Sunday Morning

We ate breakfast on the deck this morning. Most people in America wouldn't have liked the 58 degree temperature, but the sun was out and we couldn't resist. It's been so cold that I have yet to put away my down vest or wool sweaters.

Today there is the promise of 70 degrees. Again, not the scorching temperatures of the Southwest or the muggy suffocation of the Northeast, but 70 degrees is warm around these parts and far better than the 40 degrees of last weekend.

Yesterday was warmer too. Once the sun made its appearance in the afternoon, it was warm enough to walk by the lake in shorts and a t-shirt. Rubin got so warm he dove into the lake the second I took off his leash. He swam for his toy again and again and came home looking like a Rastafarian poodle.

We went to dinner last night with Jeanne and Lisa to celebrate the shift away from my 22 years of teaching. I have yet to figure out what to call this transition -- retirement? -- and as I explained to everyone at dinner, I'm not sure it's quite hit me yet. I hear myself using the wrong language for it with all my sentences still in the present tense -- in my classroom we...or...my students are happy because... I speak as if I still am a teacher and as Ann told me last night, "You are and that will never really change."

Occasionally, I feel both the relief of letting go and the panic. Friday night I woke at 2 in the morning and thought I was having a heart attack only to realize I was in a slight panic attack. I practiced my breathing exercises and tried to figure out why I was panicking. I have enough money to live for a year without finding work if I so choose. I have the whole summer ahead of me and lots of opportunities for pursuing the things I love -- dogs, writing, exercise.

I haven't yet found an answer to the panic, but I think some of it has to do with my definition of myself. For 22 years I have answered that question -- "What work do you do?" -- with four simple words -- "I am a teacher" -- and then stood back to watch the reaction. From "Good for you" to "That's a job I could never do" I had an identity, a box around my life that gave me some kind of purchase in the world.

I'm not sure how I'll answer now. I'm kind of found of saying, "I'm a retired teacher" but Ann says that I'm not really retired as I'll still be working in some capacity. Lisa told me to try on "I'm a former teacher" but even that feels too undefined. I'm too uncertain to say, "I'm a writer" for many, many reasons, but chief among them is that I have yet to earn any money from my writing. And I'm certainly not yet a dog trainer.

I'm sort of partial to "I'm a student" though technically not true, in some ways it fits more aptly. I will soon learn to be a dog trainer, I will soon spend time writing (always a learning process) and like all poor students, I will hopefully have a part-time job to pay for some of my living expenses.

Aside from naming myself, I find that I am still uncertain about time and what to do with it. True, it's only the first weekend of my shift and tomorrow I must wrap things up at school so I'm not technically done, but the idea of having time that is not filled with papers to grade or lessons to plan feels...well, not overwhelming, but clumsy. I bump into myself trying to figure out how to maneuver through the hours of each day.

The other day, when I was still a "teacher" I had to take the bus downtown (to attend the court proceedings for Jeanne and Lisa's formal adoption of their two daughters). On the bus, I realized my mind was free of schedules and lists and all the thousands of little details that have consumed my life as a teacher for the past 22 years. It was only a moment of realization and then the flood of minutia overwhelmed my brain, but in that moment I thought, I like this. I like this feeling a lot.

We're about to head out the door to take Rubin for his morning walk. The sun is out, the temperature is warming up and it's Sunday...a day of relaxation and transitions.

I could get used to this.