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There are few things more challenging—or joyous—than a feline Christmas.  Over the years, you learn that you can never really cat-proof decorations, only make them somewhat more cat-resistant.

Clearly, there are some things that are just taboo in a house with fur babies, and hopefully you make this realization before investing in too many fragile, expensive baubles.  A few years back, I was walking through a department store when I saw a set of three gorgeous, stemmed candle holders.  Snowy, spun glass with a cardinal painted on each. I knew I had to have them for my mantle.  I was halfway to the checkout register when I got a rare visit from the ghost of Christmas common sense.  Spun glass, open flames, cats—none of this is a good idea.  Sadly I put them back and looked for something less emblazoned with the word CATastrophe.

Last year I got a beautiful snow owl who felt like he was constructed of feathers hot glued to Styrofoam.  Too heavy to serve his intended purpose as a tree topper, last year I wired him between the branches.  This year he is perched on top of my mantle clock—at least at the moment.  I’ve seen Mindy stalking him from the other end of the mantle, so it’s hard to predict his long term fate.

Last year the Nativity set was Mindy’s special interest.  That creche has been part of my Christmas since childhood, so I always set it up with nostalgic precision.  Since we always had cats, I’m sure numerous sheep served as pucks in quite a few games of cat hockey, but the larger figures were fairly safe.  Mindy, however, seemed to take a special dislike for the third wise man.  Several times I found him elbowed off the buffet. with Mindy transplanting herself as the last magi in the manger scene.  Finally, like every enabling mother, I made up a reasonable excuse.  I think Mindy misheard the scriptures and believed the kings were bringing the baby gold, frankincense, and fur.  Clearly the third guy wasn’t doing his job and needed to be replaced by someone who knew all about fur.  This year the sagacious trio seems to be safe, but a couple of shepherds have been toppled, and one morning baby Jesus himself was lying in the manger at a pretty precarious angle.

Actually, this year it’s the tree that has been most under siege.  When I was a kid, we had a cat who toppled the tree while he was climbing it.  Of course, that was when we still had real trees.  Sometime in elementary school, my pediatrician surmised that the reason I had sniffles and rashes every year at Christmas might not be recurring measles but a pine allergy.  An artificial tree solved cat and health problems.  For a number of years I had tabletop trees—easy pickings for a determined feline.  My late, beloved tortie Gilda was so proficient at knocking down the tree that I seriously considered a bungee cord.  When I bought a five foot pre-lit beauty last year, I felt victorious.

Enter Logan, my newest addition, a little black Maine coon mix.  Last week I watched him climb the tree by scaling the pole under the light cords

“You mean he was climbing its branches?” a friend asked.

“No, he was shimmying up the pole like a monkey.”

“So he’s Maine coon/capuchin mix?”

At this point that seems a likely lineage.  After I lifted him out of the lights and warned him severely, I haven’t observed him climbing anymore.  I say I haven’t observed, because after I go to bed, I’m probably better off not knowing what’s going on in the living room.  Of course Nehi, my orange, fluffy diva, doesn’t even try to hide her misdeeds.  When she tires of my pushing her face away from the branch she’s chewing on, she simply goes around to the back of the tree where it’s harder to reach her.

No Christmas would be complete without cat toys.  This year I found the ideal toy a Kohl’s.  Mice with electronic “squeals” as they are being batted around.

After the preliminary group examination, they were a hit, the perfect Christmas pastime.

At least they are perfect in the light of day when you can watch and enjoy the fun.  To hear the interminable squeaks at night is not so much fun, but like every electronic toy, the novelty will wear off or it will probably be dead by the beginning of the new year.

Cats remain perpetual toddlers with fur.  As adults we can become jaded.  We become caught up in the obligations of the season and forget the wonder.  With felines, there is never a shortage of wonder and curiosity and pure joy over decorations, Christmas wrapping, and empty boxes.  There is never the teenage eye rolling of “this is so lame,” or the adult worrying about what you forgot to do.  Just the pure joy of the season.

So this Christmas, take a cue from the kittens.  Sit back with a bit of wassail and an open heart.  Take a catnap when you need to.  And have a purrfect holiday.

