work, the first thing he does is log on to his computer.  He is the one that discovered the open window.  Why do I keep referring to the window? The old phrase is, "When God closes a door, he opens a window."  I had made preliminary contact with Cengage Learning in the hopes that when I retired -- which was supposed to be three years from now -- I could do some editing or educational materials development for them.  Once I decided to retire this semester, I made contact with the company and told them of my change of plans.  I exchanged two e-mails with a woman named Elizabeth, and I sent her some PowerPoint slides that I had revised for one of their books since the slides they originally sent I thought were terrible.

The result, ironically, was the sign Rose told me to look for.  Elizabeth sent me an e-mail yesterday, the very day I officially retired, offering me a freelance contract to revise PowerPoint slides for the next editions of two of their books.  Both books are developmental writing texts, and both have slides that I will have to realign to the next edition and to redesign to better match the content of the new editions.  The pay, I hope, is reasonable.  I will make $700 per book, or $1400 for this contract.  While that is not a great deal of money, at this point it is not something I want to refuse either.  I am working again, and I feel good about being able to use my training and my knowledge to creatively produce a tangible product in the end.

The window God opened is in front of me.  When such windows appear, we should not walk past them without a glance.  We should not be afraid that the window is too dirty to see through, or that the landscape beyond the window is too foggy to reveal the details.  I decided yesterday to climb through that open window.  So far the ground beyond it seems firm.  The landscape is still foggy, and I cannot see in which true direction I am going yet, but I can move ahead cautiously, trying to avoid slippery slopes or hidden holes that might slow my progress.  As time progresses, the sun will get higher in the sky to burn off the fog, and I firmly believe that my path will become clear.

Take a Deep Breath, and Never Look Back

I retired today.  In response to hearing those words, most people would say, "Congratulations!"  However, I don't really feel any joy yet in what I have just done.  I retired after teaching English in a technical college for 29 years; the first eight were on a part-time basis, and the last 21 were as a full-time instructor.  For the most part, I enjoyed what I did.  I worked hard, got paid well, and felt a true sense of satisfaction when my students learned something that would help them better their lives.  I am only 57, and I leave my job with a true sense of having not completed everything I wanted to do.  Today should be a day of joy and celebration, yet I am heartbroken.

My friend Rose Marie knows of my feelings, and she asked me why I felt the way I do.  I wish I really knew.