Slice of Life, #9

            It was in the 50s today, and the sun was spring cleaning. The sidewalks looked like the inside of an old-fashioned freezer being defrosted. As the pavement warmed, snow mounds began to melt from underneath (I feel the need to apologize for the litter of cigarette butts, even though none are mine) as well as angular frozen piles softening on exposed surfaces.*

Isolated snow piles resembled icebergs.

Some tree wells were still filled with snow, while in others the snow had melted fast.

One shop owner jump-started the softening process with a hose, 

while around the corner others attacked the frozen piles with shovels.

 

The warmer day with its heaps of dirty snow evokes my inner five-year-old. I crunch the edges of a snowbank with my shoe and watch it crumble. I kick a chunk of snow down the sidewalk like it's a soccer ball. I wish I had a little shovel so I could dig out my own snow cave. 

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* March 9: I must apologize for the confusing placement of the photos. Blogger's editor is clearly not WYSIWYG -- the pictures are supposed to be in  pairs. I must have chosen a very poor template for mixing text and visuals. At least now I know what I need for a template with the most flexibility. 

** March 31: I found a way to create a layout that displays these photos somewhat the way I wanted them. Much, much better.

Slice of Life, #8.5*

J. and I were watching a spring training game on TV between the Mets and the Red Sox. Gary Cohen, was one announcer, a longtime sportscaster for the Mets. The other voice was new, yet sounded vaguely familiar.

Around the fifth inning, two outfielders came too close to each other, leading Cohen and his associate to reminisce about a time 10 years ago when Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran did collide while each dived for a ball neither caught. Beltran had a concussion, and Cameron had numerous facial injuries and was never the same player again. The unknown announcer remembered seeing the collision from left field -- and immediately, I knew he was Cliff Floyd, one of the Mets' better left fielders. When I said it, J. remembered that he'd read that Cliff Floyd was going to do some sportscasting for the Mets this year.

I'm a big baseball fan, but not one of those obsessives who can name every lineup for my team back to its beginnings. Every now and then, though, a trivia fact will surface, and I will know something I didn't know I knew. It was fun.

*I've already posted to the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, but this was something I wanted to write about today, as well.

Slice of Life, #8

             J. walked outside today, the first time in five days. (Background: my husband fell on the ice over a year ago, and isn’t fully recovered yet – broken arm, complications from blood thinner, three months in the hospital and rehab, and a long-lasting neuropathy randomly causing his feet to feel like they’re on springs.) Walking outside in snow or ice, or even slush, is impossible, so the past week, with three snowfalls and below freezing temperatures. have made him feel imprisoned. Today, the streets are clear, it’s 50 degrees, so he was ready to give it a try.

            We live on a side street in Morningside Heights, in Manhattan, and the wind sweeps up off of the river, especially in winter. J. is still using a cane, and wind makes him  feel even unsteadier than his feet do. As we walked up toward Broadway, the wind was at our back and not too strong. We slowly got to Broadway, where there weren’t many people. The only obstacle he had to watch out for was a pink balloon at eye level tied to a storefront and bouncing erratically from air currents when the store door opened.

            When we turned at the next corner, the wind was in our faces. J. walked a short distance until he felt the wind more an enemy than a zephyr – and we retraced our steps. I’m glad he decided not to forge ahead; walking slowly is hard on my back.  When we were first together, I was the slow walker, and I often had to run to catch up; now he is the one pulling at my coat to slow down. I’m also glad it’s March, because it has to get warmer, and soon J. will be walking outside every day, and by himself.

Slice of Life, #7

            Today I spent a few hours at MoMA as part of the Art+Feminism Edit-a-Thon to upgrade Wikipedia’s quantity and quality of entries on women generally and women artists specifically. The Wikipedia world is arcane and complicated Beneath its veneer of populism, Wikipedia, founded in 2011, is run largely, 84%-92%, by men, and its entries largely reflect these men's interests and range of knowledge.

            We were given a half-hour training, in which we were introduced to the structure of a Wikipedia page, the purpose of the various tabs, how to create our user profile (and how to use Wiki markup, a simplified html), how to make an edit, how to add a citation or new text, how to communicate with other Wikipedians. Then we were allowed to start working, either by finding some women artists’ entries to add citations or new information to or, if we had more time, to try to create a new article entirely. Most important, we were told about the Wikipedia guidelines: (1) be objective (and avoid conflict of interest); (2) articles must be verifiable through reliable, published sources; and (3) entries had to be notable, notability being shown by having at least three different references from major publications in the field.

