https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJXCZAEa7O9OH_ZbqUW_E-E-w5y9MDRsh
Harold’s Room
Chapter Eleven
Well. Isn’t life interesting? Harold has behaved unusually this winter, due to the unusual weather conditions I had assumed. Now I am behaving unusually. I am thinking that my God (whose current incarnation you might remember is Ruby, the bag lady from Selma, Alabama) has kept waking him so he could support me through the winter, which is usually emotionally troublesome for me, but which has gone quite well this year. She knew what was coming and knew I would need for Harold to be awake: I suddenly seem to be retired. As of February 12, 2016, my services, and the services of several of my fellow employees, were no longer required by our employer, through no fault of our own we were assured. It seems the company was going into “survival mode” due to some bad luck, so we were told, and that fewer people were going to have to do more. Bad decisions rather than bad luck would be more accurate, against which I had advised four years previously. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and disregard the customers who put you in the position to have those eggs to gamble with in the first place. You might need some more stake money to stay in the game later. We will leave it at that. Interestingly enough, I had signed up for Medicare Part A ten days earlier, because I suddenly realized upon seeing a notification on the annual Social Security Administration report I had received regarding signing up for Medicare three months before your sixty-fifth birthday that I was tardy, as my birthday is April 25th. Oops. Don’t want to piss-off the SSA. The rest of my life sort of depends on them. Best we remain friends, so I signed up. Then, ten days later I find that circumstances have changed drastically.
I considered my options of trying to find someone who wanted to hire an old pump man for a reasonable sum of money for one year (not likely), or filling out stupid reports once a week for job searches I didn’t even want to pursue, given the aforementioned, so I could receive a pittance upon which I could not survive anyway. Being a “greeter” at a big retail store? Definitely not something I wanted to do. Take one of those options, or take the hit to retire “a year early” at sixty-five, though all of my working life I had been told I could retire at sixty-five with full benefits, until I was informed otherwise very recently? Hmm. Let’s see. Hmm. Okay. Enough time spent. Screw you people! I am out of here! Poor, poor Harold. Suddenly he was stuck with me every day, all day. I don’t get out much. And poor, poor Lisa. I’ll leave it at that (but I will mention the word “jealous”). And poor, poor me (literally as well as figuratively), who suddenly discovers he needs to contact SSA immediately, if not sooner, and get signed up for Medicare B, and get the process of actual retirement scheduled and started. I also had to, of course, contact my financial advisor and start the process of gathering my miniscule number of far-flung eggs into one manageable basket, but then dividing them properly within different compartments of this basket where some of the eggs would provide me with a steady source of additional income, and some eggs would continue to compound for future requirements. At least I’m taking my own advice. Whee. How exciting. At least that’s what Harold said. He was awake off and on during this period of weeks that I spent getting all of the balls rolling, and he was obviously not impressed with my endeavors as a source of entertainment. Basically, he was bored shitless: “I woke up for this?! Put on some more music, you witless, ADD afflicted twit!” It has been so warm this year that he has been awake most of the time since my unforeseen retirement, much to his chagrin. I frequently do get absorbed or distracted and forget to put on selections for Harold’s winter enjoyment. He fussed at me earlier. He says that considering the fact that whenever he and I are together in the sunroom (he deigned to allow me to call it that, rather than Harold’s Room, its true name) there is music playing ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the time, he finds it ridiculous that I have not mentioned our musical selections frequently enough lately. The White Stripes, Elephant, at the moment. He has a point. In my defense I reminded him that during his recent, unexpected forays out of The Fortress Of Solitude, we were playing holiday tunes of varying types, going back all the way to the Halloween playlist he and I had put together just prior to his initial retreat to The Fortress and his first winter’s nap, and then during his unexpected emergence the Christmas tunes we had been playing since Thanksgiving evening. We will never play them before then, ever, but we have to start that evening because Lisa has to work Black Friday and Saturday, so we must try to bolster her spirits and get her in the beneficent Christmas mood before she has to go face that. I fear we have to keep feeding her doses and booster shots throughout the rest of the season as one inoculation will not suffice, so we continue to play Christmas tunes throughout. As you might imagine, Harold and I have quite a large selection from which to choose. I believe we could assemble a playlist for Lisa that would last the entire holiday season without her ever having to hear the same tune by the same artist twice. She has her favorites, though, so we try to cater to her. As long as it’s good, we don’t care what or who it is. This year we did pick up a few new ones: A Creole Christmas by various artists, Jimmy Buffett’s Christmas Island, and Leon Redbone’s album of the same name. We like islands, Harold, Lisa and I, and we wish we could afford our own, as long as it’s warm with a nice beach and some nice underwater photography areas with some nice coral. If sea turtles nested there it would be a major plus, and Harold, Lisa and I would guard those nests like a committee of mother crocodiles guarding theirs (I would not recommend approaching one.). Ah well. If wishes were horses…. The new additions to our Christmas collection were most welcome and appreciated since Jimmy has always been a favorite of mine, even if he did steal a story title I was going to use, and Leon’s voice is like dark, thick maple syrup. Cajun music? Oh hail yes. Love us some Dr. John The Night Tripper we do. Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya Doc! Yup. Creole Christmas music is right up our alley. Of course after New Year’s Day we got back to our usual play lists and it was business as usual. And then a legend passed: an integral part of my musical life, from the first time I heard Ziggy Stardust. Harold was awake on January 10th, and he and I went on a Bowie binge. We played everything we had, and then we decided we needed the extended version of Station To Station, and we played that until we passed out from exhaustion. Well, Harold from exhaustion, but possibly whiskey had something to do with my plummet to the darker realms. But he was out long before I was. And then it got cold, so for most of the remainder of January it was just me, Lisa, the winter birds, squirrels, raccoons, opossums and deer.
