Retired Again

The heavy winter rains have come and gone, my glorious week at school finished and I’m retired again. Until January, at least, when multiple courses in Brazil await me. Took a 5-mile walk yesterday and that was lovely to get back into roaming through this lovely city. One of retirement’s perks not available in the same way in the 9-5, five-day work week. My exercise at school consisted of trying to show 4-year-olds how to do the crabwalk— a bit more of a challenge at 73 years old than it used to be! (But hey, I kind of did it!)

 

What lies ahead? Visiting the grandkids in Portland, where we haven’t been for 6 months or so. Thanksgiving without my daughter Talia, who is off in the mountains with friends celebrating her 40^th(!!) birthday. Recording more episodes of my new Podcast. (Today I did Episode 4— C is for Character.) Playing piano at the Jewish Home, the Redwoods (also for Senior Living), the SIP Tea Room. Getting a wisdom tooth pulled and seeing a Physical Therapist for exercises related to my vestibular peripheral issue. 

 

When the rains start again, I’m prepared with a new jigsaw puzzle I bought yesterday. (Been a while since I’ve done that!). Continuing to listen to Audible books (just finished The Life Impossible and starting on The Senator’s Wife) and reading books (re-reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and then back to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) Continuing on my project to re-memorize some 300 jazz standards on the piano, with new-found attention to the fine songs of Lerner and Loewe. And alongside the perpetual Bach, exploring pianistic versions of opera arias. Also the nightly TV viewing, Grantchester at the moment. 

 

The horror receding a little bit further into the background, with four or more weird dreams with him-who-shall-not-be-named appearing and actually being friendly and affable and kind. Sad to say that one piece of incontrovertible wisdom I can claim in my advancing years is that it is extremely rare for people with either a lifetime of unchosen trauma or a habitual choice to be their worst selves to suddenly change. Dicken’s Scrooge gave me hope that this might be so, but in real life, who amongst us has witnessed it? Seen someone suddenly give up on being nasty and mean and hurtful and ask for forgiveness from others and from their own former self. Vow to live an entirely different kind of life and be washed clean by the epiphanic waters of love and redemption. If you know someone like that, I’d like to meet them.

 

Part of the wisdom is for us to stop waiting for it, to stop thinking that we can be the agent of change for another, to re-direct that energy to our own need to be yet kinder and more forgiving and more accepting to others and to ourselves. That is within our grasp and that level of growth is indeed something I’ve witnessed both in myself and others. 

 

If nothing else, it’s a good retirement project. Kind of like fitting together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of our sometimes scattered or broken apart life and piece by piece, revealing the beautiful image of who we were meant to be. 

 

Onward!