Once again the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump wagon, but so many times what was believed to be a catastrophe barely ruffled his base; so, it’s hard to believe this time with the lambasted sexist comments made during an hot mic  Access Hollywood interview will be any different.

One only has to look at a lifetime of comments Trump has made in Howard Stern interviews or in his own writings to know that he has definitely earned the feminist pejorative of “chauvinist pig.”  There have been so many porcine grunts during this campaign season that it hardly seems surprising to hear this full throttle oink.  The most surprising thing to me has always been that Evangelicals have viewed the election of this crude, lewd loudmouth as some necessity for the greater good.  Even worse, they seem to be buying into his excuse that this is just locker room talk.

Locker room talk—yeah, if you’re a freshman out of earshot of the coach and the upperclassmen who really don’t want to be associated with you.  Sure, they’ve put up with you bull and braggadocio because your family is so willing to provide pizza and equipment, but rest assured, behind your back they are making fun of all your pathetic attempts to impress and be one of the guys.

Equating Trump with a freshman male is probably wrong.  There are a lot of decent, mature ninth graders who don’t deserve such denigration, but it brings up a very real point.  This is a man who seems arrested in eternal adolescence.  He has avoided every unpleasant situation in life from Viet Nam to paying bills by gaming the system and leaving the burden to someone else.  If you have never had to suffer the consequences for your actions, it becomes easy to assume that everyone, especially women you find attractive, are mere pawns to be used at your discretion.

Every woman I know felt her skin crawl when she heard those comments from the bus because every woman has encountered men like that.  Fortunately for most of us, the garden variety creeps don’t have wealth, power, and a vindictive streak a mile long.

Locker room talk ends when you’re out of the locker room—in other words, when you become an adult.  As an adolescent who still experience females in abstract, women may not be whole beings.  As a grownup, when most men imagine their sister, wife or daughter having to deal with a man like that, they are livid.  One would only hope that Trump would feel the same disgust if someone addressed Ivanka like that.  However, hearing him praise her beauty as “someone I’d probably be dating of she wasn’t my daughter,” is creepy in itself.  It certainly doesn’t evoke any of the warm, loving memories I have of my own father.

There has been a recent barrage of women coming forward to indicate that his crude comments might as well have been a play-by-play of his actual behavior toward them.  In a typically adolescent manner, he doesn’t see the backlash as a direct result of his own bad behavior.  It is a vast conspiracy of the Clintons, the media, and anyone who sees him as unfit.

There were reasons that the founding fathers set minimum age limits to run for office.  They believed that with age came experience, wisdom, compassion—all the qualities we need to inspire us in these troubling times, all the qualities that make us want to our best selves. The 18^th Century was a rigorous time marked by profound personal sacrifice for the benefit of the whole society.  It was almost impossible to live to 35 or 40 without developing these qualities.  Now, clearly, some people can reach their golden years still residing in Never Never Land.  And apparently there is a strong contingency of Lost Boys who have no intention of coming back into the real world.  It is easier to create your own facts, believe every failure is someone else’s fault, refuse to see that compromise is part to what keeps the world spinning, and that graciously learning to accept failure takes more strength of character than winning at any cost.

Hillary was partially right.  There are a few deplorables in the basket.   But let’s look at the real problem.  It is a mainly a basket of immaturables.

So here it is, the day after Labor Day.  It is an important holiday in that it is one of the few to recognize the contributions of the average American worker, but for anyone who has ever been a part of the American school system, it also signals the official start of the new school year.  Of course, in my neighborhood, as in many, schools have been back in session for a few weeks and high school and college football are re-ensconced in their sacred spots.  But no matter how much earlier you push the start date, it is the Labor Day last hurrah that indicates the year has started in earnest.

On Labor Day I went over to Woody’s to pick up some hot dogs, my own last hurrah before my next Weight Watchers weigh in.  I saw clusters of kids headed to Wave-Tec for the last swim of the summer before the pools officially close.  Marilla Park in nearby Morgantown, marks this last day with a swim with your dog event.  Yes, good-bye summer, welcome fall.

