According to Plan
I could have sworn my dental appointment was at 10:30. I built my entire day around it:
6:45am: leave home for meeting at Columbus office.
8:00am: meeting at Columbus office
9:55am: leave Columbus office for dental appointment with Morgan.
12:00pm: return to Columbus office. Work all afternoon (meetings at 4:30, 5:30, and 6:15).
8:00pm: home to feed the cats, lock up chickens, and play the last free Tiles game in the New York Times’ puzzles section on my phone.
8:10pm: brush and floss because, you know, make Morgan proud.
I made it as far as the middle school about twenty minutes away and realized I wasn’t wearing my glasses. That’s pretty much a deal-breaker, so I turned around in the parking lot of the school’s bus garage and swam upstream in the dark against a long line of fellow commuters who clearly had their stuff together that morning better than I did.
For a flash of a moment, it felt like I was about to play hooky, heading home to all the comforts I’d just left behind (couch, cat, plush fleece throw draped over the arm of said couch) while my neighbors and all their friends dutifully zoomed forward as one on the two-lane country road that fed an ocean of city-bound wage earners.
Another flash of a moment: October 2016. My sister Peggy and I, driving from the condo we were renting with our husbands on Tybee Island into Savannah for scones and tea from The Pie Society, to sit at a white cast iron bistro table just outside the entrance while the good citizens of Georgia’s coastal jewel scurried across the bricks of City Market to clock in at the bank and the tourist information booth and Mrs. Byrd’s Cookies shop. We’d planned this trip for months, and particularly, this insane get-up-early-on-a-weekday-while-you’re-on-vacation breakfast with the express purpose of watching other folks go to work.
I know—not our most mature hour.
We knew, though, in a week’s time we’d be back in that flow of responsible grown-ups, punching our own clocks and setting our minds and shoulders to noble work. So, we enjoyed our scones and that delicious moment of pausing the routine of our lives, trying hard not to neener-neener too much.
Meanwhile, back to the day I thought I had planned so well: I pulled up to the house, left the truck running, and snatched my glasses from the end table on Patrick’s side of the couch (that’s where everything went wrong—I never put them down on his end table, since it’s the farthest away from the front door. I always set them on the edge of my end table so it’s a quick grab-and-go. When I go all senile in some unknown decade to come, my routines will either make or break me, I’m sure). I took the deck steps in one leap on my run back to the truck and had just shifted into reverse when my phone chirped with a text from my dentist, who was looking forward to seeing me that morning at 8:30. 8:30? Are they sure?? What madness is this? My appointments with Morgan are always at 10:30. Apparently not. It was 7:05; if I left now, I’d be 45 minutes early. That didn’t seem wise, even if they do have a massage chair just off the waiting room. But back inside the house, there weren’t really any 45-minute projects that needed doing, so I sat with my foot on the brake, still in reverse, considering my options. Tea with one of the cats? A short walk through the meadow? Anything to sew or a book to read? Tea with Xena on my lap won the toss, and on the other side of the dentist, I headed to the office with a lingering taste of raspberry tooth polish on my tongue, rehearsing apologies in my head for the meeting I missed.
I run a pretty tight ship in the morning when it comes to the unfolding of my day. Edges as sharp as a road map, and just as fussy about being re-folded properly, there’s a train schedule-like precision to what awaits me on the other side of the warm blankets of a bed too comfortable for description. When something occurs out of step, the rest of the day slides sideways along with it, and against my organized mind’s best intentions, unravels into a free-love-in-the-60’s rearrangement of meetings, projects, deadlines and late lunches. I try my best to go along with this new scrambled but mostly-harmless flow, whispering promises of “back on track tomorrow” to the anal retentive that makes her home in my soul. I wonder how she’ll do during our first week of retirement (which is still several years away, or so my financial advisor says). A co-worker recently retired after 26+ years, and I rejoiced for her on that uncharacteristically snowy day in early November when she didn’t need to go anywhere beyond her robe and slippers, while I scraped 1/4” of ice from my windshield as the flakes of these efforts fell down my coat sleeves. Sometimes I crave an existence with a looser agenda; most days I’m grateful for the pull of structure and purpose and bi-weekly paycheck security. But driving home to retrieve my only pair of functioning spectacles that morning, I started to have second thoughts of the wild and work-free kind, and even let myself imagine being comfortable with an income that didn’t have forty hours in front of it. As my late father-in-law used to say, “retirement, Liz, has nothing to do with doing nothing.”
He’s right, of course. When the time comes, I’ll change up the content of my days. That’s all, really. They will most likely be just as structured and scheduled and filled with purpose, interrupted by pauses to just be, to receive the moment that’s been placed in my aging hands (that resemble my mother’s with each passing year) until it’s time to bake the bread or bag up this week’s batch of coconut sugar-sweetened granola for the weekend market. I’ll remember where I left my glasses and get on with my day.
For now, I sit in gratitude for the lessons from a day that didn’t go according to plan but worked out the way it needed to. I made it through the x-rays without gagging, and my teeth are clean for another three months.
I’m cool with that.
