life changes

I wrote this comment on another blog, Time Goes By, which a few of you probly will never see...so here it is. the topic is how our routines have changed since retirement:

"I seem to have gone back to childhood since I retired. When I was a kid, I used to count--1000andone, 1000andtwo--to time myself in the summer to see how fast I could get dressed and out of the house in the morning. I didn't like breakfast, so unless my mother caught me and made me eat, I could be up, dressed, and out of the house in TWO minutes!

I'm not that speedy now, but I generally bathe at night--I read somewhere that the Jewish day begins the night before, and that was a revelation. Looking at it that way, the first part of the day belongs to you and not to some effing job. I wake up with the sun (haven't used an alarm clock for almost 20 years--always hated it, so I trained myself to wake up on my own), take my drops (weird remedy that keeps my arteries clear) in 2 oz of fruit juice, and most of the time go back to bed for another 40 winks or so. Then I get up, make a green smoothie--fresh fruit, lettuce or kale, flax oil, packet of EmergenC, scoop of soy powder (though when that's gone, i'm going back to whey powder...like it better). I haul a big glass of this out to the living room and read news, blogs, e-mail. I skip the meditation and yoga I did for years. I feel bad, but the major stumbling block that I don't quite understand is that I just don't like to do it any more.

About 8:30 or 9, I call my BFF to plan our day. Sometimes I go with her when she takes her dog for an off-leash run in the cemetery, sometimes we meet at a Wifi spot to work (she corrects papers or writes, I write or edit or read), sometimes she comes here to work, sometimes I go there. Most days we either walk or ride our bikes for several hours.

As Rachel Maddow describes her wardrobe, I go for the "kindergarten look": shorts or jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. No makeup other than carrot cream to smooth the rough spots.

This present time seems like a transition from working in a difficult, mostly unrewarding (other than monetarily) environment to a very different, unpressured, spontaneous kind of life.

Today we rode our bikes along the river and along the mall to see "Julie and Julia." On the way back, I felt filled with joy that we live in such a beautiful place. When we stopped for a drink of water, I said, choking a bit in surprising emotion, "This is our Paris."

This getting choked up embarrasses me, but it's happening lots. My heart and eyes just spill over. A Monarch butterfly flew beside me today for quite a ways, and I said, "Hi, there" and got choked up again.

At a red light, I waited next to a pedicab driver, and I asked him how he liked his job--was it fun or was it gruelling and hard? The light changed, and as he pushed off up the hill on Constitution Ave, he said, "I love every single thing about it."