Smalltime Soliloquy

"These days I sit on cornerstones

And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend"

The old chiming clock in the entry has today acquired a brand new tone at the quarter hour...something more querulous and slightly doubtful. Small birds come to the pine cone feeder now and demand to be identified: Black And White Warbler, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Tufted Titmouse, brown Carolina Wren; tiny pterodactyls whose names are bigger than they are. Books everywhere in this house beg to be read and people keep writing more. Bill Bryson's At Home whispers in my earbuds. Old music launches in the embedded player in my head, with or without permission, triggered by the scent of lavender soap, or a tone of voice, or a deep shade of green. 

And with each of these I become wholly fascinated; I want to go no further out into the world, but to stay right here and explore within, following each enticement until I have my fill. It's a life lived small. It condenses until I am not just contented with it; I am exhilarated by it. The Incredible Shrinking Life...The Interpolated Life.

In the background, behind the exploding countries, grasping headlines and blasts of  news that snatch at us, there have  been quiet, often troubled, conversations going on here amongst elderbloggers, especially those of us who have retired in the past five years. We did everything right. We saved, invested, balanced and polished those portfolios, and still we landed flat on our asses. Many of us cling to the slim hope that backing the right man in '08 might yet deliver us from evil. How could those careful plans fall apart? It isn't an exaggeration to say we are trying to figure out whether or not to sink into despair and bitterness.

I throw the travel brochures away without dreaming. I've learned to shop with my eyes alone. Dinner out at someplace fancier than the corner Italian is a semi-annual event. I have no answers and, frankly, I don't expect any. I've done my grieving--not that there won't be more, but I won't go back to black--and I am ready to capitalize on an only-child's familiarity with solitude and lower pitched pursuits. They suit my dwindled ration of vigor.

                                 Reverse cannot befall that fine Prosperity

                                         Whose sources are interior.

                                 As soon Adversity

                                 A diamond overtake,

                                 In far Bolivian ground;

                                 Misfortune hath no implement

                                 Could mar it, if it found.

                                                          --Emily Dickinson

I remember being a young mother of two, moving across the country every three or four years as the military dictated, so absorbed with the most important tasks in a woman's life: Creating home, making safety, nurturing those exquisite little children. My awareness was so entirely externalized that I could hardly hear my own thoughts; I might snag  half of a thought between the time I swung my legs into the bed at night and the instant my head hit the pillow. Who cared, when the senses were so full of four-year-olds, warm laundry, mashed potatoes with melted cheese? 

In those days, my parents were the age I am now and retired. They were frugal people by virtue of their Depression childhoods. I didn't give their life much thought (having so little room in my head for any thoughts at all), even though they told me about it. I knew they worked cross-word puzzles together; that my father golfed on Wednesdays; that my mother quilted with one group and learned to paint china with another; that my father followed my mother into avid political activism; that they loved to set out on day trips in the car with no intention but to turn down small roads they had often passed by and wondered about, to stop and talk with the people they found there and to learn their stories. 

Theirs was an enviably full and creative retirement, a well-rounded model for the rest of us. But I had no time to pay close attention to their lives. And they stayed put while I moved and moved and moved far away. And, what's worse, I imagined they really "had no life," because their big, important jobs were behind them. Their existence had contracted and mine had ballooned to burst my head. 

I figured they were bound to be dysthymic, dissatisfied with their limited worlds after the ado they'd once gone through. Now, of course, I see that I was wrong. Their lives were nearly frantic compared to mine today. And they were as contented with their lot as I am coming to be with mine, however reduced.

Many things limit my reach these days--modest means, fragile sinews, dwindling time--but nothing as yet limits my capacity. 

And I have the extreme pleasure of sharing this smalltime gig with you.

Carolina Wren, Black and White Warbler, Tufted Titmouse, Yellow-rumped Warbler