Good morning! Younger readers can retire off this essay right now, as I am writing for the elderly. HOWEVER, if you are young you will someday be where we are right now. So you may want to stay on and learn something. (Crabbiness.)
I retired in 1996 or so, and my husband retired about a year later. I don't know what I did with that year I had alone, but I should have photographed it or something. It was probably just too good to believe--being on the loose and having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day.
Read that last sentence over again, especially, "having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day."
I would not want to be completely alone now, but I do resent having company twenty-four-seven. I know, it's ungrateful of me. It's great that my husband and I are both in pretty good health so far, but I wonder if I am alone in wishing he'd go somewhere for about four hours every day, at a consistent time so I could count on it. It's a mistake for me to mention it because it hurts my husband's feelings, and, besides, he does not want to go. He has nowhere he'd rather be, so far as I can figure out, but here in the house or in the yard. Like so many American husbands, he has no pals with whom to share the joys of retirement. He is bigger than I am, and stronger. I need him in many ways around the house, but I don't like to call on him too much because it just reinforces his strong conviction that this little world can't function without his input, minute to minute. I have known some wives who shortly have said, "Listen, I ran this house and got your meals on the table for blank number of years without your interference. Scat!" However, for me and for many who will come after me in the future years, this won't be true as we too were out working.
When I was young with little kids, I had the luxury of not having to work for about ten years. What a blessing. What a bounty. There is no better sound than that of the front door slamming after the last of your housemates has gone off to work or school. You can actually go to the bathroom without someone turning over a cabinet full of dishes, or desperately needing some lost thing. You bathe at leisure, you get dressed, the sun is shining--and you still have hours ahead of you. Dishes to be done? You'll do them when you do them. Beds to be made? Only one if you have bought comforters for your kids and taught them how to pull them up to cover a multitude of books and toys. Groceries to be bought? Happily you can put the keys into your car and go off into the great world, there to see friends and strangers upon your own pleasure. You can sit at home alone at noon and savor the quiet and light and peace of solitary mid-day. Even if you still have toddlers about, they are not being critical nor showing you how they can mop the kitchen floor better and more frequently than you do. You can TAKE COURSES!! And learn things.
The Spanish word for "retire" is "jubilarse." I dont like the word because I always have a picture of people jumping up and down for joy and that isn't always the way it is. It is good for people not to have to go to work after they have put in a lifetime or even a partial lifetime at the daily grind. But you can't sit around and do nothing, you can't take over another person's role or life. And a woman has always had a life at her house even when she went out to work. It all depended on her, and she handled it and got used to its being HER house.
My house is not my own. I get so bound up in a deep resentment that I become immobilized. I know that that is a grave sin, a true flaw. I don't know how to get myself out of it and still stay in my house --where I , also retired, also want to be. Alone. Some of the time.
I was going to write about oysters today, but got sidetracked. Tomorrow I will write about my oyster sandwich that I had at PLSF last week with a friend. And I will write about the Gulf of Mexico, and about Oysters I Have Known. Hasta mañana from crabby old YAZZYBEL.
No comments:
Post a Comment