Time Enough At Last

I said it before and I'll say it again: life moves pretty fast, you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. ~ Ferris from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" as sampled in "Channel Flipping" by Zeds Dead

I just returned from a visit to Seattle, which included a trip to the Washington Coast for friend's birthday, a place I've not been in decades. While it's not known for being quite as beautiful as the Oregon Coast, where I've been more recently (and my raised-in-Portland mother visited frequently with her fun-sized Catholic family), the weather turned out to be quite sunny, the air was clear of awful forest-fire smoke that filled Seattle, and all that time to spend with three of my closest childhood friends was - in a word - glorious.

During our road trip and while we walked, ate, thrifted, went to the pool and hung out at the Airbnb condo (right on the beach!) we talked a lot about our future retirements, how to get there sooner, what it might look like, what we will do with our time, if we can ever get to that promised land. 

For now though, life is usually too busy and time continues to feel like a scarce resource. One friend talked about being just greedy for it, even "time-panicked" and I could definitely relate! 

Now that I'm back home and in my normal work-a-day routine I'm pondering how to move assiduously towards some sort of "retirement" but not feel quite so desperate for it. Like, maybe I could restrain myself from checking my account balances almost daily. I mean, I can try.

😜

But also thinking more broadly, about how to live richly in the moment (or at least the day), and from a sense of "abundance" even while saving and striving and driving towards the goal of being free and having my time to myself. Or at least released from the kind of confines that a full-time corporate job entails. Above all I don’t want to be so future-focused that I “miss it” - this wonderful life that I’m lucky enough to be living right now.

Just to clarify though: I don’t expect to retire in the traditional sense anytime soon. Most likely I’ll want to do peer recovery work either part or full-time. The earlier I leave the corporate job the more hours I’ll probably have to do. 

For it’s a looooong stretch between 62 (when we can first take Social Security) and Medicare at 65, let alone between that magical age of 59 and 1/2 (when one can withdraw from 401k without penalty) and Medicare-age. And it’s sad that in the US versus other countries we are so hamstrung with our health insurance pinned to our jobs, but we strategized about that also. 

One friend had the idea of trying to reduce our hours year by year until we’re only working as much as needed to keep employer-provided health care. It was a great idea! And so we set a goal (or at least she and I did), and also agreed to keep checking in with each other about our progress. 

Have I mentioned I adore these women?!? They have always been and continue to be, so smart and interesting to me, which is about the highest compliment I can give. And because we have the best time together, I can totally see myself retiring with or alongside them, it’s just that there are about a million different possible configurations for it! 

The good news is we’ve still got time to figure it out. As far as where my husband fits in all this, well….he says he wants to work forever, and I just couldn’t feel more the opposite, so I’m not exactly making any concrete retirement plans right now with him; wherever I am, he can just visit!

Meantime, I’ll be hanging with my ladies, getting up to “no good” like we’re still 16 “except we have money and a good car and can do whatever we want” - “the equivalent feeling of running down the alley barefoot to who knows what as long as we’re together except quite a bit safer and healthier lol” as Heidi texted later, reflecting on our time together and calling back to when we used to sneak out of our houses to meet up (I promised I’d give her credit). Midlife as the “open alley” for us! (Her brilliant words again.) 

So much fun and freedom - and time enough - at last. 

😍😘😍

Family, Foreign Travel, and Fifty-Four!~

Hard to believe I'm traveling internationally again! I honestly feel like I just got back from England. Then the Milwaukee trip that took the place of an intended short trip to Seattle (for "Beat The Bridge" little 8k race with my bro as we've done multiple times now), and now tonight I travel to Germany. My therapist suggests I recreate the chaotic household I grew up in by generating chaos in my adult life, and one of the ways I do this is by staying way way way too busy. Reader, she is not wrong. 

Oh well, this trip has a fantastic purpose and is driven by pure love: I had to do it because my one and only niece by blood, who just happens to live abroad, is getting married! And has a baby I am dying to meet and love on. I'd post pictures of the cuteness, my older brother (father of the bride, of course) already arrived, and sent me a few photos of le bebe, but my niece is a very private person so I can't. But I so want to!!!!

Instead I'll just post ridiculous - and too many - photos of myself: this is me at almost 54 (my birthday is tomorrow). Let's see what this age brings!

My Mother-In-Law

My mother-in-law was a formidable woman. Formidable Florence! They should have called her, or even “Formidable Flo” except that she took life much too seriously to be a “Flo”…she was also incredibly flawed and I could have thanked her for many of the major malfunctions in my husband that I’ve had to navigate over the years. However, I would never say anything so unkind! We weren’t very close but we always got along well, and I’d like to think I was a mostly “good” daughter-in-law for the nearly 23 years I’ve been married to David (and 30 years together all told). 

