Calendar

It’s time to buy a new calendar and I’m suddenly faced with another of retirement’s changes. I no longer need one.

That is, I no longer need a weekly one where I log my hours and list deadlines. I’ve had one since I was a college freshman. For years they where desk sized with pictures for every week. Then, when I went to work and had to carry it with me, they became pocket sized with no ornamentation.

Now a monthly one will do to remind me of my few appointments, mostly medical in nature. Indeed, since I no longer need to pull it out every day, a monthly one will be better at reminding me that something in the future is lurking somewhere on the page.

I wouldn’t even have to spend money if card shops still had those free ones they used to. But that would rob me of the pleasures of calendar hunting, one of those rituals of the new year. I’ve found some pocket sized ones with pictures, not as wonderful as the desk sized weeklies, but something still more aesthetic than utilitarian.

This could be a new market for those selling to the coming retirement class - only most of those, at least those who use calendars, probably carry their’s on their telephone, and won’t exchange that continuity with the wired world for mere paper. After all, aging shouldn’t be a time of regressing.

Leisure Time

Time is the gift of retirement.

Only, I’m discovering it’s not the vista of another lifetime, another ten or fifteen years, that’s important. It’s the recovery of all the minutes lost to work in a day.

I have breathing problems which means some nights I’m a restless sleeper. I couldn’t get up to do something useful until I could sleep. I couldn’t afford to fully wake up. I had to lay there remembering the countries of Africa to force myself to sleep. Wasted time.

I’d wake later than usual. I had to economize to be on time. Instead of fully remaking the bed, I’d settle for pulling up the covers. It saved a few seconds.

After breakfast, I couldn’t afford the time for the water to run hot. I’d leave the pan to soak. I’d didn’t have time to run a cloth over the counter to clean any crumbs. I couldn’t be late.

There was no time to empty the dishwasher. It slowly became the cupboard for the most commonly used dishes.

I’d go back to the bedroom, look at what needed to go into the laundry basket. That was a walk to another room. It could wait.

Slowly, without really being noticed, things got a bit seedy. Christmas breaks became times to catch up on chores. Only, with my last job, I even had to work a couple days the week everyone else was off. Things got grimmer.

And now, while I wait for the hot water to run, I take a sponge and clean a counter. Another day, the freezer top.

I’ve made no great effort to clean the house, simply fallen back into old routines.

The oldest recovered routine may be the habit of walking. I always had to walk when I was a student - to grade school, junior high and high school. In college I often rode a bike because the Michigan State campus was so large. When I was a graduate student, I rarely took a bus because I didn’t have enough money and it was often faster to walk in Philadelphia.

Then I started to work. Jobs were never near where I lived. I had to drive. Somehow, I wouldn’t think about walking anywhere when I got home. There was always something that had to be done in the house. The yard became a substitute for being outdoors.

Now I can walk each day, though rarely even a mile. One cannot recover youth. The body has changed. Muscles need retraining.

But still, other habits are being recovered that had been submerged so long they’d become part of some past life. The willingness, nay the desire, to walk to the top of a mountain or the end of an arroyo, not settle for the familiar.

Leisure time is very real, and not at all what people tell you it will be.

Nasturtiums before and after last week’s freeze.

Rat Mazes

I finally got out to the far arroyo yesterday. I usually walk out on Sundays, but last weekend I thought, I can do that anytime now, I have something else I want to do today.

As I followed ATV paths through the prairie that sits above a ranch road, I realized I didn’t need to just walk where I usually did, I could go farther north and see if I could get to the point where the arroyo crosses the county road.

As I ventured farther, I thought, how much we turn our supposed encounters with wild nature into comfortable routines. Every weekend I go out at the same time, walk the same path. Am I just condemned to protect myself from novel stimuli?

But then I remembered there were things that created my patterns, and only some of them change with retirement. While I tell others the reason I walk is my doctor made some strong noises, the real reason is I want to watch how the plants change from week to week and use photographs as my notes.

I learned plants have many adaptions to the sun in this bright, high altitude environment. One is that as the air warms, the rate of photosynthesis increases. Before the rate goes beyond the limits of a plant’s ability to process the energy, it finds ways to protect itself. One obvious technique is deliberately wilting during the day.

A less obvious method is the alteration of its biochemistry so that flower parts that absorb energy from the sun in the morning begin to reflect it before noon. It’s called the violaxanthin cycle.

You can’t see the difference in reflectivity, but the camera can. It’s thus much easier to photograph a flower before it’s gone into its protective mode. This means, in the summer, I leave early and get home by 9:30.