           Notability, to me, is the elephant in the Wikipedia universe. Since women are still often overlooked in mainstream culture and history, how will they pass the standard of notability? I never got a good answer to this question.

            I tried to create a new article, and immediately ran into the problem of finding enough outside sources online to meet “notability” guidelines.  Next, I found the director of an organization I helped start, but her entry was in Polish. I learned how I could translate it into English using Google Translate, edit it into idiomatic English, and reformat the footnotes. But the conflict of interest question arose, and I will need to do more research.

            While I didn’t make any changes to Wikipedia, I did meet some very interesting women: Debra Harris, who runs hip-hop tours for tourists to New York; Lady K, a hip-hop artist; a journalist who’s had to turn to corporate work as it’s harder than ever to make a living in journalism; and the various Wikipedia editors both female and male who were so helpful. It was a fun and exciting afternoon, and I hope to keep trying to get more women and better citations, and writing, into Wikipedia.

Slice of Life, #6

            My mother died five years ago. She was a pack rat. I have pack rat tendencies. One of the things of hers I’ve saved is her address book, a black six-ring pseudo-leather “Made in China Rolodex” notebook.

            Why have I kept it? I don’t know most of the people in it, other than family members, but certain items bring up memories. An envelope postmarked May 27, 1997 (a month after her sister died), from Lois Toby, the postmistress of the Vermont village where my aunt had lived. Several pages from my mother’s passport of her visas to China and Hong Kong (Apil 10, 1975; October 4, October 17, October 25, 1978). A page listing all the organizations she donated to in 2008; as they continued to solicit her in 2010 and 2011, I informed them all that she had died, using the collection of stamps she had amassed in her zeal for commemoratives – there was about $75 worth of them.

            One woman I never heard of, Vivien Horowitz, has the note: Plays Canasta. I learn that my mother had phone numbers for Florida Atlantic University’s Holocaust & Judaic Studies, the School of Arts/Museum, and Friends of Yiddish (which may no longer exist, as a search of FAU’s Web site today turns up links no more recent than 2007).

            Few of my mother’s interests are mine, but I miss her talking about them or telling me the latest U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association news or controversy, or about learning to play mah-jongg in her 80s. I want to tell her about the video of Leonard Nimoy talking about growing up speaking Yiddish. I want to keep our conversation going, and I’m sad that her end of it no longer exists. Only her address book is still here.

Slice of Life, #5

            A Delta flight landing at LaGuardia Airport this morning skidded off the runway and into an embankment and fence. With only a few minor injuries, all passengers were evacuated by chute. Immediately New York’s broadcast channels went into all news mode, with reporters reporting every tiny piece of information, as well as speculation, and misdescribing the video of we were watching. Once the TV news directors had decided to cover this “Breaking News,” voices had to fill the air.

            All of which reminded my husband, J., a former New York City reporter, of the following story. In the 1970s, J.’s newspaper assigned him to find out about a story an editor had heard about a charter plane carrying 40-some U.N. diplomats off for a retreat that had crashed in Pennsylvania. He called the F.A.A., whose spokesman said they had no information about a missing plane or crash, but J. was the third person who had asked about it, so they would look into it. J. called the U.N., and they didn’t know about any retreat, but they were also getting inquiries, and said they’d get back to him. No airport had any information about a charter plane departing its space. He continued to make calls, and to hear that other news organizations were also making calls, so he wrote a story about what he knew, which was mostly speculation, and the story was typeset and ready to go.

            Until just before the next edition, J. was told to keep working the story, but the news editor was not running with it yet, because it was just so “iffy.” And as J. continued to make his phone calls, it all evaporated. There was no plane crash, there was no plane, there was no U.N. retreat – there was nothing.

            J. was never able to trace the source of this nonexistent story. But in today’s world of “citizen journalism,” when everyone can have a blog or a Twitter account, rumors, misinformation, any information spreads quickly. Even when something unequivocally happens, like this airplane accident at LaGuardia, it’s far better for the sake of truth to not fill the air with words (like the ABC anchor saying that passengers were leaving the plane by walking on the wings, when those watching the video could clearly see they were sliding down a chute). Wait until you know something for sure, wait for confirmation from at least two sources, before repeating the latest “I just heard about...” 

