9. The Horror of Doing Nothing
The Year of Paying Attention
[It’s January of 2017,
the waning days of
the Obama administration.]
The world is my oyster. A silent sealed-tight shell committed to keeping its secrets.
Adventures populate my calendar: a trip to Knoxville for a weirdo music festival, followed by a spin through a little of the terrifying American South. I can already hear the Deliverance banjos. On the home front, I’m registered for the Encore Transition Program at Union Theological Seminary, a seminar for privileged, aging, perplexed people like me, wondering what to do with the rest of our lives. Is this the year I ride a train across the American West, or spend a month living in New Orleans? To protect what remains of my mind, I hereby vow each day to meditate, learn Spanish, practice guitar, read something ennobling, go to a 12-step meeting, and take advantage of the grown-up supreme amusement park that is New York City.
And I don’t feel like doing any of it. I feel like doing nothing. Doing nothing consists of listening to music I already know (why don’t more people appreciate NRBQ?), staring at my computer, posting inspiring articles to Privileged Old White Guys for Change, a Facebook page I set up after last year’s presidential election (I’m an involved citizen!), then posting snarky content to my own Facebook page (people are fools!), all the while stuffing my face with apples and cheese and peanut butter and fistfuls of raisins. It’s lucky I don’t have Cheesit (singular, like cheese, not Cheesits, please, pay attention) or potato chips or peanut M&M’s, as those would be next, and they would be gone, and I would feel dirty and like a failure, a greasy, chocolatey failure.
Even as I become one, I’m mystified by idle people, like my father had been, a widower with a paid-off mortgage who buried his wife and sold the family house, and in his last years lived alone in big home-turned-apartment house across the suburban street from my sister Marianne. I phoned him twice a week from my office, and filled him in on his granddaughters. He sounded okay, but my sister told me his thinking had gotten shaky, his powers dwindling, his vision fading, this former newspaperman’s obsessive reading of three daily papers and a clutch of periodicals no longer possible. Then he spent a few nights in the hospital for some kind of cerebral short circuit, and I drove up, huddled with my equally freaked-out sister, and told him in no uncertain terms that he must accept some help, like a cleaning lady, and that my sister and I would be making some safety changes to his apartment. He offered no resistance.
His mysterious ailment cleared up, and restored to himself, he exited the hospital and returned to his apartment. Within a day he let me know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t making any changes in his home, he didn’t need any more help, and that was that. I offered no resistance, and we didn’t discuss it further. We understood each other.
He seemed to live now for little more than broadcasts of professional football, and I dreaded the end of the season — what would he do to occupy his time? Out her kitchen window my sister would watch him back his car into the street, thinking, “When is he going to hit somebody? Is it time to make him stop driving?” Marianne had always been his favorite child, and she adored him. They went out for lunch every day or two, phoned one another multiple times a day, but otherwise he spent his time alone. They cracked each other up, and she was accustomed to his dark humor, not just kidding when he reminded Marianne that when he decided he’d had enough, he’d make his exit on his own terms. Then came the morning when he didn’t answer Marianne’s repeated calls. She crossed the street and went in to find his body, with a note apologizing for putting her through the terrible discovery. She called me in New York, and I drove home to help her.
The other day I was buttoning my shirt in the changing room after the yoga class with another old guy, with whom I’d been trading the silent “how ya doin’” nod for a couple of months. How long had I been coming, he asked, and I told him I began when I’d worked nearby, and kept coming after my job ended. “So you’re retired?” he asked conspiratorially. I guessed maybe I was. “It’s great,” he said, as if we both knew something working people hadn’t discovered. “Sometimes, I get up and I don’t feel like doing anything. So I don’t.”
Doing nothing. This idea is terrifying.
Next week: That’s Where You’re Going To Live If You Don’t Shape Up