However, there’s also a lower limit for when I can walk. My camera isn’t able to take decent pictures early in the morning. Pictures are either muddy or look like they came from the bottom of an aquarium. As sun angles change in fall, I can photograph flowers much later in the morning, but I also can’t begin as early.

A second natural factor that has influenced when I walk is the wind, which comes up when the air warms. My camera isn’t quick enough to catch flowers on moving stems. You don’t realize until you try to photograph them, how many plants are in motion when you can’t yet feel a breeze. Such flexibility is, no doubt, another adaption to our hostile environment.

There is a band of time available then, which may be longer now than in July, but is still absolutely determined by nature.

It’s convenient that the natural limits for photographing flowers coincide with some personal ones. My body can’t tolerate high heat and bright sun. There’s a point in the morning when the air changes, when the sun becomes warmer, that forces me indoors.

I suspect my limits are related to some lung problems I developed as a child. I grew up staying out of the sun and walking more slowly than others. There was probably some early feedback cycle that led me to look at the ground to shelter my head, which in turn meant I began to notice plants and stones, which in turn made me go slower to notice more. It can take me 90 minutes to walk a little over a mile here on a Sunday.

It so happens the arroyo has areas where there are many plants, and other areas where there are few. I’ve explored some of those areas, but haven’t gone back to see what’s beyond or to try to figure out why the plants appear where they do. My usual walk, my personal rat maze, limited as it is by natural factors and my physical level of energy, stays within the limits of predictably interesting plants.

Retirement can’t undo the consequences of my parents’ smoking and housekeeping habits.

I don’t think I have the same limits when it comes to exploring the land at a more general level. My car protects me from the heat. I haven’t yet discovered if the sun has any effects on my ability to photograph rocks.

For now, I drive out later in the morning, after the sun has reached that point that sends me indoors. I could leave earlier, but my mind is more creative when I first wake and I don’t want to get into the car until I’ve come to the end of that particular cycle. It’s when I write.

The only other limit I know so far is that I have a limited capacity to be stimulated. If I see something that overwhelms my senses in some way, I might as well return home. I won’t notice any thing more, no matter how spectacular until I’ve fully absorbed what I’ve already seen. It can take hours.

So, I’m venturing out slowly, sometimes looking at those things like La Bajada Hill that I deliberately ignored so I could get on with my life, get to Albuquerque to buy something. In a way, I’m building immunities. Once I’ve fully absorbed my near environment, then I can pass through it quickly to get to something new.

There’s one routine that won’t go away, and may even expand: downloading cameras, recharging batteries, renaming pictures and taking notes on them while I still remember what they are. These tedious, but necessary tasks have become part of my decompression routine, part of the way I process the stimulus from the day, and reset my sensory receptors for the next outing.

If, as I anticipate, I’m going to be spending time in motel rooms in places where the natural landscape is more interesting than the human one, this may become a welcome time hog.

The major difference retirement has made so far is that my adventures no longer need to be limited to the time on weekends that isn’t already committed to such chores as the weekly visit to the post office, but I can't suddenly ignore natural rhythms.

Pictures taken yesterday, from top to bottom are: 1- cottonwoods, 2 - strap-leaf spine aster, 3 - chamisa, 4 - Russian thistle, 5 - juniper berries, 6 - purple aster, 7 - mushrooms, and 8 - tamarix surrounded by chamisa with juniper in the back.

I Am Not a Camera

The sun’s rising later. It’s dark when I wake at six. Instead of getting up, I check the heated mattress pad is still connected and snuggle back in. It’s the best time for unstructured thinking.

Some people have everything organized. Before they go on a trip, they’ve read the guidebooks, have an itinerary, know what to expect. Perhaps they’re anxious they’ll never get another chance, that this is their one opportunity and they can’t afford to blow it.

I haven’t classed them yet as a separate species, but it’s a possibility.

Or maybe I should be thankful my mother was too intimidated by Spock and Freud to do anything serious about toilet training.

I learned long ago there’s no place in this country I can’t return to. That doesn’t mean things won’t change. Some evenings clouds are so special I wish could remember them. But there’s always the possibility for something wonderful some other night, some other summer.

The freedom of retirement is that time constraints are gone. If I didn’t get quite the picture I wanted Saturday I can drive back today. Or will be able to soon. Please let that woman who interviewed for the job yesterday come to terms with my boss.

A camera matters if you’re not blessed with a painter’s imagination and skills. I may not be able to recall those clouds, but it should remind me.

And so, this morning as I lay in bed I returned to the problem of photographing rocks that apparently send no signals digital equipment can recognize. I thought maybe I should simply take a picture of the same section of that rock with each light setting on the new camera to see the differences.

Maybe tonight.

This morning there was more light coming through the kitchen window and camera settings made do difference. The rock was determined to be brown and out of focus.

