Two Guys Get on the Ferry . . .

Last week, some of the B.C. ferry runs were extremely problematic: it was Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and one of its biggest ferries, The Spirit of Something, had a fire which put it entirely out of commission for a week or so, beginning Friday morning.  This is a Tsawwassen-Vancouver Island ferry which even on quiet days is a heavily trafficked route.  Just one more thing to drive a commuter crazy.

We travel on the Horshoe Bay to Langdale route, which gets smaller ferries but more and more traffic all the time.  Today, however, the Saturday of a rainy, rainy weekend and the week after Canadian Thanksgiving, people must have just decided to stay home.  The 5:30 pm ferry had fewer cars/passengers than I have seen in a long time.  The festivals really are over.  Until they start again next tourist season,of course.

I was sitting by the window when two guys sat themselves in the seat in front of me.  We were pretty much the only people in about 8 rows of seats.  They, like me, were people of a certain age, an age that starts around 65, of course, when one, long ago caught, is now released and is required to find a new life strategy.  They were not travelling together on the ferry but had apparently run into one another on their travel up from the lower decks where their cars were parked.  Because they had voices that carried well, I was privy to their conversation, although they were largely unaware of me since I was sitting behind them.  Indeed, I would have to have done something radical not to have heard it.  I’m used to other peoples’ conversations of course since we have been blessed with cell phones, but there you get to hear only the one side. 

‘What,’ I asked myself, ‘do such guys talk about when they are (more or less) alone?’  The answer to that question is this:

A. ‘Yeh, I sold my condo, and then I bought another one.  It’s okay.  I like not having to do the yard work.’
B. ‘We’re going to Thailand for the winter and then will come back to the Sunshine Coast in March.’
A. ‘We’re having our first grandchild.  It’ll be born in March.’
B. ‘We don’t have any grandchildren.  Our kids don’t want kids.’
A. ‘Well, yeah; it’s a scarey world.’
A.  ‘We’re going to Florida for the winter, but we'll be back in March, too.  For the grandchild.’
B. ‘My bicycle got stolen.  I don’t like the new ones, I don’t like the aluminum.  I’m getting old and want more of an upright ride.  I found a new 1991 model in Vancouver.  I’m on my way to pick it up now.  I like bicycle riding.’
A. ‘I’ve given up ballroom dancing, but I’m still teaching Tai Chi.’
B. ‘In Thailand, we live like kings.’

A offers a long monologue on bicycle gears.
A and B offer one another a long discussion of stocks: which ones they made money on, particularly.  A is currently in high-yield bond funds, and B in stocks still paying dividends.  A sold his stocks before the crash pretty much; B bought and held on.  They agree that it’s a problem, knowing what to do now.
A. ‘Still got your boat?’
B. ‘Yeah, although I don’t go out much on it.’  This is followed by a long listing of people whom they know who own boats and what those boats are like.
A.  ‘Doing any consulting?’
B. ‘A little.’  This is followed by a long listing by both of all the guys they know who are doing consulting/contracting work.  (The two apparently both previously worked at the Howe Sound pulp mill operation.)

The ferry sound system announces that it is time for us to go back to our cars.  And we do.  And that’s what men talk about (to misquote Raymond Carver) when they talk about retirement.

Crayons

In Ha Jin’s A Free Life, the Chinese-born novelist writes about the difference between being an immigrant and being an exile or expatriate. He also observes that art requires leisure. Those two pieces of this fine novel reminded me of some things about living in Point Roberts and Roberts Creek. Many current residents of both places have come as retirees and have come from large cities, just as we did. We are definitely not exiles nor expatriates but we, too, are in some ways immigrants to a new way of life that we do not altogether understand, nor indeed can we altogether understand it. The tendency, of course, for Ha Jin’s characters as well as for those of us who have immigrated to small places like Point Roberts, is to try to understand the new place in terms of the old place and, at the same time, to try to make it the opposite of the old place. First we consider why there are not more of the amenities that we were used to in our old lives. Later, we may think about how we can and perhaps must become someone quite different from our prior self.

