Welcome to Your Next World: Reinventing Oneself in Retirement

Oh, the indignities of old age; they are first visited upon us at retirement parties. Here I am bedecked with diapers and coke bottle glasses and a clock to measure out my last hours. It's a comic vision of an all-to-real possible future as anyone who has cared for elderly parents knows. Yet, we're not ready for that yet. Today we move off the boat and go to the Hilton for a night and tomorrow morning we're on the 6:30 flight to Honolulu. Then to Houston, then to Norfolk, then across the mouth of the Chesapeake on that great tunnel-bridge and on up to Onancock and our new lives. I'm planning on a self reinvention of sorts. We owe ourselves a reinvention when we retire; a re-birth as something new, use the small wisdoms we're accrued over 61 years and make the last decades another fine adventure worthy of the one we just finished.

17 June 2008: At the Houston airport

A few hours ago I finished the longest part of the journey home--Guam to Honolulu to Houston. I'm now, with burning tired eyes, ready to walk from the Presidents Club to the gate for the last leg, Houston to Norfolk. I'll be glad to get there and meet up with Terry and make the hour-and-a-half drive across the tunnel-bridge and up the Eastern Shore to Onancock and home. Draggy stuff, this long-distance travel. Terry just called on the cell--she's in Newark.

Adrift, Sailor, Adrift!

I've got two weeks until I'm cut adrift from the safe harbor of full-time teaching. Blessed be he who floats free on a tranquil sea, all sails full and by, to determine his days only day by day, such as he pleases. For example, take these lovely blossoms floated across the cove last week. They found refuge under the stern of our boat for a brief time and then, turning slowly brown as they absobed the salt water, passed on. Of course, their time will be all too brief before they join the mud at the bottom of the cove....

Things left to do? The LIST: Fumigate the boat, get the truck ready for shipping, finished packing up my classroom, party with friends, and a myriad of other details. But, the stress is pretty much over. Thirty-two years worth of it. All those special kids I helped (or didn't), some of them now middle aged and paunchy. Makes me shudder. Think of it. Mr. Arvidson's Opus.

Then, on to the plane for the grueling trip, lubricated with scotch, from one of Earth's hemispheres to the other. Settling in to a small-town, Chesapeake Bay idyll. My life, as I plan it, will be filled with reading and Red Sox, scribbling and scrimping, long happy-hour afternoons, etc, etc. and then, one day, I, too, shall turn brown and sink into the mud at the bottom of the cove.

Mother's Day: Our Last on Guam

Here's a shot of what we faced today, Mother's Day, aboard our sailboat, VATNA on the island of Guam: Flowers, champagne (in the more correct, before-Noon form of a mimosa), and a small bouquet. It's a fine day here, too--sunny and breezy and it's excellent to be a love---whoops, I meant "a live." Slip of the fingers there.

I was up early this Sunday morning while the "mother," the "a love" person being celebrated, managed to sleep in, surrounded by her cats, despite my crashing around in the galley. I did a 50 minute run, ending it with a 15-minute walk and felt very cool about that, and then off to the Navy Exchange to get the necessities for the day.

Now, aftewards, Terry, her energy and intent bolstered by a cup of expresso, is packing up my clothes in preparation for leaving the island. For the past half and hour she's been dogging me to try on pants the better to sort them into these-go piles or these-don't-go piles. A pleasant enough exercise after my long run and half a bottle of bubbly.

I have 20 days left to work in my life. We get on the plane 17 June 2008 and fly, via Honolulu, and Newark, and then to Norfolk. With luck the cats will arrive with us and we'll all drive across the tunnel-bridge and up Rt. 13 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia to our new life ashore. We haven't sold the boat and I don't anticipate that happening before we leave. In that case, we'll keep her here and I'll fly back next spring and sail her to Austalia via the Caroline Islands and Papua New Guinea. Such a dandy adventure that would be.

A Guam Democratic Caucus in a Cockfight Ring and Viewing a Delicious Horizon, Yet.....