 

I was there for her big 100th birthday party and then we visited again for 102 last Fall. My husband was desperately wanting Florence to make it to 103 because he planned to have his granddaughter be there, hoping she might - at 4 years old by then - actually have some memory when she got older, of meeting her great-grandmother. But this was not to be. We were starting to think she might live forever! But no one gets to - or has to - live forever, at least no one as of yet has figured out how to do that.

There was the fall that forced her move from assisted living apartment (shared with her husband until he passed in 2016) to a skilled nursing facility. Incredibly, there was yet another fall she was able to recover from with no long-term issues. But then there was a final fall in April. She went on hospice pretty much immediately, and husband flew to Milwaukee after a short visit with his granddaughter, rather than returning home as planned, because we didn’t know how much time Florence had left. 

He FaceTimed me on a Friday evening and told me I needed to say goodbye. I sang her “You are my sunshine” which my husband said she really responded to, told her I loved her, and then a couple hours later she was gone. My husband, the youngest of her 4 kids and so her last “baby,” was there holding her hand to the end.   

I flew out the following Sunday and that week we laid Florence to rest. Outside of it being a celebration of the long rich life she lived, it was also such a special time for me, to be part of David’s family and reflect back on all the years living in Milwaukee, gathering with them for holidays, birthdays, weddings etc. There were many tears, memories, and stories shared - and a lot of laughter. I also had some unexpectedly healing time with my step-son with whom I haven’t always had the easiest relationship. 

I may be repeating myself when I say this but…thinking about life, how long or short it may be, I consider my now 11 years of sobriety to be “bonus time” I get to have, because I surely was on the road to quite an early death and miserable last years, when I fortunately course corrected. 

Given everything I’ve gone through with my husband, and the mostly good place we are in now, I likewise think of the time since I decided to stick with the marriage after all, as being “bonus time” we have together. It’s a nice little mental trick that keeps me grateful! And I never felt more grateful than the week I spent in Milwaukee supporting him while we went through all the activity surrounding saying goodbye to Florence. 

“I can’t believe she’s gone” - David keeps saying ever since we got back from Milwaukee, and I can relate, since sometimes I still can’t believe my own mother is gone. Now we are both “orphans” together, and my hope is that this might bond us even closer, over time. The truth is that none of us know how much time we have…and so we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to just be as present and connected as possible. At a certain point, and considering the other possibilities, it’s all “bonus time” isn’t it?

Jesus College, Cambridge - April 2026

That photo I can’t find, but crystallized in my mind: his hand on my hand as we sat on the bed of the Bed&Breakfast his parents stayed at, the one time I met them, the same place my parents stayed when they visited me later, April (or was it May?) 1993 at Jesus College, Cambridge: we took the train to London, we took the train to Bath, my mother embarrassed me by wanting ice in everything she drank, my father just by being his big loud American self, he would fall from a mountain trail to his death just 3 years and a few months later but I, of course, didn’t know that then, or I might have minded less, he wrote in his journals we read later when he was gone, so we could better know him, how much he enjoyed their visit with me in England during my college “Study Abroad” semester, and how traveling (he so seldom got to do, at least internationally) inspired him to remember his love of history, how he really needed to “learn more about Mary Queen of Scotts” a phrase that became an inside joke between me and my husband (whom he didn’t get to meet before his death), because dear Dad was so voracious about all he was interested in and never had time for (I am exactly like this, and am now living longer than him, which is a strange realization), and he put such pressure on himself, on me and his other children, how it shaped us (for good and for ill), and the sad affection I’ll always feel for them: my mother, my father, the boyfriend from that intense time in my life, my husband, all gone now or transformed, the way our memories change over time, get rewritten, or become encapsulated and static, as if something still lives in those moments but is frozen, some small part of my soul remaining at that college so far away in England or captured in that still not-found photograph.

Recreating photos, or trying to!

Happy to see the hippy liberal spirit - and action - still alive and well in Cambridge!

No one better to share my first time back in Cambridge than my dear friend Charmaine, who married a Brit and lives in England now. She and I met in 7th grade - when we were only 12 years old! She took some really wonderful photographs during our visit.

    

This may or may not be the house we Pomona College students lived in together, because I totally forgot to check what exact address it was, and the houses all look the same!