I’ve always been lucky enough to live in West Virginia where there is a virtual panorama of seasonal change.  I’ve often wondered if people who live in perpetually warm climates have the same perception of the passing of time, or if seasons—and age—just surreptitiously creep up on them.

School pictures mark the passage of time with sometimes humiliating visual acuity.   January 1 may mark the beginning of the new year for adults, but for kids, and anyone involved in the school system, it is that first day of school that really marks the milestone.  If you’re in school, it’s all about September.  Some years are monumental—elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, high school to college or the workforce.  But, every year is a fresh start.

Sure there is the academic aspect of looking at your schedule for the year, finding out who you have classes with, scoping out your teachers to see if all the rumors you have heard about their reputations (bitch, pushover, loon or winner) are true.  But academics can wait till after Labor Day.  The first day back is the day that you establish your image for the year.  You present the self you have spent the summer reinventing.  The first day you see strategically planned outfits, buff bods, great tans, streaked hair, contacts replacing glasses, new cars paid for with endless shifts at Mickey D’s.  That first day is the ultimate selfie of the year, the ultimate optimism that this will be your best year ever.

I’ll be honest.  After teaching for almost 40 years and starting each year with that same sense of optimism and gratitude for a fresh start, my first year of retirement was difficult.  I watched the buses roll past the house and felt a little empty that I was on the sidelines of the excitement.  This is the fourth year school has started just fine without me.  I’ve settled into the retiree world of morning water aerobics classes, long lunches with friends, mid-afternoon movies, all the things you never had time to do when you were working.  I now know that September replaces the summer blockbusters with more contemplative movies that might be Oscar nominees.  It provides cooler weather for yard work and winterizing tasks.   It allows you to schedule medical appointments without regard to how quickly you can get there after school to avoid taking a sick day.

September may no long hold the excitement of walking into a new class in new year, but it still reinforces the passage of time.  In fact, when you’re not bound to a strict schedule, I’ve come believe that almost every day can be a fresh start.  But what do I know.  I’m just a spinster with cats.

 

A while back I was a little shocked by Donald Trump’s pronouncement that the only way he could lose Pennsylvania was if the election was rigged.  I say a little shocked because, let’s face it, we’re rapidly becoming inured to any new outrage. I guess he feels this way because of the crowds at his rallies.  Fact is, there’s a difference between rallyers and voters.  Clearly this is something the whole Trump clan doesn’t understand.  Remember when a couple of his own kids didn’t get registered in time to vote for dear old dad in the primary?  This had nothing to do voter id, or any other thing that Trump endorses to prevent voter fraud.  It was purely personal oversight—something most people acknowledge as a more prevalent issue than people voting multiple times.  But nonetheless, it’s a mistake a real “voter” would never make.

At its best, political rallies take you back to high school pep rallies.  (Or as we call them in my neck of the woods “thuses”—for raising enthusiasm.)  During a large portion of the four decades I taught, our football coach was Bob DeLorenzo, affectionately known as Big D.  Bob was probably the most persuasive speaker I’ve ever encountered.  He was not a shouter, but he had the emotion and modulation of a Shakespearean star.  In fact, one of my colleagues had him come in and perform the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy every time she taught Hamlet.

Those Friday afternoon hours of frenzy prepped players and fans alike for the game that night.  But Big D was a teacher as much as a coach.  Of course he loved to win and had plenty of kids go on to play college ball, a couple even had a shot at the pros. But, he knew that for most of that squad their last high school game was their football swan song.  They would go on to become husbands and dads, teachers, salesmen, hospital workers, and city cops—contributing members of society who had internalized those values of teamwork, dedication, discipline and hard work.  Pep rallies were a success if they made those attending leave united to do good work.

At their worst, rallies have become the death metal mosh pits of American politics—loud, angry, aggressive, and nihilistic.  The desire to go out and crack some heads and roust some immigrants is not what I consider good work.

But good or bad, rallies take you back to your teen years.  I suppose if you’re one of those people who believes the myth that those four years of high school were the best years of your life, this might be making America great again.  But for people more comfortable in their adult status, high school was an interesting part of your past, but you don’t want to live there.