I took out the other camera, the close up one, which is turning out to be much more difficult to learn than I expected. It rarely gives me what I want when I first try, but always teases me with possibilities. It makes clear, it’s always my fault it doesn’t do what’s expected.

It folds in half, so it can be set it on its base in a V or triangle to take pictures. However, the lens is at an angle to the flat rock and gets blinded by reflecting light. I tried standing it on its end in a great U so the lens was perpendicular to the rock and things got better.

Then I decided to take a wet paper towel and wash the rock in a few places. As a child I learned it was worth while washing quartz, but useless if not dangerous with sandstone. The idea of washing a sedimentary rock is quite alien.

However, I discovered the wet rock photographed better than the dry one. Perhaps the water plays with the lens so the light reflects differently. It was finally possible to see the bits of mica and the flakes of quartz, though the focus was still fuzzy, the glints bright blurs, and the light glaring.

I have no choice but to master these cameras - a new one won’t be better, just different. But I curse them a lot, because throwing them across the room would, contrary to most rules of punishment, actually hurt them more than me.

Please, I beg them, if you can’t see what I see, can’t you please show me something better?

Tell me, is that pebbly surface of dark carbon and white silica something the land looked like before it hardened into rock? Can you show me the past?

The Journey Begins

I finally talked back to my boss one too many times.

Or, he finally made me mad one too many times.

Take your choice.

Two weeks ago he came in angry about something, maybe the extra zero on an invoice. When he paused, I reminded him it really was time for him to find my replacement.

Besides, I added, now that I get social security, I didn’t want to pay taxes on it.

There’s nothing like a tax scam to motivate the man.

Within days the ad was in the paper, he was looking for the best qualified person he thought he could bully, and I was counting the days to freedom.

Of course, retirement is the great bluff caller.

All those things you’ve been saying you’d do, if only you had time.

Well, now you have time and no excuses.

My boss’s mother came in to see what I was going to do.

I told her that since I'd had to buy a new car in March, I wanted to drive around the state and look at places I hadn’t truly seen.

I reminded her that the Las Conchas fire this summer had gotten me started, those days when the smoke was so bad I climbed into the car and drove towards Taos just to get my lungs into air conditioning.

The first time I headed out I had no map, no plan. I only knew I couldn’t go south or west because of the smoke. I didn’t want to go east because the road to Chimayó is too treacherous. That left Taos.

I can’t say I had no map. When I pulled it out I discovered it was issued when Garrey Carruthers was governor. That was between 1987 and 1991. I moved to New Mexico in the fall of 1991. While I’ve seen little evidence of road construction in the past 20 years, I thought I really could do with something better.

A friend whom I’ll simply call the Rock Queen and I went scavenging in Borders, but it was early days and there were no bargains. However, they did have DeLorme’s atlas for the state, and it’s been worth every penny I overpaid.

The next time the smoke got bad, I took the Dixon cut off. Just as I passed the crest of the Sangre de Cristo and headed towards the Carson National Forest, the car’s warning system came up to tell me I had a tire going soft. Route 75 may be a state road, but it’s about as isolated as you want to get in this state.

The next day one of the tires was flat. The tow truck operator, the car dealer, the tire dealer - none could see any reason why. The only possible explanation is that the manufacturer used soft tires to get better car mileage, and such tires aren’t really good enough for driving on two lane roads in New Mexico where shoulders are rarer than the need to get out of the way of some hell hound riding your bumper.

So the next purchase was a new set of tires.

My next expeditions were still day trips into parts of Rio Arriba county. It soon became apparent that gas stations don’t exist once you leave Española. All many towns have left are convenience stores with slow turn over.

I was grateful that car does get good mileage.

I also learned to always throw ice and bottled water in the cooler and a bag of potato chips, just in case. I wasn’t going to do any better in those out of the way convenience stores, and the local ones were probably cheaper.

Last week, after my boss had narrowed his choice, I ordered a new camera, one so cheap I could replace it if it bounced off the car seat. I picked the Sony that advertised wide-angled landscape capabilities. That was the one thing my current camera didn’t do well, though I will admit expecting it to do close ups of a fire some 20 miles away is a bit much.

Again, I learned inexpensive is another way to provide quality by eliminating necessities. In this case, you have to remove the battery to recharge it. It’s possible to buy some kind of device to connect the charger to the car’s electric system, but it’s really cheaper just to buy more batteries and a surge suppressor for those times I expect to spend in some motel in some remote part of this state.

Photograph: The Las Conchas fire taken from my back porch on the first day just before 8pm when the flames were becoming visible in the smoke. I pushed the close-up focus beyond the capacity of the camera to handle both the foreground and the Los Alamos area some 20 miles away