Slice of Life, #4

             After days of sorting through receipts and documents last week and two hours today, my income taxes are filed! I went to H&R Block for the first time (long story), and my tax preparer was a former lawyer, a little heavyset, spotty gray mustache, wearing a green oxford shirt and striped tie of black, blue, and silver. He was chatty, too, becoming inquisitive when he saw our TIAA-CREF 1099-Rs, and asked where and what we’d taught. I explained my teaching saga – editing and journalism at NYU – and he inveighed against the poor writing of most young people today. But not his daughters, he hastened to add; they went to Brearley, which emphasized writing, so its students were at least adequate writers, and at best superior ones. Then he let me know that his younger daughter was in Turkey for her junior year and really loved the country, even though most tourists didn’t go there, preferring Paris or London. I chimed in that my daughter had gone to Turkey a few years ago and also loved it.

            Then he told me that his older daughter was in her second year of Teach for America in an inner-city school in St. Louis, and that now she understood how privileged she had been. The district she’d been assigned to had lost its accreditation, and in its reorganization, her high school had been designated college-prep STEM. But the school had no language teachers. Since she was a French teacher, she became the head of the language department of one, until the school hired an experienced Spanish teacher.

            His daughter isn’t going to make a career of teaching, but she’s become very interested in education policy, a trajectory too many Teach for America participants take. Does it really help schools that most need good, committed teachers to bring in recent college graduates for two years, then have them leave to be replaced by another cohort of two-year teachers? There is so much more I would have liked to know about this young woman’s experience, besides her learning that teaching is really hard. But my tax time was up and other clients were waiting.

Slice of Life, #3

           Maybe it’s the weather, but I keep thinking of dead people. Such as, the people no longer around for me to talk to about what I’ve just read or seen. I just finished reading a fascinating article in “The New York Review of Books” about France between the wars, learning among other things that the French government’s response to the Great Depression was to go the austerity route, so much that the military budget by 1936 was essentially zero. No wonder the French army succumbed so quickly to the Germans.  And eerily reminiscent of our own time, France’s first Jewish, and Socialist, prime minister, Leon Blum, prompted such hatred that government was stalled, making it impossible to overcome the Depression or rearm the military. I wanted to talk to my aunt and uncle who lived in France for several years in the 1950s, but they’ve been dead since 1997 and 2008.

            Then I watched Leonard Nimoy’s video posted at the Yiddish Book Center, talking about his youth and the role that Yiddish played – and he’d break into Yiddish occasionally. I couldn't understand the Yiddish, but I so wanted to be able to send that link to my mother, whose first language was Yiddish even though she was born in New York City. But she’s been dead for five years. All those incomplete conversations, unanswered questions, lost knowledge.

Slice of Life, #2

            On my way to the grocery store this evening, I hear a voice behind me in an admonishing tone: “It’s your body. You’re the one responsible for it. You have to use deodorant, you have to brush your teeth. It’s your friends who are going to smell you...” As they passed, I saw that it was a mother speaking to her, I guess, 12- or 13-year-old son.

            As they passed out of my hearing, I was reminded of the extremely controversial, if delightful, video of a few years back by Bomani Armah, called “Read a Book.” It took the message of “read a book, brush your teeth, wear deodorant, drink water, buy land, raise your kids” and wrapped it in hip-hop rhythms and language. BET played it like a public service announcement, and some (many?) black parents were deeply offended by the language and the booty shaking. But some (many?) kids got the message. (On YouTube, you can find at least one one, as well as Armah and his director being grilled on CNN.) I was also reminded of a Tina Fey and Amy Pohler “Weekend Update” skit parodying a few grown women’s attraction to teenage boys, how sexy their green teeth, bad breath, “skid marks in their shorts.” But I was also reminded of real (white) teenagers who wore the same sweater, even with food stains, for days because it was their favorite sweater. Or when I took baths maybe once a week because baths took so much longer than showers, and I didn’t like showers. And I drank Coke instead of water well into my 30s.

            Civilizing the human child into a grownup is hard work, maybe even a constant struggle throughout that human child's life. Remember that mom: “It’s your friends who are going to smell you...”