Oh. The hawk. I forgot about the hawk. I’m not sure if it was the young one from last summer and fall, more coordinated and less naive, or an older one, more adept and clever. It was in and out so fast I lean toward the latter. Whichever it was, it decided our free diner was its favorite deli and began to make multiple daily visits. Neither myself, Lisa nor the diner patrons appreciated this attention. Most of the diners successfully scattered, but an unfortunate few became the daily special. The doves exploded in a cloud of feathers and fluffy down as they were blasted in flight, or impacted on the ground from above. The smaller birds were deftly snatched right from the feeder perches in a beautiful show of aerial dexterity: pivot in the air, swing talons up to the vertical, snatch from below with one foot, using the other for balance, right yourself and go. Not all attacks were successful, but all were masterfully executed and came like a bolt from heaven. I’m pretty sure it was a more accomplished hunter and not the youngster from last year. He mostly sat around after a ridiculously futile failed attempt smack in the middle of the feeding area with a “What do I do now?” look on his face, waiting for the other birds to come back while he was in plain view. Not exceptionally clever, that. This one came in hot, like a stealth fighter on a strafing run, struck, and was gone. Nope. I do not believe it was the same bird as earlier, unless he was an exceptionally quick learner. This one has finesse. Don’t get me wrong. I love hawks and other birds of prey. They are exceptionally beautiful creatures, and I admire them greatly, especially owls. I admire the big cats, too, yet I would not want to see one of my human friends being devoured by a tiger, which is why I do not appreciate the hawks using our diner as their deli. Survival is survival and I understand the necessity, but I don’t have to like it when it is my friends who are being eaten. I can’t chase the hawks the way I can chase the foxes, so it is just a fact of nature I have to deal with.
It’s cold today and Harold is napping in the potted jungle, so possibly you would not mind a slight discourse on the effects of unexpected premature retirement on the human psyche? Or at least one human psyche. Given the fact that for most of my life since high school I have been gainfully employed, except for a few times I was laid-off or between jobs for short periods of time, and the one year I stayed home as a house father to watch Sean, my eldest, until he started first grade, because of several unfortunate events with baby-sitters, including him having his head engulfed in a Doberman Pinscher’s mouth, which required quite a few stitches. No, I did not sue. The owner was an old friend, and the dog wasn’t vicious. It was just jealous. Sean was sitting on Pam’s lap, and the dog wanted attention and was just trying to pull Sean off. But you get my point. Once he started first grade he could stay at our next door neighbors’ house after school until I got home from work. The point being that aside from those segments of my life I have always had to be at work at some point in the day, be it first, second or third shift, and suddenly on Monday, Februrary 15th, I was up and about with nowhere I had to be. Lisa’s being off on Monday’s helped, and I went to the grocery with her that morning. Not one of my favorite things to do, but it was somewhere to go. Tuesday was a different matter. I had the research to do regarding my options, and that kept me busy, but it still felt really odd, and it’s not getting any better now that I have finished the research, made the decision, and am actually, though not yet officially, retired. I will officially be retired June 1st. A nice lady at our local SSA office explained to me that if I retired in June rather than April it would mean an extra fifty dollars a month to me for the rest of my life. I did some quick computations and determined that my severance pay would cover my household responsibilities until the end of July when my first social security payment would hit the bank, and that anything else I needed or wanted could go on my credit cards. My annuity payments, which do begin in April, will give me just enough extra to pay some on those cards and at least keep me from debtor’s prison, and so, the decision was made. And here I sit wondering what to do.
My simple answer to the situation after Lisa leaves for work at seven-fifteen or there-abouts, is to converse with Harold for a while, watch the critters eat, fight and carouse, and then wander the house until I find something that needs to be done, do it, and then wander some more until I find something else and do that. Then I make another pot of coffee, sit and converse with Harold again while I sip the first cup and we watch our friends for a while, then I refill my cup and wander the house again until I find something else I need to do. This goes on all day. When sitting with Harold most of our conversations are concerning what our outside friends are doing, or what music we will listen to next, because yes indeed, now that I am home all day the music is on all day, or at least most days. There have been a few days, for instance the cold ones when Harold is napping like today and not much good for conversation, that I get somewhat over-underwhelmed with my nothing-to-do situation, and I sit and think for hours at a time, much like Harold does, and I forget to turn on the music. Those are not good days.