I considered changing my name when I first moved here. Never a big fan of ‘Judy,’ I found I was not a bigger fan of something else. Binker Wooten Wilson had a certain je ne sais quoi, but it worked only if all three parts were used, and that seemed more than I’d be able to expect. So, my antique name glided into this new life right along with me. Other things did change, though. I had spent my entire adult life as a writer, so I became an artist. If Art requires Leisure, as Ha Jin says, it may be equally true that Leisure begets Art. With job done and children off on their adult lives, there was all the leisure in the world. If you haven’t learned to keep house for two adults in about 30 minutes per day, including some cooking, you weren’t paying attention. So then there are the other 15.5 hours to consider.

I decided to focus on what I could see, and sixteen years of acute focus on the art of quilting has taught me a great many things, one of them being that the visual arts are more like the literary arts than I would ever have thought. The second is that a little bit of talent and a large amount of focused work will get you a long ways. I’m not the only retiree to find this out, of course. Artists of all kind are thick on the ground in both these places. The artist-retirees have, in common, leisure, a habit of focused work, and relatively little interest in what previously they understood as ‘success.’

They have something else in common, too. All of them that I’ve talked to hear, sooner or later, a friend, relative, or acquaintance say, ‘You’re so talented! I’m not creative at all.’ Sometimes these are reversed: ‘You’re so creative; I’m not talented at all!’ It’s a world-class conversation stopper. What is one to say? ‘Yes, I am and no, you’re not.’ Or, ‘No, I’m not, and yes, you are?’ I’ve learned to say something like, ‘Well, I work very hard at it,’ and just let it go.

But I think there’s a better way to say it: Creativity is like a seed. If it sits around in a seed package, nothing is going to happen to it. If it's planted, and gets some water and some warmth, it’s likely to start growing. If it’s in the wrong kind of soil or other external conditions are too harsh, it will die or just struggle along, inadequately. If it’s well nurtured and the conditions are made right for its development over a long period time, it will bloom well and beautifully. If it’s neglected, or nourished only fitfully, it won’t. The retirees with leisure who are working hard to foster that seed: well that’s one choice. There are lots of other choices in life that won’t get that seed to flourish, but that will allow something else to happen. It’s choice and focus, I think, at this point.

Which brings me to crayons. Yesterday, a friend sent me an interesting link to a recycle site. Many things there that I hadn’t thought about recycling. My favorite one, though, was crayons. If you’ve got crayons around that you have no use for, you can send them to this woman and she will generate new crayons from them and give them to those who need crayons, whoever that may be. Or, if you’ve been thinking about how to get that seed of talent and creativity to flourish, you can just take the crayons out and use them yourself.

Fewer Choices, More Order

I remember the how, back when I had a job, my world was largely organized by external forces. I drove to Orange on Monday to meet with a hospital group, went to the UCLA campus on Tuesday and Thursday to teach a class, attended a Bar Association meeting on Wednesday night, and so on. All events that were largely a function of others’ needs, availability or arrangements. I had a day planner; I looked at it all the time. Then, I would be off for a two-week vacation and when I came back, I couldn’t exactly remember how to do my job until the day planner told me what to do.

In retirement, the external world does very little to arrange your days (other than, say, raining when you were hoping to garden). In fact, the single most important skill of retirement may be in learning how to organize your day yourself. Even when you’ve learned to do it, however, something comes along now and then from the external world that interrupts that organization, something like family visits. After a while, the visitors leave and, although you never got the hang of a new schedule when they were here, you have now lost the old one as well. And unlike the days when you could look at that day planner and get it back, there is no longer anything to look at in order to inform one’s self about what you are supposed to be doing. Oh, the dishes always need to be done, there’s always some laundry and ironing and watering of plants, but I’m talking about a more purpose-driven sense of one’s day, one's life.

Quilting offers me my best hope, but even that doesn’t exactly work for me at the moment. Because much of the quilting that I do is of the ‘art quilt’ variety, I can't seem to just slide into it easily once I've put it aside for awhile. You can't just wait for inspiration, of course (that could be a long time coming), but you have to have some kind of starting place and I’m not finding it. So, today, I went backwards to the tradition of quilting, to lots of labor-intensive cutting of strips and squares and making of blocks, all of which will result in some version of a traditional quilt based upon one of the two basic quilting designs (the nine-patch and the log cabin: for this quilt, it's the nine-patch).


