Sputterpub's Blog

I watched Compass while I drank coffee. She was patrolling the yard but I wasn’t interested in that; I was looking for signs of intestinal issues. That’s a euphemism. She was a healthy retriever mix when we adopted her at one, but within a year she started showing symptoms of the allergies that would dominate her future. Still, that future had continued for another 13 years so far, and she’s going strong now. She’s my model for how to age.

Silly name, though. She had it when she came to us and we figured it shouldn’t be changed. Then we noticed that it isn’t pronounced how it’s spelled. “Come piss” is how we had to call her, and our ideas about shortening it to Comp or Compy never took.

My landline rang. Mom is the only reason I still have one, so it’s always her or solicitors. I headed for the coffee pot as I answered.

“I talked to Betsy today,” my mother reported. “I called to cancel the ride to the rehearsal dinner.”

“Already? You’re always jumping the gun! The dinner isn’t for another three days.”

“I know, but I wanted them to be able to make whatever plans they need. I know I’ll be too tired to attend.”

“Mom. When I RSVP’d yes for you, I made it clear it was conditional. That you might be too tired. You could’ve waited till Friday morning to cancel.”

“I know, Mel. Sue me. It’s the way I am. At my age, I’m not going to change.”

Mom’s 90. She’s a very young 90, but she’ll be 91 in half a year. And about this subject, her infamous impatience, she’s right. I remember when my son was about four and spent a weekend with my parents. Alex came home and reported that he had a nice time but Grandma kept saying the same thing. “What did she say?” I asked. He looked up at me and flung his plump hands outward while pressing his elbows into his sides: “C’mon Jerry!” (Jerry is my dad’s name).

Alex is now 34. He’s getting married this weekend. My brother and sister-in-law are driving in for the Friday dinner and Saturday ceremony. They were going to stop at Mom’s – change clothes and chauffeur her to the rehearsal dinner, but Mom is opting to rest up on Friday so she can shine at the wedding.

“I can’t believe Betsy is so stupid,” Mom continued while I watched Compass squat. “She’s going to lose her son.” Oh dear: the dog was squirting liquid shit. I checked to see that there were a couple of towels near the door.

My sister-in-law is a bitch. She’s a complicated individual, of course, but the older she gets, the more dissatisfied she seems, the more she drinks, the more she says snarky things about others that are consistently overheard. Betsy is a bitch, we all alliterate. Just like we say Jack is a jerk, about her younger son.

It’s her older boy, Sam, about whom she’s being stupid. Sam is engaged to be married in a few months. His fiancee is gorgeous and charming. Her name is Isabella, she’s of Thai heritage, and she is a hard-working nurse/administrator for an assisted living complex. She’s devoted to Sam, and she sacrificed proximity to her own family so she could be with him in Oregon, while he matures and finds himself. But my brother and sister-in-law think Isabella is a manipulative conniving phony.

I’m surprised at Jeff. He’s not a gossip and he’s a pro at letting bad words and scenes not affect him. It was a skill he honed in our own little family. I think Betsy has pounded the critical opinion into his head with her incessant repetition. That’s another thing about her: she latches onto an opinion and chants it like a mantra.

“Isabella is a plastic, LA princess,” is her current tune. She says it to Jeff, she says it to me, she says it to Mom. She says it on the phone, she says it in emails, and based on the twisted bitter expression on her face lately, I’m sure she says it to herself. With each day of this engagement her hatefulness grows.

“Uh, Mom? I have to go. Compass has just had an ‘incident.’”

“Inside or out?”

“Out.”

“You’re used to it. One more thing…” And then she delivered the punchy line. “Betsy said Isabella hacked into her phone.”

“Wait a minute. Hacked into her phone? Isabella? How? For what? Was she listening to calls? Reading emails?”

“I guess she was reading emails.”

“What were they about?”

“I don’t know.” But of course we do. They contained nasty comments about Isabella. They were probably addressed to Jack’s wife, Lilah, aka “the most wonderful daughter-in-law in the world, who I love like my own.” Lilah is okay. She’s a bit homely but nice enough. She puts up with a lot of temper and selfishness from my nephew Jack-the-jerk. Clearly she doesn’t reciprocate Betsy’s affection, or she would have told her mother-in-law about the second trimester abortion that she underwent last year.

I know about it because Lilah confided in me. She and Jack stayed at my place the nights before and after the procedure. They had to come to the metropolis because late-term abortions aren’t performed where they live. It was a sad visit. I was never convinced that Lilah wanted to terminate the pregnancy. But Jack was adamant.