We had the most gorgeous weather for our punting excursion:

Angry - Scared - Sad

I don’t write about world events on this blog too often; it’s mostly an unabashed exercise in navel-gazing that I yet hope is occasionally interesting to others.

But knowing this is happening - that our country is doing this - while we live our safe little lives in the US, is so deeply troubling I have to pay attention, and talk at least a bit about it. About how I hate it and I hate the government in power that thinks this is acceptable. Or the way to solve problems. 

The fact that other countries are standing up to the US and not playing along is good, but still more needs to happen. This war never should have started, and it has to end. Yet, even when it does, I fear the repercussions are going to be so long-lived that it feels like end-times. And puts everything else into perspective.

It Keeps Getting Better

I know that, oh, this love

Is starting again

And it keeps getting better

Oh, it keeps, it keeps 

getting better

I cried out

And fell out the center

I’m so high

I want this forever

“In Love Again” ~ Mannequin Pussy

How do you know when someone loves something (or someone)? Bring up the subject and watch that person’s face light up. Whenever anyone talks to me about running half marathons, I light up like a Christmas tree.

At the risk of over-indulging this topic, let me count the ways I love this sport and how thrilled I am that I’ve been able to get faster with almost every single race I’ve done since last Fall. Doing 2:07 for Lousiana half marathon, then 2:10 for Clearwater (slower because: bridges) left me logically desiring to get 2:05 with this morning’s race and - mission accomplished!

Fastest time since I did just under that, for the same race in 2022:

Since then I just got slower and slower and I thought maybe my fast (for me) days were just, over. So I’m very happy and thankful for my body being able to do a half this fast again! Maybe that is all I need to say.

But there’s always more I can say about running! And about this most recent race in particular - how the weather was freaking perfect, dry, sunny and low 50s for the 7:35am start, so I could wear only a light jacket for before and after the race, and my usual running tank, no hat and gloves needed (unlike freezing cold Baton Rouge). How I met two women before the race, friends doing the race together, one of them 70 years old and still running half and full marathons. My new hero! 

We met in line for the bathroom at Starbucks before the race (as you do), and when Joanne (all the way to the right in photo below) heard that I was trying for 2:05 she said she was going to run with me since that was her goal too (versus her friend Christa who was trying for sub-2:00). Insta-friends! This type of thing happens at races all the time.

How I started out pretty near the 2:00 pacer (I actually recognized her as the pacer who helped me get my 2:00 PR in New Orleans back in 2022) and fell further and further behind, but knew I just had to stay far enough ahead of 2:10 to make my goal. 

I whiled away most of miles 1-5 talking on and off with Joanne, picking her brain for all the things she does to still be able to run such long distances into her 70s. At some point after that, she fell behind me, but she had told me several times “you run your own race” so I didn’t feel obligated to stick with her. Somewhere between mile 6 and 7 I thanked a (handsome) police officer for being out there and the “good pace” comment he offered back, buoyed me up for a bit. 

👮‍♂️

Hitting mile 8 was encouraging, except for the knowledge that I still had (5) “miles to go before I sleep” (eat). The hills helped, at least when going down them. The slight stitch in my upper right chest, which started about mile 9, did not. The ups and downs (both literal and figurative), of a distance like this sometimes feels like a wild bipolar ride and all you can do is strap in! 

Mile 10 and it’s just a 5k from here! Turns to despair at how much further to go that actually is. But then oh look boardwalks ahead! Both picturesque and lovely to the knees and the sun’s on my face, this is heaven, I adjust my form, I close my eyes, I could do this forever. 

Becomes shit, my lower back is not feeling so good, I wonder if it’s smart to be running this pace, but here’s a blessed water stop and let’s try some nutrition, which was this yummy “energy waffle” I bought at the running store where we picked up our race packets.

OMG when will this ever end!?! Transitions to ah there’s the turnaround, it’s the last one so just lock in and finish after that. Mile 12 this is really going to happen and let’s see if I have any energy left to sprint!

Look, as my new friend Joanne said, “I’m not training for the Olympics here!” and I also realize I’m not setting any records. Even while falling in love with racing again, and even if I keep training hard, I know there’s no guarantee I’ll keep getting faster. 

There will still be races both “good” and “bad” ahead, there could even be - god forbid - a real injury (versus annoying knee thing I’ve had for over a year but recent x-ray shows just an inflamed tendon, not even arthritis, to my surprise and delight). 

But it doesn’t matter because I am just enjoying the euphoric ride while it lasts! It has been nothing but a complete and unexpected gift.

If I can just stay healthy, I guess there’s nothing to do now but to chase a new PR of sub-2 hours! 

A time I thought would never again be within reach.