There is definitely such a thing as thinking too much. Lisa tells me I need to let the past go, and that I need to not fret so over the tiny little things, or the future, but for me that seems to be impossible. I used to read. A lot. At least one book a week for most of my life. Since my mid-teens it has been mostly sci-fi. Taking my mind to other worlds kept me sane. When my mind isn’t occupied it goes places I do not want it to go. It seems as if I remember every bad thing I ever did to anyone else in my whole life, and I do fret over details and worry about all of the tiny little things that could possibly go awry in the immediate future. I am very good in emergencies, but little things drive me nuts. Reading took me away from all of that. I also listened to copious amounts of music in my teens, and dabbled with drawing, painting and meditation, but as I grew older those things slipped away and it was just the reading and the music, and then a couple of years ago the reading slipped away and it has become solely the music on which I depend, and the writing, which I do not do often enough. Much like reading, I used to write something every day for years. I have numerous journals, notepads and notebooks filled with my spidery scrawls, and I used to read back through them looking for inspiration for the poems I used to write, but I have not done either of those things for a long time either. The music has remained a constant. I rely on the genius of others to survive. Always have in some form. But isn’t that what being human is? Without music, art and literature, we are no more than the worker ants scrambling about at the behest of others to ensure the survival of the colony.
So there you go. That’s what an early, unplanned retirement can do to one human psyche. I frequently question my value to society now that I no longer contribute to its existence by helping to ensure that the world of pumps runs smoothly. Think of your own life without pumps: no running water, no sanitation, no cars, no planes, no electricity, no natural gas, oil or gasoline, no washing machines and on and on. The modern world would not exist without pumps. You wood be living in a wood or coal heated cabin and hauling water up from the crick in a bucket for your family and your stock. I felt useful helping to make sure peoples’ pumps kept running, or that they were using the best one I could possibly find for the job at hand. Now I do a lot of things around the house I used to not do, to try to help Lisa, though not as much as she wishes I would, and I fix things that need fixing here and there, and that helps me feel useful, but I still feel there is something else I need to be doing. The one thing that keeps running through my mind is that when I started dabbling with writing in the late eighties I started thinking to myself that I believed that I’d like to keep it up, and that when I retired I would maybe have the time and inclination to write more. Unfortunately I haven’t done it nearly as much as I had foreseen and intended, but that’s what Harold is for. He keeps telling me, “Look dumbass, why do you think I’m here? We met so that when you slack off I can give you some serious shit about not doing what you told Ruby you were going to do once you ‘really had time to do it.’ You’re sitting in front of the computer staring into space like a fool anyway, so open a file, put your fingers on the damned keyboard and get at it.” Harold is not gentle. Of course he does not literally speak those words, but if you were here to see how he marches across the room, assumes his regal stance and stares at me in that piercing manner he has when he’s displeased, you’d know. I have been getting that a lot lately, when he’s awake of course. I believe he is correct. I needed a muse, and he was assigned the task. I do not envy him, and though I’m truly sorry to say this, Harold (you too Lisa), I truly wish Salma Hayak had been assigned to my case. She is a great muse.
Oh my. He must have heard me. He woke up and came out to check on me. He just reminded me to hit save. At least I didn’t get the imperious stare. He is pleased now. Damn. The infamous dryer buzzer. Sorry Harold. I have to go get the sheets out. I’ll hit save again, go make another pot of coffee, make the bed, and then I promise I’ll try to pound out some more. Yes I’ll tell them. He wants me to mention that we have been listening to Chris Whitley for the last three days. At the moment it is his rendition of Spoonful off of his Perfect Day album. If you haven’t heard Chris Whitley, you need to. I wish that man were still alive. He inspires us, doesn’t he Harold? At the very least listen to Big Sky Country. At the very least. Ah. A beneficent look this time. Once again he is pleased. Back in a bit.
I’m back. Harold is tucked in behind his (Lisa’s) stereo. I moved everything down to his level. That made him deliriously happy, and right now he is stretched out down there displaying no concerns what-so-ever, with legs sprawled everywhere. I have never seen a turtle in the wild expose himself in such a fashion. This boy is comfy, all kicked back listening to Chris. That is one happy camper down there. No threats, good tunes, and dad is busy telling the world what a wonderful companion he is. What he does not know is what I’m about to say regarding His Royal Highness: Harold is a Spoiled Brat! I guess I shouldn’t say that. Harold has paid his dues and deserves to be comfy and happy, and he tells me I have worked hard all of my life to get to where I am now and I should be just as comfy and happy. It is very hard for me to swallow that, but he is very wise, and I should listen to him in this regard, too. So he tells me anyway. The one thing I will say regarding that is, he may mess with me and order me around terribly, much worse than my wife, but he has never lied to me. Nor has she, I must add. Ever.