That’s when Jack outed Betsy about booze and her mouth. My mother keeps asking “Do you think Betsy’s an alcoholic?” but the rest of us know the answer too well to ask. She’s got all the symptoms: drinking alone, looking forward to her next, not stopping till she loses consciousness. And more. I’ve been around a lot of alkies, and she’s the first I’ve known who will drink till she passes out and then immediately resume drinking when she comes to.

Jack told me the reason Betsy has no friends. “Every single person she met,” he said to me about the household in which he grew up, “got to overhear her bad-mouthing them.” Talk about not learning from consequences! Instead of taking any responsibility for her smack-talk, Betsy always accuses the subject of deliberately eavesdropping on her loud drunken repetitive accusations. Yeesh.

Sure Betsy will lose Sam. She already has. Jack was her favorite, as all of us know (another repeated statement she’s made, and overheard more than once by Sam). Being Betsy’s favorite has been Jack’s doom.

Sam is considerate and sometimes affectionate toward his mother, but he’s not exactly respectful. Clearly and naturally, he will choose Isabella over Betsy. Isabella doesn’t have to do anything to make that happen.

Betsy will keep drinking. Betsy will slide deeper into selfishness. And I think she will continue to ruin her looks, more by bitterness than by alcohol. There’s irony there. It’s likely that the real source of Betsy’s enmity toward Isabella is simple jealousy. For Betsy is terrified of aging. She’s classically vain. She has had surgical work in the past and now she’s addicted to cosmetic dermatology. Made up and smiling, she resembles Michelle Pfeiffer, with similar coloring, wide eyes, generous mouth. But she’s no longer young. And even 40 years ago she was unremarkable, compared to Isabella.

We’ll all attend Alex’s wedding this weekend. I’m sure Betsy will drink too much to behave well. But I’m equally sure Mom will be overheard making redundant critical comments about Betsy. And Mom won’t need a drink to trigger her unfiltered mouth.

By then Compass was at the door. Wagging her tail and acting like she’s well. That dog gets up every day, figures out what’s working, and enjoys it. I picked up a towel and opened the door.

This is a work of fiction. Really.

I’ve heard the assertion that all writing is autobiographical, but that’s bullshit. Of course it’s biographical – what else could we be writing about except life? – but it ain’t necessarily auto.

At least the word autobiographical is sensible. All-Greek in origin. Unlike automobile. As a Latin teacher pointed out a couple of decades ago, auto is from the Greek and mobile has Latin for a parent. That’s silly. You might as well refer to a car as an ipse-kinetor.

In truth, writing fiction is a bit like dreaming. Disparate elements come together in surprising ways. It’s only always auto if the author is a raging egotist.

This is fiction. About a woman in her mid-60s taking on retirement. I’ll play her.

I know it’s time to stop the office job. I probably should have done it five years ago, but now is particularly appropriate. For one thing, the practice is dying a natural death, partly because of consolidations in the financial services industry but also because my referral network was always older than me, and they’ve gone ahead into this next phase of life. There are no new clients and the old ones are dying. The office really can’t afford me any more.

But the bigger thing is my disdain for the job. I note that my reaction to a ringing phone is a snarl. My immediate response to an email is resistance. When I travel around town and see the signs of small businesses my strong, almost visceral response is pity for the business owner.

Wow. Time to stop.

And I can do it with some grace. I live in a small house with no mortgage. I have a 401(k) balance. The federal government is depositing money in my checking account, on the first Wednesday after the seventh of each month. I no longer have to earn money.

So why am I so nervous?

I mean, why am I so much more nervous than normal? For I am a nervous person. I found that out when I was 20. I’m not one for letting others define me, but I went through a medical experience then and I still believe the doctor.

I was a junior in college when I was stricken with pains in my right side and the area between my neck and right shoulder. They came and went but when they were present I found it hard to take a full breath.

The student “hospital” (a so-so health center populated by medical people who were convinced that every symptom in any student was a sign of pregnancy or venereal disease) decided I’d had a gall bladder attack and told me to avoid all dietary fat. The pain was so scary I followed that advice. Mostly I lived on dry cereal and skim milk. The symptoms subsided and I lost weight.

My mother didn’t trust the diagnosis. When I came home she took me to an internist and he said if there had ever been a gall bladder issue it would show up on a GI scan. He was flabbergasted that the student hospital hadn’t run what turned out to be a simple, non-invasive test.