I have never really liked crowds, and the older I get, the less I like them.  My friends know that I’m only half kidding when I say I’ve got about a three hour window of sociability.  The bigger the crowd, the narrower the window.  I can count on one hand the number of rallies I’ve been to, but I vote with dogged regularity.  Never missed voting in any election since 1972.  And for every rallyer, there are at least a dozen voters.  We’re not cheering and clapping.  We’re sitting at home, watching debates, reading the editorials, contemplating the candidates.  And guess what?  Come November, our votes count just as much.  No rigging.  Just one person, one vote.  And that’s a truly honest election.  But what do I know?  I’m just a spinster with cats.

In my college freshman-level acting class, I remember the professor saying that people who viewed acting as a way to get noticed or draw attention to themselves were engaging in emotional masturbation.  To my somewhat sheltered seventeen-year-old self, this blunt appraisal was a real attention getter.  As I progressed through the theatre program, I came to understand that self-aggrandizement was totally at odds with looking at the complexity of the character, the context of the play, and the interaction with your actors.

Strangely enough, this comment has repeatedly hammered at my brain during this Presidential election cycle.  We have often heard the term “acting Presidential.”  We’ve been bombarded with enough screen hours of Moran Freeman and Martin Sheen in the Oval Office to wonder why we can’t get a President like that.  They’ve set the bar pretty high because, in this constant blurring of entertainment and reality, it’s easy to forget that these are characters, not real people  The irony is that as we idolize screen leaders, we claim to want “authenticity” in our real candidates.  No matter what you thought of his policies, Bernie Sanders went further than anyone expected based on pure authenticity.  His message never wavered, he never pandered to the crowd.  Ultimately being a Democratic Socialist who never ran as a Democrat proved a bridge to far, but there is no doubt he was authentic.

Now we are left with a binary choice.  Sure, there are third, fourth, and even fifth party candidates.  But, I’ve seen too many elections skewed by an also ran; so, I refuse to throw my vote away on “principle” rather than pragmatism.  I want a real say in who governs for the next four years.  The two remaining “real” candidates are under scrutiny for trust and authenticity.   Hillary is constantly under attack for her stumbling attempts to explain email gaffs that she has already apologized for, her robotic delivery and her personal aloofness.  Sorry, but I think that’s authentic.  Not everyone is a glib extrovert.  Some people are measured and cautious.  They may not be the people you want to sit down to pizza and beer with, but they are probably safer to have in charge in a crisis.

So, do I think Hillary is the perfect candidate?  Oh, hell no!  It’s hard to look at the Clintons net worth and believe her claim that they were broke and in debt upon leaving the oval office.  Full disclosure, when I retired, I was broke and in debt—and three years later, I still am.  So yes, I might be willing to give speeches to anyone willing to pay me.  Still, in my heart of hearts I know that no one short of Jesus is worth $300k a speech; and, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t speak in venues that could offer that fee.  Then there is the murky conglomerate known as the Clinton Foundation.  Such sources of income are questionable, but they are laid out in all their sordid glory in Hillary’s tax returns.  That in itself is a kind of authenticity her opponent refuses to participate in.

Because Trump seems to operate without a filter, his detractors label him a loose cannon while his supporters label him authentic.  I don’t believe either of those evaluations.  I believe that someone with a past in reality TV and pro wrestling doesn’t just blur the lines between entertainment and politics.  He erases it.  Remember the GOP Convention’s silhouette entrance to We Are the Champions?  Look up demagogue on dictionary.com and find “a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”  Sound familiar?  Have you ever heard a single speech where policy and substance outweighed insults and name calling?  When a reporter dares take him to task on an especially inflammatory comment, the response?  The crowd seemed to like it.

What I find most confusing is Trump’s blue collar support, since that is my own background.  He stands before his crowd in the full sartorial splendor, with custom made clothing manufactured in every country besides the U.S., topped off with the signature Make America Great Again baseball cap—the ultimate affectation of what he sees as regular guy attire.

