Starting a New Set of Habits

I’ve been retired from the classroom for six years.

The first two I spent in a near-catatonic state, transitioning from a world wherein my pavlovian day was regulated by bells every fifty-five or fifty-seven minutes or longer divisions spread across two-day arbitrations designed to give kids and teachers longer face-to-face sessions in constant flux.  I moved into a world without regulation beyond the solar cycle of day and night rolling through the seasons of Earth’s orbit.  

The first summer passed, and my adult body was conditioned to spring into teacher-prep week in August.  I had no lesson plans to prep for the new school year, and I physically stressed  because I was outside my patterned existence.  I needed a cushion, and, not being an alcoholic, I drove daily into Joplin for an ice cream “fix.”  It actually helped a little.

Gradually I have broken the shackles of the academic year, having sworn I would never go back to the pressures of teaching.  But teacher retirement coupled with politically-reduced Social Security herded me into substituting last year.  Parts of it were pretty good when I was able to interact with middle-school kids and the high-schoolers who enjoyed being there.  Parts of it were excruciating when I had to deal with angry high-schoolers who did -not- want to be confined to the school desk.  

It is now the end of the sixth year since my retirement.  I think I have detoxed enough to start actively constructing a new life system.  I’ve tried lots of things, even lots of places, and met people in different situations.  I love to teach, to share the excitement of learning new things, of gaining new experiences, of seeing new places.  I love projects that have beginnings, middles, and endings, that I can modularize into repeatable formats (lesson plans).  I love using my hands to fashion new artifacts . . . specifically little wooden cars, lathed projects, and small wooden objects.  I love handcrafted art.  I love the smells of my woodshop.

So I intend to write each morning for two hours in a designated place.  The designated place is the kitchen table.  Right now I don’t have access to a woodshop, so that bit’s on hold.  I’m going to get the materials to do some charcoal rubbings; those don’t take much space.  Then I’ll see.  I’ll do some more subbing with happier kids.

I’m sitting at an Ikea dining table in a 1930s kitchen in a working class suburb of London.  The glass door to the garden (back yard) opens to  twelve-foot by twenty-foot piece of astroturf bounded by oaks and palms in a four-foot dirt strip on the left, a falling-down wood panel fencing on the right with another dirt strip, and a chain link fence with irregular wooden boards across the back.  Don’t omit the mandatory dirt strip.  The commuter rails are right at forty-two  feet from where I sit (by Google distance measure), and the trains rattle, roar, whistle, wail, clatter, and growl northbound or southbound every four minutes between eight in the morning and midnight.  They do spread out after nine in the evening, but the bigger freights rumble past on the five lines the other side of the commuter lines in the darker hours.

We didn’t know about the trains when we leased this place, but their initial irritation has pretty much become white noise.

The washing machine in the house is gloriously effective with washing cycles from twenty-eight minutes to two hours.  One learns to be specific when selecting a cycle.  There is no matching dryer.  There are no clotheslines like those I grew up with on the Texas plains.  There is a white folding metal-and-cord contraption that opens up about ironing-table high and about eight feet long on the back porch (terrace).  I was surprised at how well it actually works.  The kink came when the landlady decided that the cracked triple-pane back door was a health-and-safety issue and locked us out of the garden.  That drying rack is now in our room, and we dry our laundry and bedsheet and duvet cover on it and on the wall-mounted radiator.  There is also a bent-wire clothes-drying rack to hang from the room’s window.

Our bedroom is eight feet wide by ten and a half feet long.  The white bed in the trackside corner is diagonally opposite the white Ikea wardrobe which is tucked into a niche formed by what I think is a heating and plumbing utility chase.  We unplugged and wound the cords to the  large-screen television around its wall mount, and I stole one of the three kitchen chairs to have a place to sit in our room other than on the bed.  A short white Ikea bedside cabinet completes the white—painted-walled ensemble.  I have scavenged a small blue plastic bakery crate and a wooden Spanish peaches crate to organize the books and papers we have accumulated in our rambles. 

The water closet is three narrow stairs down the hall to the kitchen.  The full bathroom -shower, no tub- is ten gray-carpeted steps upward beside that kitchen hall.  The stairs are gray-carpeted; the stairs are narrow; the stairs are steep. (And I have miles to go before I pee.) (Sorry, Mr. Frost.)  I took my tape measure to the water closet (because I carry a tape), and found it to be thirty and a half inches wide by forty and three-quarter inches deep.  The lavatory is eight inches wide and eighteen inches long.  It is not roomy.  And we provide our own paper.

We have kitchen privileges in the house with cabinet space under the wall-mounted ovens and a single shelf in the refrigerator.  “There is no room for (us) in the (freezer).  The discipline of reduced living space is, not invigorating really, not even stimulating, more an insistent pushing-into-a-mold sort of sensation.  It makes living in our tiny house (twelve feet by twenty) in Missouri’s wood feel positively spacious.  

The windows in the water closet and the upstairs bathroom have yet to be closed.  We only close our bedroom window on nights that go below forty Fahrenheit.  The ceramic floors in the kitchen and toilet and bath are frigid.

We are living much like an English working-class family instead of American tourists in three- and four-start accommodations.  It’s interesting. I actually educational.

This essay is a touch over eleven hundred words.  I started at nine of the clock; it is now eleven.  I’ll stop here because I’ve done my two hours and so I don’t leave things open-ended.

Because Life Just Keeps Getting Better.