Time Warp

There are pluses and minuses to just about everything and retirement is no exception.  On the downside, most people retire when they are up in years and not able to physically do a lot of the things they could when they were younger and most retirees have less money to spend than they did when they worked full time.  On the plus side, however, some kind of Einsteinean time warp happens when you retire.  You don't have a lot of commitments anymore and the days of the week cease to have a lot of meaning.  In some ways the weekdays and weekends become reversed.  You find yourself staying home when all of the working folks are out shopping or hitting the recreation areas and then you run your errands during the weekdays when all the workaday folk are in their cubicles.

Some people have a hard time with an analog life that isn't governed by the clock and calendar.  I guess for some people it is sort of like being lost at sea with no reference points in sight.  Once you get used to it, though, it makes life a lot easier.  Take last week for instance.

Ellie and I had decided to hit the Texas Independence trail again.  We planned to take a Friday run to Goliad to see Presidio La Bahia, one of those consecrated in blood sites sort of like the Alamo.  We had been planning the trip all week but as the week progressed it began to look more and more as though tropical storm Don had its sights trained on Goliad and the prediction was that it was going to get pelted by five or six inches of rain Friday afternoon.  We decided that that didn't sound like fun to us.  In fact it would be adding insult to injury since Grizzledgalootland has been in the grips of a record-setting drought all year.  Since we're living in a time warp the storm didn't really cause us a problem though.  We just switched the trip from Friday to Thursday and spent the day climbing the parapets of Presidio La Bahia and paying homage at the shrine dedicated to the 400+ members of the Texas revolutionary army that were massacred there.

That's the neat thing about living beyond the clock and calendar.  One day is the same as another, so you can slide your schedule all over time and back and do what you want to do whenever it's convenient.

Today was another example of the advantage of living without a schedule.  The powers that be have been working on the road behind Casa Galoot for over a year.  Apparently they have ramped up the schedule in an attempt to finish it by the time school starts and buses begin to rumble down the road because, at four freaking o'clock this morning, we were awakened by the sound of road-building equipment clanking and growling so close to the house that it sounded as though they were in the backyard. 

We both woke up at the sound and lay there like zombies for half an hour or so until we realized that they weren't going to quit anytime soon.  So we got up, poured ourselves into a pot of coffee and sat around trying to work up some degree of consciousness for an hour or so until we were able to see something besides floaters.

We were both kind of hungry by then and Ellie mentioned that a local one-off all night restaurant had an early bird special breakfast from four o'clock until seven.  So we followed the old proverb “when life gives you broken eggs, make migas” (I think that's some kind of Tex-Mex proverb) and hied ourselves to the Kerbey Lane Cafe (which, as it turns out, isn't on Kerbey Lane; at least, not the one we went to) and chowed down on a couple of eggs and a couple of raspberry pancakes each, with bacon for her and fresh fruit for me (all for $3.45 apiece), washed down with about a gallon of coffee until we were more or less coffee-logged.

After that we drove to a 24-hour Wal~Mart and killed some time until the local mall threw open the doors for the crowd of septuagenarian strollers that usually gathers there at that time of day and joined the group for a mile and a half walk in the A/C.  (It was about 90 degrees by then and humid as, well Bon Temps, Louisiana, I guess.)  We had planned to make it a two-mile walk but the coffee had worn off by that time and we were kind of sleepwalking so we decided to head home to get some yard work done before the temperature got up into the triple digits again.

On the way home we realized once a gain how lucky we are to be able to live in relative rather than absolute time.  Yeah, sometimes you hit a boring patch, but it's great to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it instead of trying to fit everything in on the weekend or after work.  Now, being able to afford to do the things you want to do when you are retired ....   Well, for most of us that's a different story.