Retirement Projects

  Chapter 2

  During the months when I was trying to nerve myself to retire, Barbara, one of my fellow teachers, told me “I think if I retired, the first thing I’d do is nothing for a few weeks or months. I’d read the paper until 10 o'clock and walk the dog and work in the garden. Try to get all that oxalis out of my back yard.” I liked the idea of trying not to do anything in particular, just hanging out for a while like a skinny Buddha, waiting for Enlightenment. The very first problem I encountered in retirement, before the venomous ex-cop Victor Carogna exploded my life, was the violent deceleration. One day you're a small part, however reluctant, of the teenage maelstrom of a modern high school, and the next you're an irrelevant old man, shuffling down the street with your hands in your pockets and nothing much to worry about except actinic damage on the back of your neck. It's like hitting a brick wall without your seatbelt.

  There are a least a couple of different ways you can handle that situation, one being to generate a flurry of activity – obligations, deadlines, volunteer gigs, lunch dates, and other forms of self-imposed structure – that will keep you too busy to wonder why you're doing any of it. The other approach is to go with it; to bore as far as you can into the pulpy flesh of inactivity and irrelevancy. The more useless you feel, the less you do, in that way drilling yourself mercilessly toward the core of Being and the ultimate question: Who the hell would I be if there weren't all these things that I do? Which – if you put aside eating, sleeping, elimination, breathing, and, if you can arrange any, sexual activity – are mostly things that human society imposes on you. Or that's the theory. I've been one of these people who devote most of their lives to avoiding the question of what their lives are really all about; i.e., making sure there's always an excuse not to examine things too closely. I've always felt a little guilty about that. I could see that retirement might give me a chance to strip away all the fluff of unreasoning responsibility that I'd wrapped myself in for more than a half-century; and what odd larva might then be exposed by the stark light of old age?

  It's not that I've never made any efforts in that area. When I was much younger, for example, I believed it would be possible, if I just applied myself with enough determination, to understand what I was doing on this planet. I had an idea that the thing to do was to get as far away as possible from the endless wanking of humanity, plunk myself down on a rock, and just wait for the Spirit of the Universe to come flooding in. Once I'd become a proper Cosmic Receptacle the rest would take care of itself. I would be equipped to return to the ways of mankind and both live in peace and make my mark.

  I therefore devoted a lot of effort to finding out-of-the-way places where there would be no other people to disrupt the subtle emanations of the Universe. For example, I toyed with the Walden idea, contemplated spending a winter in my parents' unwinterized cabin in northern Minnesota, went camping in the remotest places I could find on the map. I never did make contact with the cosmos in that way or, I have to admit, any other way. Some survival instinct for example, made me chicken out of the unwinterized cabin idea, which I now suspect would have left me either dead or insane if I'd managed to carry out the plan. Or I would have just gone running back to the central heating after three days, with my metaphysical tail between my legs.

  As for camping, I discovered it was hard to find nobody for any length of time, at least in the eastern part of the country. There was always some parkway with commuters not very far off, or if you did find a remote spot, a crowd of teenagers would soon show up in somebody's father's SUV and start partying and shooting at endangered species. In a final desperation effort, I celebrated moving in with my wife-to-be, Leilah, by quitting my job at the bank, buying a car, and heading out, by myself you understand, for a long tour of the Great American Desert. I washed up about a week later in a state park somewhere in central Nevada, lovely place, nothing but pines and rock and the summer remnant of a little stream, finally the perfect camping spot I'd been searching for all my young life. I sat in my rusty '67 Plymouth Valiant for quite a while with the door open, listening to the trickle of the stream and thinking about setting up my tent. Mountains loomed in massive silence all around, the sun hammered down on me, and there was nobody, anywhere. After about 15 minutes of that, I slammed the door and drove back to Leilah and the other 8 million people of New York City. That was pretty much the end of my trying to find nobody.

  The next 25 years I occupied with getting married, teacher training, finding and keeping a job, failing to have kids, and so on, all of which prevented me from thinking too much about cosmic emanations. But teaching is tiring and a little frustrating too, and there’s always been that other pull, toward employment oblivion, the end of hurrying, the death of the alarm clock and all that. After 25 years, the conviction that I should give that lifestyle a try before it was too late became very strong. And at that point Barbara's suggestion rang a bell, for all the reasons mentioned above. So I took my little pension, paddled to the edge of the river, and got out to sit on the bank.

  I put the Barbara Plan into operation: watch and wait. Watch the great River of Life and wait for it to bring something my way, a sun-bleached tree trunk or a floating cow that I could haul myself onto and drift with, watch my mind and wait for it to throw up a revelation about what it really wanted from life. This, I found, was not easy, but I stoutly persisted. I hung in there for weeks, which grew into a couple of months. Because I'm not capable of sitting still for whole days at a time, I became a homemaker. Working slowly and contemplatively, I penetrated the gloomy depths of the oven and some areas of the apartment that hadn't heard the roar of the vacuum cleaner for years, hoping to grasp the place of grease and dirt in the Universal Plan. I experimented with new dishes and fed them to my sometimes appreciative wife, who was still employed, being quite a few years younger than I am. I did minor repairs, and spent a lot of time petting, combing, and observing the cat, although I was never able to emulate her 20-hour-per-day sleep schedule. I cracked some books I should have read years ago – Crime and Punishment, Ulysses – and I read each new issue of the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker slowly from cover to cover. I smeared sunblock on my ears and took long walks over the eucalyptus hills and through the foggy valleys of San Francisco, went to an occasional matinee, sat for hours in coffee shops with my journal/sketchbook closed in front of me, idling and watching humanity bustling about its business, feeling guilty but bravely not giving in to it. I was determined to take this doing nothing thing as far as I could. It was as if, instead of fleeing like a dog from self-knowledge, I'd actually managed to sit in my car on that Nevada mountainside for a few days and nights, with the sun and stars wheeling over me, until my brain and body slowed down and I could begin to feel the messages seeping in, coalescing into a new worldview.

  And it worked. Eventually my patience was rewarded, and the river threw up this surprising piece of flotsam, like the kind of rolling snag that could sink one of Mark Twain’s steamboats: Leilah took off.