All we are is dust in the wind, all's well that ends well, I wish I was in the land of cotton, but, frankly, dear, I dont' give a damn---or do I?

In my last entry, long ago, I was celebrating a great sail and squirming under the pressure of an uncertain future--would I retire and would Terry get elected to the higher position in the teachers' union, and would be subsequently move back to our home on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

It has, in fact, all come to pass: My retirement is final, Terry is now--or will be, come August--the Federal Educaton Association Director for the Department of Defense Domestic Elementary and Seconday Schools, and we are, as of June 13th, leaving Guam for the lovely backwater town(literally) of Onancock, VA.

Such bitter-sweet surrender. If before I was squirming, now I'm looking back over my shoulder, gazing reluctantly at what we are indeed surrendering: the close proximity and joy of great friendships, a wonderful, world-class cruising sailboat, a tropical paradise.

Meanwhile, the Barack-Hillary debacle reaches across the far Pacific and finds this paradise (I must add here, it's a paradise if you have enough money--just enough money and no more) and I was there, casting my vote. The picture above is of me at the community center in our village of Santa Rita. I'm the haole on the left. As I was casting my vote under the smiling gaze of the mayor and a dozen volunteer election workers, it struck me that the last time I was here, I was watching a cockfight. Right here, where I was standing, checking the Obamba box, chickens with razors strapped to their legs, were killing each other in seconds flat.

It was a thrill, let me tell you, to have been part of this particular political cockfight, though its been somewhat elongated compared to the rooster's fight to the death. I felt famous, somehow, in the tiny village in the middle of the incredibly remote island of Guam--a speck in the vast galaxy that is the Pacific Ocean. I was casting a ballot that might make a difference, even under these circumstances. And I was right. Later it turned out that Barack won Guam by just seven votes. Had I not been there---who knows?

We are leaving Guam though, in about six weeks. Packing it in. Gone. One problem--so far, the boat has not sold and the phone is not ringing off the hook with potential buyers. Oh, well. If that's the case, we'll just have to adjust. If VATNA, sweet, sweet VATNA, does not sell by next January, I'll be forced to return, forced to get her ready, and forced to sail her away. I think I'll go south. A three day sail south of here are tiny atolls where they live in thatched huts. I want to see them. And I want to see the remote islands of Papua New Guinea and sail the coast of Australia where my hero Captain Cook came to fame. So, adjust we will. Even at my age. I guess I can give a damn for a while longer and let my dust blow around some more.

Rainy Sunday, Great Sail Yesterday, McCarthy's THE ROAD, Moving Back to VA?

Today in Guam its raining like a mug, as my son used to say. Rained all night, hard, on the cabin top of the boat, and it was very fine to wake up to the sound. Yesterday we sailed on a friend's lovely Tayana 43 and while out there, got caught in the shear line that's now over us. The leading edge of it caught us off guard as there didn't appear to be much wind in it as we watched it come over the island and descend on us. Nearly knocked us over before we could get the double-reefed main out and de-powered and the jib rolled up.

Never mind. It was all good fun and a nice small adventure. Back to reading/writing. Just finished Cormack McCarthy's The Road. Advice: Don't start it if you're depressed about the state of the world--or anything else, for that matter. More advice: Read it anyway. McCarthy is one of my favorite wordsmiths for a lot of reasons that don't include his use of humor to lighten things up a a bit once in a while. Hell, even Shakespeare did that.

No, the reason I admire McCarthy's writing is the haunting quality of the prose. He doesn't abide by the usual conventions of punctuation. No quotation marks, few commas, and lots of incomplete sentences (no subjects, just a verb and a prepositional phrase, maybe). The text is presented in short burst of paragraphs separated on the page by a few empty spaces.

It all works. You always know which character is speaking and the plot moves along, quivering and gripping, as the father and son move with painful slowness and uncertainty through a savage, ashen, cannibalistic, post-apocalyptic world.

