The Depth of the Nows

I feel like I have been complaining and moaning and fearing, lately, but despite myself, these past few days have been pretty wonderful.  Fearing, you say?  Well, I think it is a typical thing.  Makes my think of my friend Jim, who told me way back when I was a freshman in college living in the same dorm (that’s where I met him), that he planned his whole life out—that he was going to get a government job and retire early with a big pension.  And, as it turned out, he actually did do that, got a job with the County of San Francisco, and then retired with a pension when he was 50.  And he bragged about it, it seemed that way to me, anyway, but after a while of such retirement, he started to complain that now he couldn’t do things like he used to.

He said he used to go to the opera, and he used to go out to dinners in elegant San Francisco restaurants (of which there are an infinite supply), and he would travel to Europe, but now he couldn’t.  Why not, I asked?  He said, “Because I don’t have the same amount of money I used to.”

I figure that maybe the pension he was receiving after having worked about fifteen years less than the “normal” pattern (or, comparing him with me, now, he worked twenty years less), I didn’t really feel all that sorry for him, thinking (admittedly unkindly), Well if you need more money, maybe you should get a job!  I didn’t say that to him, of course, that would have been rude and actually none of my business.  And anyway, he does deserve points for planning his life and actually sticking to it, and I don’t think he can be blamed if he later discovered that some of the details ended up being different from what he had expected.  That is life, right?  That happens to all of us.  Any anyway, he still remains a brilliant, talented, and hilarious guy that I always liked.

But for me, lately, in what has now been my three months of retirement, I have now finally experienced and understood Jim’s feelings.  It isn’t whether you have the money or not, but it is that you can’t be quite sure that it is enough.  If you are actually living on your pension, or, in my case, on your retirement fund and various investments, while that may be sufficient for maintaining your previous lifestyle, it isn’t really the same as having a regular paycheck come ringing into your bank account.  I would love in when I would be working on my computer and there would be a signaling “ding” and on the lower right hand side of the screen would be a notice from Wells Fargo saying that a direct deposit had been deposited in my checking account and it would tell me my new balance.  Twice a month.  And I knew that that would come to a stop and I would surely miss it, but that didn’t mean that I was now going to be destitute.  And I absolutely am not.  And my licensed financial adviser underscores that.  And it is not that I am not planning on generating an income from hoped for published books, monetized YouTube travel videos (once they get way better than they are now!) and other ideas.  It’s just that none of those are as secure as a regular paycheck.

So now I am “Mr. Conserve”, running around turning lights off (my father would be proud), only having on the ones in the actual room that I am in, not going out to eat as much as I had been, and cooking at home, instead, and not even taking any major trips (not yet) until my retirement finances are all fully set up (my advisor, Cheryl, tells me that will be somewhere in the middle of January). (P.S., Carmen, if you are reading this, “I am not Cheryl’s only client!”)  But we had a very productive day yesterday, a two-hour phone call discussing my “risk profile” that was generated from a 25-question questionnaire that I had done last week (sweating bullets while doing it).  That was amazingly useful, and essential according to Cheryl.  Based on how you answer the questions, you end up with a “risk tolerance” score, and then Cheryl goes over each question with you to find out why you chose each choice so that she can get a better understanding of your emotions and also set up the most appropriate plan.

The risk tolerance score goes from 1 to 100; a 1 would be a person who was so afraid of risk that they would hide every penny and dollar they owned under a mattress, not even feeling safe with having their money in a bank.  A rating of 100 would be the kind of person who would take their entire retirement fund, all $500,000 or a million or whatever it is, and maybe even borrow money, and go to Las Vegas and put it all on one number on a roulette wheel.  Me, I scored a 55, which means that I am in the risk tolerance band of anywhere between 50 and 60.  I am to make a decision as to exactly which number to apply to myself in that range.  What that will mean will be, suppose I choose 60, then that means that Cheryl will create my portfolio so that 60% of all that I have will be invested in a variety of equities, and 40% in a variety of fixed income investments.  Fixed income investments are those that pay a definite amount, such as 2.5% percent a year (or decades ago, 10% a year), whereas equities can grow in value (or diminish), the typical stock performance of going up or going down, fluctuating the whole time based on market forces and so on.  I think we all know about that.

