Life Interrupted

Life Interrupted

Whenever I have to fly somewhere and I have a choice, I always choose to fly earlier rather than later. Some people don’t want to be rushed on departure but I don’t want to hang around all day before leaving. I simply feel better getting to where I am going and then relaxing. I can’t seem to relax so well before going, but only after arriving. I’m sure it is like being a morning person versus a night person. When they have complete freedom to choose, some choose morning flights and some choose evening flights. I have always been this way, and since I didn’t grow up on a farm or under the watchful eye of Benjamin Franklin, I will assume that this is an innate tendency more than a learned behavior.

I rarely feel tired in the morning, but rather, am probably at my most productive. In fact, here I am at 7am, sitting on my patio in the early morning sunshine with the birds tweeting and bees buzzing while I hammer away at my chosen pastime, writing stories. I am also not a coffee person for some reason. When asked about that (it is a rarity that surprises people more than it should), I have, over the years, developed a story as to why. I lived for two years in a remote tropical valley in Costa Rica where the main crops were coffee, bananas and sugar cane. The first house we lived in was on a rough, largely untraveled, gravel road and had a banana plantation bordering the back yard (30 ft away), a sugar can field across the road (25 ft away) and was surrounded by hills with coffee bushes covering them (probably a quarter mile away). I cured myself of banana appetite by doing the green apple thing with green bananas. I can eat a banana, but it brings back unpleasant memories of those green bananas I overate at an early age. I don’t run into sugar cane much in life, but if I did I would immediately think of the local children with rotting teeth from too much chewing and sucking on the sweet pulpy stalks. As for coffee, I claim that some combination of the continuous roasting operation wafting the smell of cooking coffee over the countryside and a school trip to see the grimy workings of the coffee roasting operation put me off of coffee for good. I have no idea if that is the basis for my aversion to coffee, but it makes a good “Juan Valdez” story for the audience.

As for other forms of caffeine, I do partake of a Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke in the morning at times, but I am convinced that is more psychological than physiological. I have never been able to connect ingestion of caffeine directly with wakefulness. Then again, I have not been a participant in the Mountain Dew and Redbull clubs that jolt themselves with the extreme versions of the drug, so maybe I would feel it if I did that. I just don’t feel tired in the morning, almost regardless of the amount or quality of sleep I’ve gotten. I do, however, find myself getting drowsy in the late afternoon and there is a correlation between the degree of that and the amount of sleep I’ve had. I’ve been known to drink a Diet Pepsi when that happens, but I don’t really think it helps much. Moving around and keeping the blood flowing helps, but that’s about all that will.

Since Kim and I are together every morning now that I don’t scurry off to work somewhere, I have become aware of her daily habits. They certainly involve an early cup of strong coffee, and then a rather long review, via iPhone, of the day’s events and news. Once again, I tend to use my mornings for creative and productive pursuits, not for catching up with the world events. Obviously, I want to know if something dramatic has happened overnight, but generally I prefer to revise the day’s events with the evening news update and the just-before-bed summaries. Given the equal popularity of morning and evening news, I’m guessing that the world is pretty evenly split on this front, just like Kim and I are.

An interesting combination of these personal preferences (morning person and dislike for waiting to travel) has put me into an interesting spot right now. As I have explained time and again, I am trying to retire and trying to find peace in not trying to be productive all the time. I feel as though I am making progress. My shift to gardening and household projects is a step in the right direction and it does fill my day with activities and exercise that keep me from napping all day long. It has the added benefit of giving me lovely surroundings to contemplate and enjoy. Someone told me that even Jeff Bezos now takes time every day to do some gardening for the same reasons. I like that.

Another form of activity in retirement is enjoying the freedom to travel whenever you want and presumably when others are not so competing for the roadways or airways. I have had to put that trial on hold due to COVID, but that is now changing as we reopen the world. I have literally rebooted every trip planned for 2020 and done it or planned it for 2021. Life interrupted.

The first two trips were week-long road trips, one with friends to Mendocino that involved ticking off the California Missions from here to there, and the second was a motorcycle trip to Southern Utah that we just came back from two weeks ago. The next two are a much longer, five-week East Coast road trip that starts in five days, and a motorcycle trip to Northern Spain and Portugal that goes through the Pyrenees and along the Camino de Santiago for two weeks. The Spain trip happens in September and involves us getting on planes for the first time in eighteen months. Life, again, interrupted, but at least now resuming.

One can argue that anticipation of travel is almost as valuable for the psyche as travel itself. But that ignores my underlying “waiting to travel” syndrome. There were two weeks in between the Utah trip and the start of this East Coast trip. That is a decent reloading time for laundry and packing and sorting routine lifestyle issues out. We even used the interregnum to plan no less than four gatherings, two for family, one for friends (the guys who worked on the deck with me) and the neighbors. When I say it that way, I realize that was a lot to plan for a two week gap like this. The family gatherings were a dozen and two dozen in size, and the other two were ten and fifty in size. That totals to almost a hundred people entertained over a fortnight. What were we thinking? Maybe we were thinking we are doing it because our social lives have been so interrupted by COVID the last year that we had to make up for it.

We are prepared for the last two parties that happen on Saturday and Sunday. We’ve bought the outdoor waste bins, the acrylic ice buckets, the printed napkins and the other related party paraphernalia needed. We will go out and add to our beverage stockpile this morning, making sure to replenish the Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke especially. The rest is just general party prep on the day-of. As for the trip in five days, I have had the car serviced and even sprung for new tires yesterday (a bit premature, but better safe than sorry). The route and the hotels are all lined up. In other words, despite two parties, a long road trip and a long motorcycle trip on the docket, I am sitting here, with a Diet Coke in hand, on a morning where I feel like I have too little to do and productivity potential that is underutilized. I guess I still have a ways to go to find that retirement mantra for which I am searching. I still have to learn the difference between a life interrupted and a life of peace.