Appearances aside, many supporters say he says the things they think.  And some of those comments are a litany of blue collar complaints—complaints born out of real frustrations:  lack of affordable education programs; layoffs from blue collar jobs with no alternative source of employment; inability to access emergency credit at an affordable rate; family illnesses where local medical care, much less out of state specialized care, is minimally covered by insurance; drug problems with no affordable rehab available; a house in foreclosure.  These are real lower middle class problems that build the kind of anger and frustrations that make one look for scapegoats and saviors because false hope is better than no hope—until that “hope” proves falsest of all.

He parrots the right things, but I don’t believe Trump’s anger is authentic.  A man who constantly boasts about his money, his family, his pricey education has no understanding of those issues, and if you don’t understand them, how can you really care about solving them?  Trumps biggest problems have been some financial projects that went south.  His solution?  Cut and run without a backward glance, leaving mainly blue collar workers to take the hit.  You may call him a smart businessman.  Lots of other terms come to my mind.

We constantly hear from commentators and celebrities who know Trump personally that the brash, arrogant man we see on the campaign trail has little to do with the kind, charming man they know.  If that’s supposed to reassure me, it doesn’t.  It reinforces my worst suspicion.  We are seeing the ultimate performance—a cynical, calculated, caricature of the frustrated middle class, at least as he sees it from Trump tower.

But I believe we’re smarter than that.  We are better than that.  And we deserve better than a parody of us at the lowest moments of our frustration and fear.  But what do I know?  I’m just a spinster with cats.

So the conventions are finally over.  It’s time to expect some rousing policy speeches and meaningful social media messages.  Yeah, right.  Since that doesn’t seem to be happening, let’s go back and look at what was actually set forth at the conventions.

Both parties formalized platforms, which I’m sure are available somewhere if anyone actually wants to read them.  However, I suspect that political platforms are like the notorious missions statements that every business and educational institution develops.  Even though a mission statement may be prominently posted where it is seen by everyone every day, it probably has very little impact compared to day-to-day goals, promises and negotiations.  Which brings us to the candidates’ acceptance, or the  “I’m gonna do” speeches.

The list of goodies each candidate promised party followers reads like divorced parents not so secret Santa bribes.  The problem is, if you’re old enough to vote, you probably should have suspended faith in Mr. Claus by now.  To the voters who registered specifically for this election, some of this sounds great.  As more experienced voters, I’m afraid we’re come to doubt all promises.  And for good reason.  Candidates are never really held accountable.  They get our wish lists and promise us the sky.

As someone who spent an entire career in teaching, I was subjected to accountability for classroom performance.  As the standardized testing became the biggest accountability measure, elective courses and time for enrichment activities became the first casualties, so teachers were forced to develop supplemental extracurricular activities, which were rarely funded, forcing to teachers to scramble for the soft money sources of grants.  Laying out a presidential to do list is a lot like writing a grant, and it should entail that level of specificity and accountability.

A grant application has several key elements. There is the narrative of what problems you are trying to solve, what specific actions you are going to take to solve the problems and an accompanying timeline, a evaluative measure of how you will know if you have succeeded, and last, but not least, a budget.

Both candidates seem to have the narrative down.  The country is going to hell and needs to be saved and returned to former glory, or the country is good but could be better.  I guess which narrative you accept depends on your personal beliefs and life experiences.

The specific steps and the timeline become the first stumbling block.  Sorry, but nothing gets done “from day one” and it doesn’t happen instantaneously.  Priorities need to be set and programs need to be phased in, IF they meet with legislative approval.  We need specifics on how you’re going to create jobs, take care of the veterans, improve homeland security, and improve race relations.  And let’s be honest, Make America Great Again, may fit on a bumper sticker, but it isn’t much of a plan.  It’s just a slogan.  I suppose there are some things that are easy to evaluate the success of.  Either a wall gets built, or it doesn’t. But so many of the promises are nebulous, feel good ideas that mean myriad things to every individual member of the electorate.

One of the big questions with all of the promises, from free college to shipping out illegal immigrants living in the USA, is how are you going to pay for this?  That’s the budget section of the grant.  Grants always want to know if you have any matching funding for your project.  (Mexico has made it pretty clear that they don’t intend to pay for a wall.)  Even though you may be estimating, you have done your research and have specific numbers.  (Hint, “We’re going to save zillions and zillions of dollars” doesn’t cut it in the specificity department.)