 

Slice of Life #1

            Technically, this is yesterday’s slice of life, not today’s. Today I did go outside the apartment. Yesterday I did not. I haven’t stayed indoors all day in many years. It was not a good day.

            Outside it was cold and breezy. My husband, who’s somewhat disabled since a fall on the ice over a year ago, was willing to go outside, but also willing to be talked out of it. I didn’t push for the walk.

            So I spent the day online. Visiting Facebook, seeing who had commented or shared my links, commenting on other’s posts, feeling like I was part of conversation moving slowly and erratically through virtuality. Watching a video of Leonard Nimoy talking about his relationship to Yiddish (I didn’t know he was Jewish!) and thinking about my dead mother, who would have enjoyed this article immensely. Becoming a FB friend with a woman who, it turns out, I may have known slightly 30 years ago. Discovering a small-world connection between my daughter and a woman I knew years ago, through a mutual acquaintance. Reading my e-mail and discovering I’d lost notes from a meeting, so missed some actions I maybe should have taken – and feeling bad about that. Learning that an early second-wave feminist I’ve met once has ovarian cancer.

            Offline, I finished reading “Freedom in the Family,” by Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due, for my book group. Checking online (yes, back onto the Internet), I learned that Patrician Due (Tananarive’s mother) died three years ago, and her husband, John D. Due Jr., wrote a piece for CNN last fall about restorative justice. 

            Finally, I cooked up a Moroccan chickpea stew from a New York Times recipe, and it was truly delicious. That alone made the day worthwhile, and not as claustrophobic as it felt while I lived through it.

6 more full-time days of work

On my four-day holiday, I started cleaning out my paper files at home, which will take days if not weeks. No writing, though. A little depressing. Especially after seeing On the Road, which shows Kerouac writing regularly when he isn't drinking, smoking dope, or taking bennies. He did do a lot of writing.

I had a brief fantasy of my replacement e-mailing me and my boss at work saying that he just couldn't do it, the job would be too much for him. What would I do? I would not stay, no, no, no. I'm leaving for my trip at the end of January, no matter what.

19 and counting...

I've been miscalculating, counting down to the first Monday I don't have to report to my office. But shouldn't I be counting down to the my last day in the office? That's 19, not 21.

My replacement has two weeks to learn everything. He'll miss the week between Christmas and New Year's, but that's only three work days anyway. And he's doing pretty well so far.

The Perils of Being a Dilettante

I'm very undisciplined and easily distracted. Unless I have deadlines from others (like going to an office, having specific work to do), it's too easy use up my time doing things I like doing, but that aren't essential to what I want to do. I could easily spend two hours reading the New York Times (in print) and then another hour or more playing Luxor Maj-jongg or Bejeweled, and another hour or more reading Facebook and clicking on the links friends have posted, and another hour or more reading all my e-mail and the various links other friends have posted -- and there you have it: almost seven hours just reading stuff that's interesting (many things are interesting to me) but not focused.

So I have to learn to set priorities, my own priorities. If I'm semi-retiring to write, writing has to be the first thing I do. If it's not supporting my writing, the reading has to wait. Writing, the writing group, reading books on writing, talking about writing: those are priorities. Reading for fun counts, but not online. Reading online is an open-ended temptation, links to links to links. Print books keep you in the book.

33 Days

My boss is on vacation, I'm doing his job and mine, and the new staff person, the hopefully-to-be-my-replacement, worked today. He seems to be doing okay, at least the questions he's been asking are good and reasonable ones. I haven't checked his work to see whether he missed anything egregious, but the editors whose work he read will doubtless give me feedback. I'm still feeling half in/half out. I need to remember how to do everything so I can fill in the replacement, yet I'm finding myself not caring about details that used to concern me.

Meanwhile, I had to make a phone call about my father's life insurance and only learned a crucial piece of information by using the old journalist's interview technique of asking, "Is there anything you want to tell me that I didn't ask about?" What I learned added an additional step to the process, but simplified another step. I still need to get in touch with my retirement account person and one of my father's accounts, and make some informational phone calls about Medigap and Part D. Retiring is such hard work!

What I Most Fear...

