Guilt is a bothersome thing, especially guilt over something that is neither mandatory or required. Setting out on this move for Portugal I was cocksure that I would be able to set a routine incorporating writing every single day. There was to be coffee, a bit of breakfast, (whatever I might conceive that to be), a brisk walk and then my ass in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard. Nope, it has not worked out that way.
When you retire, you don’t want to do the things that you “had” to do during your “productive” years. Alarm clocks become anathema. Rituals are disdained. Feeling obligated is distasteful. So, the whole get up and walk, drink some joe and pound away at the keyboard thing isn’t quite as attractive as it sounded in the abstract. Yes, to some degree writing is fun, but doing writing of any worth is also work. Work, blech!!!
Oh, and the time just slips away so easily. My own time gets frittered away with trips to the hardware store mostly. When you rent an apartment in Lisbon you get a plain vanilla box as we used to say in the construction attorney trade. There are no major appliances, no furniture and no light fixtures. Do the list in your head, beds, fridge, washing machine those are the lowest tier on the expat’s hierarchy of need. Then comes scouting. Where are the grocery stores, the markets, the laundries and the cheap places for a quick bite when you are exhausted from runs up and down the metro to get the perfect whatzit to do that thing you gotta do?
Once you get that stuff done then there is the language acquisition. At night I listen to podcasts on words you need to know at the store, the restaurant and the doctor’s office. These are matched up with simple verb forms. Rolling one’s Rs is hard to do correctly. Hard? It is really hard.
Occasionally there is the social outing. On Sunday we went to the carnival parade in Loures. It started late, so what else is new here in Portugal? And then it just kept going and going and …. Men in drag, people dressed up consumes that ranged from cheerleaders to sailors to spools of thread marched around in a big square for hours. Each blasting on a whistle or singing along to pop songs blasted through the whole town on ginormous speakers that would have given the Grateful Dead’s wall of sound a run for the money.
Carnival is a big thing here. So big that Shrove Tuesday in Portugal was declared a holiday. I don’t know whether it has been an annual tradition to declare Shrove Tuesday a holiday or if after multiple years of limiting the partying of carnival due to Covid-19 the country just wanted to let it loose.
Finally, there are the disruptions from America. Never would I have dreamed that East
Lansing, MI, the land of beer bongs, football games, good basketball and higher learning would be the site of an active shooter killing three people for no decent reason whatsoever. Never would I have expected my middle of the night would be spent calming my adult children who are still in East Lansing. When people see our MSU garb they comfort us and tell us those things don’t happen here.
Today is to be low key. We have a chandelier to be installed. We might visit a framing store for a recently purchased painting. There is a purple flowering plant that is calling out to me from a garden center a little way up the metro. Oh, and the blue wall needs a second coat.
Who can write with all that going on?
The song below is from a compilation record from years ago that I believe raised money for AIDS research. The tag line is truer for me today than it ever was before.
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