Milan July 2011
I am certain practically no one who reads this blog will remember the tv show entitled, “Have Gun, Will Travel” which aired from 1957-1963. Yes, I was alive in 1957 – actually I was 3 years old. This title has always intrigued me as it created a mental image of someone always “game” to be on the move, ready for adventure. While the actual show took place in the old US of A in cowboy times, my own “Have Gun, Will Travel” has a slightly different connotation. Well, I don’t own a gun and never will. However, I am game. For me, it’s “Have Passport, Will Travel”.
You have heard me writing about some of my hopes and dreams for today and the future. And yes, many, if not most of them happen to revolve around the worlds of food, garden and travel. You might say food is in the center of my universe and there are particular offshoots around that center that spring forth – like the rays of sunshine, or meteors or shooting stars…… Some of these rays include all the history, language and anthropological roots of the social and culinary systems of our planet.
Every day I come upon words I don’t know the meaning of, in English and in other languages, paintings I’ve never seen and artists I’ve never heard of. There are centuries of history about which I know virtually nothing. Burt Wolff did a great episode on Rome that I happened to catch part of the other evening – and I was enthralled, and I’ve been there twice already (never too many times). There are culinary words I don’t know the meaning or origin of. There are millions of books I haven’t read, recipes I haven’t tried or invented. I haven’t witnessed the olive harvests in all the regions of Italy, nor compared the olive oils of Spain, France, Greece, Italy and the remaining top 25 producers, en place, not here, seen the almond blossoms in Sicily, seen the capers growing on Pantellaria. I haven’t been to Greece or Turkey or Morocco. I haven’t been to Provence or Tuscany. I haven’t eaten the famous apricots of Austria know as Wachauer Marille nor those from Val Venosta as I wrote in my post on 6/10/12. I haven’t been to Machu Picchu or traversed the Silk Road. I haven’t been to Volpaia to see the artisan vinegar operations. I haven’t been to L’Hermitage in St. Petersburg, nor to Moscow. Whoa, wait, stop the clock………
I am hoping to live till at least 90 years old – if I am in good health, that is. Proportionately speaking, that means I have approximately 1/3 of my life ahead of me. Over the last few years, I have gotten to thinking a lot about this “proportionality problem”, a phrase my last corporate boss used to evoke daily as we traversed the endless sales, expense and other statistic-laden evaluation statements which were the fabric of one of my past lives. Lately I have come to observe the world around me and those in my approximate age group and those slightly ahead of and behind me to look for clues to the secrets of a happy final “phase”. I find this to be a fascinating subject to ponder. And, I feel like a fish out of water.
I can see that many people around my age are anxious to retire. I can see this as logical, particularly if they hate their careers and are exhausted and unappreciated. However, retire is a word which has become quite the irritant to me. When I look it up in the dictionary, I see that the word retire refers to the time when one ceases to “work” formally, I guess, all together. Unfortunately, it also refers to lying down, going to bed, moving back, receding and withdrawing. In baseball, “and the side retires” refers to the team from the field going into the dugout and sitting down. Their portion of the inning is “over”. UGH. Well, this inning is NOT over!
I may be the only person I know who actually finds it perplexing to think that people, when faced with the last 1/3 of their years, or whatever proportion they think they might have left, (lots of people aren’t as delusional as me) would consciously choose to spend that time lolling around in an unstructured, non-directional kind of existence, with relaxing and resting as their primary pursuits – and not pursuing that “bucket list” of things they’ve been “dying” (ha-ha) to do all their lives. For me, this includes: to see, to read, to taste, to cook, to photograph, to be thrilled and moved, by all of the as-yet unexperienced moments, in the most amazing places of a lifetime. Isn’t that completely incongruent with the word “retire”? It would appear that I am at odds with a large majority of my peers.
In my lifetime I have seen countless business executives retire to golf communities around the country – many in Florida and some in Palm Springs. When I traverse the grocery store, I see people who seem to have this as an outlet for their undefined time, studying the selection of breakfast cereals as seriously as they once studied the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal. (yep, I remember when people used to get their stock prices out of the newspaper.). This observation gives me a huge case of the he-be- je-bees, aka anxiety and sends my motors into overdrive.
Perhaps I am a person whose life intricacies have become disturbingly out of order? Yes, I stayed out of the work force for 25 years and raised my kids and tended to some major family health issues. But, after that, am I supposed to be approaching the time in my life when I don’t want to have the same fervor as I did for the first 60 years? Am I supposed to be exhausted and yearning for downtime – lolling in a hammock, playing bridge, visiting communities where I can transfer through the various stages of end care without too much disruption? What happens to some people when they turn 60? Do all people my age begin to think about homes with master bedrooms on the first floor, comfortable shoes, their schedules of doctor visits and advanced directives? Yikes – there is surely something terribly wrong with me if this is the case.
One of my cousins was forced to retire from his law firm last Fall at 62. They have mandatory retirement as do many professional firms. My first instinct was to wonder why firms have mandatory retirement when all the government keeps talking about is raising the retirement age and forcing people to work past 65 in order to collect their Social Security. I confess that when I began getting AARP pamphlets in the mail when I turned 55, I threw them all in the garbage. I still do. Call me delusional again, but that’s fine with me.
Well, anyway, you get the point of what I am saying. In this stage of this life of mine, I consider myself to be a “Gone Girl” – not the current novel. I’m going, going and plan to be “gone” until the very last breath is exhailed out of my lungs. About a year ago when I mentioned to a friend my desire to move to California, she looked at me and said, “What? No you’re not. You’re going to stay here and help your children raise your grandchildren!” Huh? I remember feeling like I did not live on the same planet as this person.
Well chalk it up to another day when I am feeling like I live in some other universe. One where no one is like me. Where I’d as soon as drive to the airport and fly to Italy as get up in the morning and brush my teeth. I want to feel like I felt when I stood in front of the statue of David, tears streaming down my face, stood in the shade of the Ufizzi, stepped into each and every new Piazza like it was a whole new world, and watched life being lived by the citizens of Italy, peered into each and every biscotti shop and patisserie . Must I lay down and die someday? Yes, of course, but I am hoping that I will have worn the soles off every pair of shoes I now own and will own before I get there. 62? Ha! 92? Maybe……….
(am I having some subliminal baseball thing going on? oh no!)