I have narrowed the task by limiting myself pretty much to two colors (different values of orange and of blue-green) and to two basic forms of 9-patch (a 5-4 checkerboard and a cross), and a symmetric arrangement of the blocks. That means the initial constraints of construction are considerable, although the arrangement of blocks has a lot of possibilities.

In the photo, there are about 100 five-inch square blocks, but nothing is sewn together or even in a final arrangement. I may move each piece somewhere else this evening or tomorrow morning to see whether some other arrangement is more appealing, thereby creating some different quilt. The cutting, the sewing, the ironing are all occupying my time and energy very nicely at the moment, filling my day and, because of the constraints, not leaving me with too many choices.

That’s the problem with having your day planner empty: the choices with which you could fill it when you have no schedule appear to be unlimited. Less choice, less choice: that is what we need. What more un-American sentence could there be?

Taking in Boarders

There are a lot of retirees living on the Sunshine Coast, generally. These are the retirees who worked somewhere else, somewhere to the near south or to the east, and then came here to do the golden years part. Such retirees often talk about ‘having a little B&B when they retire.’ And a lot of them do more than just talk about it, I’d guess, given the number of Bed and Breakfast places that seem to have recently opened up on the Sunshine Coast.

When we first came here, eighteen years ago, we stayed in the only B&B on the Coast, or at least the only one we could find, a very cute little place in Roberts Creek called “Rose Cottage” (in the picture above), managed by a charming weaver named Loragene. Her husband worked in the local pulp mill and she wove rag rugs and attended to guests. She was extremely gracious and the cottage was absolutely exquisite. It was the kind of place that you might imagine finding in the English countryside in the 19th century: brass beds and handmade everythings, including bed quilts and rugs, and old, carefully made, comfortable wooden furniture. There was a little kitchen area, and a wood stove, and everything charming and tasteful but not newish—that is, it didn’t feel designed by some decorator and never touched by human hands. It felt like someplace you might have always been visiting.

We arrived in the late afternoon and she had us into the main house for tea and scones or muffins or such and she provided us with lots of information about where to go to do whatever it was that we were doing. Then, in the morning, we had a more-than-abundant breakfast of pancakes and bacon and eggs and toast and coffee and hot chocolate and fruit and homemade jam and who knows what else at a lovely old round table in their kitchen. Her husband had his coffee with us while she cooked and served and we had a lovely conversation. It seemed so very welcoming; it was so very welcoming.

We stayed with her a couple of times after that—she even recommended a great real estate agent to us--and we always found it as fine an experience as the first stay was. Eventually, they expanded and built an entire additional building with 4 suites, I believe, in addition to Rose Cottage. I am not the least surprised that she has had a very successful career as a B&B operator; she surely had the personality for it.

I have thought about running a B&B in the intervening years. I mean, you have a lot of time on your hands in retirement and, even if you are filling it up quite adequately, there is a vague feeling that you ought to be doing something to earn money and a B&B would be so easy. Loragene made it seem very, very easy. I have a quilting friend who, as she retired, did indeed operate a B&B for several years. She thought it would be a fun way to meet people coming through the area, and after all they wouldn’t stay all that long and how much work can it be to provide breakfast for a nice couple each morning? She pretty quickly found that it was not only a lot of work but a lot of work for demanding and not particularly appreciative people. Although she is a most outgoing lady, she was not outgoing enough for that kind of dealing with the public.

Me? I wouldn’t last two days at it, I imagine, but it is still one of those careers that I vaguely entertain having. A charming little place like Rose Cottage, with delicate teas and scrumptious breakfasts and people as interesting as Ed and me coming to stay and to chat with over breakfast and appreciate what I've created. Sounds great, but only as a fantasy, alas. I think we'll be outsourcing this career to Loragene who really does know how to do it and who accepts reality. If you come to the Sunshine Coast, stay in her B&B and let me know if she is still keeping up her standards!

Volunteer Careers

When people move to a place like Point Roberts, it is often because they have retired from some other career or, have achieved semi-retirement with some continuing career work via the net. One couple retired from a university somewhere else but are extending their academic career at a Canadian university in Vancouver. Ed and I took another alternative and, for three or four years, lived here for a month and then returned to Los Angeles working the next month there. Over a decade, the six months in each place slowly turned into no months in Los Angeles and all the rest of the time here in the northwest. And then, there you are with every day open to whatever suits you.

