Moving east after decades on Central Time, we adjust to late sunsets, to falling asleep in the second inning when our team plays in L.A. or Seattle. (First pitch at 10:10 p.m.!) Our body clocks have been slow to synchronize with the turn of the globe. How can I be hungry already? Is half the day really gone? We’re Midwesterners born and bred. Retiring to Eastern Time continues to be a small but formidable adventure.
After all, we’re in a new zone in other ways. A new town in a new state. New drivers’ licenses and bank accounts. Have to find a new plumber, a new barber, have to map routes for walking and biking. How far to the grocery store? The ice cream shop? Neighborhood pub? What’s the local newspaper called?
Me time, down time. On vacations, we learned of “island time.” I can find among my shelves of vinyl a few different renditions of “Tulsa Time.” Indeed, lots of songs on those LPs have “time” in their titles. Pink Floyd’s “Time,” obviously, and Todd Rundgren’s “A Long Time, A Long Way to Go” (particularly apt for us), plus “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” by Judy Collins, “Time Out of Mind” by Steely Dan, Neil Young’s “Comes a Time.” It would take some time to list ‘em all.
As the days ticked down to our retirement, Sharon and I purged, gave away books to our students—Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Edna O’Brien’s Time and Tide, Jack Finney’s Time and Again—donated furniture and clothes and dishes and tools. We jettisoned, cleaned out, cleared off. We’d read all about döstädning, Swedish death-cleaning, but we seemed to require a livelier, more spirited term. What’s the Swedish for “lifting,” for an almost physical sense of airiness, a higher zone (or ozone) of the spirit?
We’re lighter in this new light, retirement itself a new time zone perhaps, not so much starting over as resetting the clocks of both body and soul. On some days we experience a pleasant, nearly timeless free-floating, accepting the new in whatever way it might manifest itself. Other days, we set out to find it. The magnetic Scrabble letters on our fridge spell out the idea: “What shall we do today?” We have time, new time, for anything.
Recently retired and relocated, James Scruton reads and writes and hikes and bikes, as the mood strikes him. He takes his time.