I was into so deeply that when I left my first copy on the airplane when I flew back from the Mainland last month, that I bought another at an airport bookstore, price be damned.

I haven't written anything but blog entries since last summer after finishing A Drop of Wizard's Blood, the third book in my Eye of the Stallion fantasy trilogy. It is hard leaving a book after spending a year with the characters and their adventures. Most writers report a feeling of loss or loneliness and that goes for me, too. I wonder how McCarthy feels.

Today's rain will allow me to take the time to finish filling out my retirement paperwork. Once June rolls around (three months to go--an agony of waiting), I'll have all the time I need to write. I'm especially interested in the virtual book tours (VBT), now all the rage for writers to peddle their stuff on the Internet. Meanwhile, you can still order the first book, The Face in Amber on Amazon.

Last: We're getting ready in our minds for a possible move back to Virginia. We own a home in Onancock, a town that time forgot, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. Perfect.

A Winter's Tale: Revisiting the Summer Walk

I'm now relaxing in my room at the Sheraton Hotel at Bradley Airport listening to planes take off.

Just finished with being home in Massachusetts helping out. Cold, cold, cold. Tried to get walking in on a regular schedule, but did not have much luck. The weather (snow, freezing rain, temps in the low teens and twenties) and an unpredictable schedule kept me from my appointed rounds except for some rare times when I could squeeze one in.

On one of those occasions, though, after a light snow, I carried my new camera and caught these raccoon tracks, fairly fresh, in the long driveway that meanders through the forest. There are some more pix, too, of my sister's house on the pond in the forest, and some roads and fields.

More than just taking pictures with a camera, I've been taking more interesting mental pix and integrating them into the general idea for a novel. I'm excited about it. Another New England story with all the salient New England stuff-- family, gray skies, dirty snow, then blue skies and fresh pure air and frigid air, the grinding sameness of every day as the winter wears on, interminable and forbidding.

Now its back to Guam for the last four months of work before I retire. Can't wrap my brain around that idea. Reading: The Road by Cormack McCarthy. It is a fitting book for a New England winter, all ash and bitterness. This past few weeks, while living on a pond in a forest, I also dipped into Thoreau's Walden. His scolding, finger wagging wisdom, while sound enough advice, can get a bit tiresome.

The Dogs and the Detritus of War: When Will We Ever Learn?

Ah, the dogs and detritus of war. Here on Guam, it's everywhere, the rusty, the broken, the remnants of the late, great struggle between Imperial Japan and the Allies. And we live, on our sailboat, in the middle of it. In the middle of an old battlefield, in fact--the battle for Orote Point was fought all around where we now live so peacefully. Above is the memorial to the twenty five dobermans who died working with the Marines and a Japanese midget sub, designed to carry two lucky sailors and couple of torpedoes. It was found washed up on a local beach.

On the right, we have some anti-aircraft guns, or what's left of them. You can see the first one is still pointing up, just as the Japanese gunners would have left it as they died blasting away at American planes.

Below are the remains of the house where a family lived that manned the overseas telegraph cable station. It stretched across the Pacific and was a prime target of the Japanese when they invaded on December 8, 1941--the same day (it was December 7th on the other side of the International Dateline in Hawaii) that Pearl Harbor got hit. There's another house in pretty much the same shape as this one, back farther in the jungle.

Ever wonder what is inside those caves the Japanese were famous for dying in in the Pacific operations? Below, is one view of one of them.

And to the left is the inside of it. Probably a storage area for munitions. Just some Marine graffiti from 1977 in there now. Now that I think of it, the soldiers who left there mark here were fighting another American war at that time. Barney and James Cagney, wonder where they are now. Would be my age, probably.

In any event, there is peace here now. To the right, is Terry and her black cat, Zeke, in the cockpit of our boat, VATNA. Behind her, up in that green you see, is where the caves are. This was all a hell hole in July 1944 when the Marines took it back from the Japanese.