It’s a lot of time to work with after the first few months. Most of us have lived lives of carefully and full-time scheduled lives. Without all that work stuff, we are left with three meals a day (which, of course, take on great new significance) and whatever other routines we can figure out. Lots of people who come to Point Roberts under those circumstances take to volunteer work of various kinds. There are a lot of organizations on the Point that operate with volunteers. But it isn’t entirely easy being a volunteer as compared with having a job because jobs are relatively clear and suited to your abilities, while volunteer jobs often are neither clear nor suitable.

It seems to me that by the time you’ve finished off your work life, the people you know and work with pretty much understand your strengths and weaknesses, your skills and your non-skills. You are generally encouraged to do things you do well and discouraged from doing things you’ve shown no great aptitude for. And life is the better for that most of the time. But you move to a new place where no one knows any of those things, you may well be asked or encouraged to do things as a volunteer that you have no ability to do, but not asked to do things you really know about.

In my work in Los Angeles, no one I know would have ever allowed me, outside of a classroom, to be involved in meeting with and encouraging a lot of people I didn’t know to do something. I’m a bedrock introvert and I hate asking people to do things that they haven’t already agreed to do. Other people are terrific at doing this kind of thing (think of all the people who are fund raisers for various causes, which seems to me the very extreme end of this kind of job). Nevertheless, I have somehow found myself agreeing to do just this thing in my attempt to be a cooperative volunteer, and nobody stopped me.

So, here’s the small lesson: before you become a post-retirement volunteer in a small community project, remember to remember what you do well and try not to stray too far from that, at least not as a first step in expanding your abilities.

Get a Yurt!

Today, I went up the Sunshine Coast to visit an acquaintance who has set up a new business venture that involves half a dozen yurts and the hopes of a lot of people moving in and out of her establishment. I heard her describe the project a year or so ago when it was very much in the planning stage, but this is the first time I have seen it actually in the flesh, so to speak. I’d heard of yurts before she told me what she was planning, but I hadn’t heard of (or seen) them in the sense she was speaking of them. Yurts with Mongolian residents in various desert areas of Mongolia is what I would have had in mind. Obviously, she had some other idea.

What she and her husband have created are the housing and plans for a fibre arts studio that also provides workshops and gallery exhibitions. The next job is to get the people to come for both and they have made a very impressive start with gallery shows and workshops of many sorts planned for many months ahead. The yurts are stunning. Well, from the outside, they look kind of like what you’d see in Mongolia, I suppose, but on the inside, the space is quite lovely. Three of the yurts are 28-feet in diameter (615 square feet each): one a studio where she does her own work, one a gallery-exhibition space, and one a workshop space. All have electricity, radiantly-heated floors, light domes and windows, beautiful curved walls that feel good. The workshop has water. Two smaller bathroom-yurts are included, plus a 20-foot office and maybe another yurt whose purpose I’ve lost track of. All very nicely carried off. I can only wish them well.

This seems to be one of the things some people can do in this world in which one career finishes before retirement and old age actually start. People have these dreams of becoming vintners, or running a bed-and-breakfast or an art gallery or whatever it is that can help them, I think, to believe once again that work is not only an honest activity but one that can be fully and personally rewarding beyond issues of money, but only if one is largely independent of bosses, bureaucracies, corporations, and the like.

We live in the age of globalization, they’re always telling us, but I think we live more and more in the age of unknown forces that create conditions that drive us all at least a little crazy. Think of Jessica Yellin in the news today saying that the executives in the news media made it clear that the reporters were not to challenge the Bush administration’s war in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003. No, she says, in her second assay at this story. They didn’t say it directly; it was just obvious from their attitude, from their behavior.

We are all of us way too much controlled by these odd forces from above and without who want something of us without saying it exactly: want us to go shopping, want us to go on vacation, want us to just let them do whatever they are doing—in essence, want us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Point Roberts and the Sunshine Coast are both, to varying degrees, replete with people who are hoping for a different kind of life than the one they had before they got here. Putting up a yurt is a very nice start.