My gall bladder was fine. He ruled out other causes. He told me I had a tendency to a spastic colon (now known as Irritable Bowel Syndrome). He said it’s a nervous ailment. He was Jewish, like me, and he acknowledged that it’s as common in our tribe as myopia.

I protested that I’m not nervous. He gave me one of the best lines of my life. “My dear,” he said, “there’s a difference between nervous and hysterical. You’re not hysterical.”

Hah! Well, I learned a few tricks then. Like not to eat when agitated. To avoid drinking liquids while chewing. To be careful around trigger foods (corn, cauliflower). To watch how often I yawn, because yawning can mean swallowing air. Decades have passed, and I’ve never had an attack as bad as that first experience. Sure I poop a lot. Yes I’m often flatulent. No big deal.

And the fact is, there was plenty to be nervous about back in the spring of 1970. My college time was politically turbulent: Stop the Draft, Third World Studies, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and finally, that spring, the US invasions of Cambodia and Kent State. All that amidst the swirl of speech and freedom issues that predated those events. All that plus what must have been my gathering angst about what would come next, in real life, after I finished up at Cal. Sure I was nervous.

And now?

I’m shitting more than normal. Looser than normal. Almost to the point of cough-triggered leakage. That’s not TMI; we have an aging population and will have to start discussing it. The Internet says normal is three times a day to three times a week. We all know three times a week isn’t often enough. Lately I’m counting more like six times a day…

I have miscellaneous torso pains that may be orthopedic but are probably pockets of gas pressing where they shouldn’t. I have little attacks of amorphous anxiety, when I don’t want to sit still and I have no patience with peoples’ comments. I’m often talking to myself, telling myself to be reasonable, listing all my blessings and arguing with myself that I have no worries. WTF is going on with me?

The likely cause is this attempted retirement. I’ve been working in an office for 43 years. This is a big change, and I’m not sure what comes next. If I were diagnosing a friend, retirement would be my number one theory.

Except those sentences don’t ring true. I really think I’m ready. It’s not like I plan to travel or garden or take up bird-watching. I want to write more. Read more. Learn Spanish. I want to get into endocrinology and true nutritional science. I’m not concerned about aimless time.

So what is it? Second-hand social anxiety about my son’s upcoming wedding? I so want it to meet his expectations. An unsettled feeling about my little condominium association? One of our five units is going on the market this weekend, and that’s always disruptive during the sale process and also the getting-to-know-the-new-owner season. And then we have the issue with our oldest member: so far into octogenarian dementia that the whole neighborhood is now waiting for the APS ambulance to take her away for “evaluation,” and get into the bureaucratic process that will result in the sale of her unit.

Yeah. Those conditions are just part of the richness of life. I don’t think they’re causing my symptoms.

WTF? The best I can go with is just “change.” I never have liked surprises or spontaneity. I always want to grasp the overall plan.

After an adulthood of office work, suddenly I have time. I’m stunned by time. I’ve tentatively renamed my current condition “retimement.”

And I love having time. I’m luxuriating in it. But it’s a big change. Perhaps I’m just going to be unsettled for awhile. What do they call it: the new normal?

Meantime, though, something should be done. I’m not enjoying these anxiety attacks. I remind myself of a provisional adult about to matriculate from college, looking inward and wondering who I am. Just recently I noticed that I don’t like sweets. I never did want the oreo filling. I always preferred the cake to the frosting. I bought carnival cotton candy for my kids but never took any for myself. Don’t hand me a jelly bean or kernel of candy corn unless it’s so stale it’s fun to chew. Almost a year ago I stopped eating sugar and didn’t miss it, but it wasn’t till nine sugar-free months had passed that I understood why it was so easy. I’ve been plugged into food as long as I’ve had an eating disorder; how did I miss that?

It seems like I’ve always wondered if my acts are age-appropriate. And that’s continuing. It doesn’t seem age-appropriate to have identity questions at 66.

Then again, what do I know? I read somewhere that, when psychologists asked subjects to imagine themselves in the future, the “stranger” areas of the subjects’ brains started firing. The shrinks concluded that a person’s older persona is an alien as far as the present-day persona is concerned. Well, where’s the line? Maybe there’s a band of middleness between my knowledge of myself now and my ignorance about my future character. Maybe life transition is a period of acquaintance with a beloved stranger.

Probably I just need time.

That’s a relief. Because I don’t want to start the search for a good therapist any more than I want to try for Internet romance.

But I have to do something.

I think I’ll look into meditation.