Am I nitpicking?  You tell me.  These are the hoops that a teacher jumps through to get a $500 grant to start an afterschool program or buy collateral classroom materials.  Should we allow candidate to make vague, hyperbolic promises with no specifics of plan or budget when they ask us to grant them our vote?  I don’t think so.  But what do I know?  I’m just a spinster with cats.

A few months ago, I was complaining to a friend that I hope I live long enough to actually vote for someone rather than against the opponent.  She gave me a wry laugh and asked, “Exactly how long are you planning to live?”

The first election I voted in was 1972.  The law allowing 18-year-olds to vote had finally taken effect, and as a college sophomore, I couldn’t wait to go cast my ballot for George McGovern.  I was a true believer.  I got my first taste of crushing political defeat that year.

Since then, I have never missed voting in any election, and even though I find increasingly fewer candidates to get excited about, I view voting as more than a right.  It is an obligation.  I firmly believe if you don’t vote, don’t bitch.  And, I know I’m going to bitch.

This year each party is nominating a candidate that half the country has an unfavorable opinion of.  You’ve got to figure that means that,  within that demographic, a fair amount of votes really detest them.  How did we get to this?  I believe a lot of it has to do with ideological bubble building.

It’s interesting how we can contend with family, friends, co-workers, and even significant others whose political views are far afield from ours, but we expect a political candidate, who hopes to represent millions of people, to be in a kind of political lock-step with our personal belief system.  Both parties, in their ideological purity litmus tests, have skewed so far to the extreme that most of us are standing in the vast chasm that remains.  It reminds me of the old Stealer’s Wheel song,

Clowns to the left of me,

 Jokers to the right,

Here I am,

  Stuck in the middle with you.

Actually, it’s not that surprising that so many Americans believe a candidate should be specifically catering to them.  Everything else does.  If you are a certain age, you remember growing up with an AM radio that picked up maybe ten stations clearly.  You found a popular, static and drift-free station, listened to the DJ’s daily popular play list, and on Saturday listened to a syndicated top 40’s show.  If you really liked a band, you waited to see them on American Bandstand, Soul Train, or the Midnight Special.  Sure, you liked some bands and songs more than others, but there was a commonality of experience.  I believe the Beatles would have still been a phenomenon in this day of You Tube, but watching their video 50 times in succession on line could never compare to four Sunday nights on the Ed Sullivan Show, followed by Mondays of arguing with your friends about who was the cutest Beatle and who was your favorite.

Today, everyone’s ears are plugged with personal play list of nothing but “their” music.  Car trips are soundtracked by Siruis radio, with the station set to niche music or talk radio that reinforces personal views and prejudices.

The same thing with visual media.  I like Netfilx and DVR’s a much as anyone, but I also love seeing a movie on the screen it was made for.  Often when I go to movies with friends, we have our own private screening because we are the only people in the cinema.  Everyone else is waiting to stream it from home.  If you watch an intriguing tv show, you can’t talk about it the next day because you have to issue a spoiler alert to anyone waiting to watch it on DVR.  I remember reading an essay once in a college text that referred to three things that, even if we made fun of them, unified our viewing habits:  the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the Miss American pageant.  Pretty obvious that those are no longer part of the national discussion, but there is very little that has replaced them.  Probably the closest would be the final episodes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, but lots of people didn’t sit down to watch them till weeks or months later.

Still, you can argue that TV bingeing and personal playlists are simple, solitary pleasures.  The real harm is the bubble mentality is also impeding our face-to-face interactions.  Next time you’re in a meeting or a restaurant, look at how many people are totally ignoring the population around them to be on their phones, texting or sending pictures to their “real” friends.  Good bet at least some of those pictures are selfies, because what could possibly be more important than reminding  your best friends what you look like?  Being at the beach or the Eiffel Tower doesn’t count unless you’ve sent a photo with yourself plastered in the middle of it.  No meal tastes as good as the one you’ve Instragramed to everyone on your contact list.