... that when I don't have an office to go to every day, I will just sleep into the afternoon, spend three hours reading the New York Times, go to the gym, and get home too late to make dinner out of one of my many new cookbooks.

When I told this to a colleague, she pooh-poohed my fear. Sleep, she said, read whatever you want to. Your time is your own, and you don't have to do anything. Enjoy yourself, you'll figure it out.

This will be much easier if I can follow her advice. Can I?

Retirement = Death?

That is stark.

But think about stages of living: after high school comes college (often), or perhaps a job; after college comes a job (or maybe graduate school); after a job comes moving in with someone, usually eventually getting married; after getting married, having a kid(s); after working for a while, getting another job, perhaps changing careers if you're lucky enough to have that freedom. After working for a long time, retiring. And what comes after retiring? A new career, yes, that's always a possibility; travel, if you've got the money. But what comes next? There's always something coming next. Until, inevitably, the end. Death. There's no avoiding it.

So retirement makes death feel that much closer. Leaning over your shoulder, perhaps. Breathing down your neck. Poking its hands in your pockets to keep warm.

What day is it?

Keeping track of what day it is, is not going to be easy when I no longer have to go the office. My husband is retired, and he can only remember what day it is by what day I am going to work now. But when we're both retired and semiretired, how will either of us remember what day it is? Will I have to write the day of the week on the medicine chest mirror before I go to sleep each night? Or cross off each day on the calendar in the kitchen before I go to bed?

At my father's retirement village, one resident would announce, at each meal, "Today is Wednesday, November 28" (or whatever day of the week and date it was). So if you woke up that morning and couldn't remember, at least you would be reminded at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And will it matter what day of the week it is?

Countdown...

In six weeks, I will leave the full-time workforce and no longer have to go to an office. Right this minute, that feels really good. But there are so many steps that still need to taken:
1. Sign up for Medicare Part B: two forms that need to be filled out
2. Sign up for a medigap policy and Part D  prescription coverage by December 7
3. Make sure my replacement at work will really work out (the first choice didn't at all)
4. Get used to using my to-do list again (I lost track of it the past few years)

There's more, but isn't this enough?

Delay, delay, delay

It was a whole month ago that I said I would work out my feelings and plans for this next stage of my life, semiretirement. And the first step was disappointing myself by writing nothing. I haven't posted here in 31 days. This is not new. Of course there have been conflicting demands. I'm still working. Then we had an almost hurricane, which fortunately did not cause me anything but inconvenience. Nothing like what happened to others in the region. Then work problems arose, which need to be extricated from. NaNoWriMo began, and I haven't done much with that either. 7,267 words in 16 days; at that rate I will have to write more than 3,000 words a day to get to 50,000 by the end of the month. That will never happen.

And then my father died yesterday. So there is the pull to write about that, to write about him, to write about why I feel only relief, or mostly relief. I will never have to call him again on the phone. I will not have to worry about him outliving his money. I will not have to worry about sending him to a nursing home or negotiating with California Medicaid. We just have to wind up his affairs, pay whatever outstanding bills there are -- and since Medicare is very slow about processing claims, I may not be able to distribute the estate until some time next year. Maybe after his taxes are filed.

So my idyllic dream of working a few hours a day a few days a month, and writing what I want to the rest of the time just isn't going to play out.

Let's see how long I go before posting here the next time.

Retirement, no, semiretirement

I'm moving into semiretirement in January, which is a major change for me. Working at home, setting up my own schedule for my own work and for the work for which I will be paid, not seeing other people (except my partner) unless I make the effort to see them -- all this will be new and diff-erent (or should I have written "diff-icult?).  So I will use this space to prepare and work through How to Go About It.

Twelve years ago Carl Klaus, founder of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, wrote a whole book on preparing for his impending retirement, Taking Retirement. Nine years ago Nan Bauer Maglin co-edited a volume of women writing on retirement, Women Confronting Retirement: A Nontraditional Guide. I doubt this will become a book. But I do invite anyone out there with thoughts, suggestions, questions, pitfalls to chime in. Let's have a conversation about this stage of life without the gung-ho, false cheeriness, and Hallmark card sentiments or the moan and groan of how bad things are now. However, hearty whining accompanied by action prompts are welcome: what can we actually DO about what's bothering us, whether it's the deterioration of our bodies or the deterioration of the body politic.

So, let's go...