If we have constructed little virtual bubbles around ourselves where we only surround ourselves with our music, our media and our people—at our convenience—why would be accept a candidate who doesn’t accommodate our every whim?

It’s probably too late to anything this year but vote your conscience in November—and for the love of God, do vote.  But think about this down the road.  If this country becomes much more self-absorbed and divided, we won’t have to worry about external forces bringing us down.  It’ll be a DYI project.

Try something radical.  One day a week—or even one day—puncture your bubble.  Listen to the music, the conversation, the sounds of the natural world around you.  Go see a movie on the big screen or sit down with friends or family and watch a TV show in its first airing.   Unless it’s an emergency, don’t text anyone.  Strike up a conversation with people around you, no matter how different they may seem.  (Truth is, they’re probably not that different.)  For one day, try to live in the real world, in real time.  It’s a big step, but real is better.  At least I think so.  But what do I know.  I’m just a spinster with cats.

For thirty-eight and a half years I was a high school language arts teacher; I retired in June of 2013.  I hadn’t set a specific date of departure.  Like a lot of people, I wanted some formula for the right moment.  One of my friends who had retired a decade earlier said “you’ll know when it’s time.”  That seemed a little too mystical to me.  I had planned to go at least one more year, but when I spent a night in the hospital with chest tightness and shortness of breath that, fortunately, turned out to  be primarily stress, I knew it was time.

The first year of retirement was almost recuperative: making up for lost sleep, getting more exercise, taking more time to plan meals and cook.  It’s the little clues that let you know you’ve de-stressed.  You’re not cleaning as much hair out of the drain after you shampoo.  You’re not wearing a mouth guard to bed because you’re grinding your teeth.  You’re not buying giant sizes of Excederin and Advil.   Don’t get me wrong.  I loved every year that I taught, but I just no longer had the energy to do the job the way it needed to be done.

By year two, I was going to water aerobics three days a week and playing trivia one night a week.  My body was still on teacher time, waking up by 6:00 a.m. without an alarm clock.  I was getting long overdue repairs done on the house because I didn’t have to take a day off from work to let a repairman in.  I found out that there was a special sweetness about going out to lunch and a movie in the middle of the afternoon—probably because it still felt like I was playing hooky.  I had time to read for pleasure.  While I was working, I hesitated to start a book because I always had to set it aside to grade a couple sets of essays.  Sometimes, by the time I got back to it, regaining interest was a lost cause.  It was like a well-deserved vacation.  But by year three, I was getting hungry to get back in a routine, to do something more.  I could probably have worked almost every day if I had decided to substitute, but I was done with the classroom.  Retirement was supposed to be the time when you went back and resurrected your dreams from decades earlier, right?

Scratch the surface of almost any English teacher and you’ll find a frustrated writer.  You can only rhapsodize about the prose that you teach in your classes for so long and critique so many student essays before you begin to fantasize about your own authorship.  So, like so many people on the internet, I figured the easiest way to get back into a schedule of writing was to start a blog.  Ah, but what to blog about.

First off, I don’t consider myself an expert on anything.  Of course, a lot of blogs about finance, diet, and lifestyle clearly aren’t written by experts.  Most of the advice you get is flat out common sense, and if you had enough gumption and will power to be doing the things you already know you should do, you wouldn’t be broke, fat, and miserable, would you?

I’m not going to give you a mommy blog.  No kids here—or spouse.  I’m not going to tell you how to get rich.  I may share that if I ever figure it out myself, but don’t hold your breath.  I’m not going to give you recipes for scrumptious meals in ten minutes.  I’m more of a survival cook.  No itch to cook from scratch here.  I’m not going to show you Pintrest worthy pictures of my spectacular home projects or fashion looks I’ve put together.  I’m comfortable with my lifestyle, but, trust me, it’s nothing to aspire to.

I’m simply going to share observations from the viewpoint of the last archetype that, in this era of political correctness, it’s ok to make fun of—a spinster with cats.  If you don’t mind the cat hair or an occasional furball, come along for the ride—and welcome to my blog.