There’s way more to it than that, though, and that is Cheryl’s software has all the performance histories of types of investments from 1970 onward.  I liked the use of that particular date (which is scientifically based, I am guessing based on that being the year that Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and cycles started to change dramatically; another type of benchmark might happen to be when the Federal Reserve system was begun), but I like that date of 1970 because that was the year I graduated and suddenly felt that I had stepped out into the real adult world, which meant I was no longer in college and supported by my parents.  It was from 1970 and on when I more or less now had to be earning money to live on.

That wasn’t the beginning of my getting a job or earning money—I had been doing that since I was 17, at first having a “taking your trash to dump” in my pick-up truck service, for which there was an immense demand in the neighborhood where I lived, and I really gave them their money’s worth by filling the bed of that truck sky high with stuff.  One summer, I was paid by my parents to paint our house (and boy were they demanding professional quality…and go it), but they were also cool about it and allowed my girlfriend, Becky, to come be with me while I painted.  I got so tan in the sun that summer that I can hardly believe it (I know Becky liked the shirtless view; ah, how nice to be teenager) and apparently I worked much better (and quicker) when I had someone wonderful like Becky to talk and joke and sing, etc., with. Her presence wasn’t a distraction but an energizer.

While in college, I got a job working in the dishwasher area of the dorm, and my friend, Jim (mentioned above) worked by my side.  He was stationed at the window where the students would put their finished trays and dishes.  Jim would scrape off in the garbage the left over food and hand each plate to me, where I would give them a good rinse and hand them to the guy on my left who would put them into the conveyor belt of the dishwashing machine.  It was noisy enough in there that Jim and I could hear each other, but nobody else could hear us, so we had wonderful conversations and hilarious jokes (he could choke you with laughter) and sing songs and dream our future lives.  On Sundays, the dorm dining room was closed, so I worked in the snack bar cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, serving chili, frying French fries, and whipping up milkshakes.  So I already had my so-called “McDonald’s” job when I was in college.  I loved all this, because it was filling my pockets with money and it was all mine to do whatever I wanted to with it.  That money was total gravy, not like once you are out of college and now you have to make a living.

So, Cheryl matches the historical investment performances with her client’s risk profiles and comes up via a multivariate analysis what investment vehicles would get the most money based on a client’s tolerance for the risk of getting that level of growth. 

So having that conference got me feeling a whole lot better yesterday!

That evening, I was going out with a friend I’ve known since high school, Ted, to see at the Lemmle Movie Center in Santa Monica a movie of the recent London play of The King and I.  I actually had never seen the Deborah Kerr, Yule Brenner movie, so this story was new for me.  And it was glorious.  Never before had I seen such a beautifully put together film of what was really being performed on stage.

It’s interesting, because I am currently studying a book written by a movie maker named Steve Stockman, entitled How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck”, and Steven Pressfield, who wrote the The Legend of Bagger Vance, a book and then subsequent movie that made me wish I had taken up golf, said Stockman’s book was “like two years of film school in 248 pages”.  One thing Steve Stockman stresses (and stresses and stresses and stresses) is that you plan your video!   Don’t be like the goofball man who goes to an elementary school concert and stands there the whole time and simply videos the whole chorus by going back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, back and forth over and over again, not even thinking to focus in on his daughter.  Or, what I definitely am guilty of, don’t just randomly video things you see while on vacation trips and expect strangers, or even friends, to sit down and watch more than four seconds of that very boring material.  I sort of get the idea from him (so far) that “vacation videos” are the worst, and yet I somehow expect to make money from posting YouTube videos on just that kind of video.  Well, some amazing people are making tons of money doing just that, and there are several of them whose videos I watch every day as do tens of thousands of other people, so there is still some hope.

So watching that London Palladium film of the play of The King and I was clearly film utterly planned out, perfectly.  Clearly, the filmmakers had to watch that play many times in order to do such a great job.  They couldn’t possibly just arrive one day and figure they could sit down and film that.  You just know that it would be absolutely horrible.  They would have to know when they needed to do wide shots and when they needed to zero in on one particular performer, “et cetera et cetera et cetera”, so they wouldn’t miss anything that would be essential to catch.  Otherwise, they would always be getting to the good scenes after they happened, not before.

I imagine that everybody reading this has already seen the movie of the King and I, but I was like what I think of (affectionately) as “the country bumpkin”, what I often do like to be, which is a sort of “hey, maw, would you look at that!” feeling I get which lets me be flabbergasted by something really wonderful that so many others are already bored with by now.  Kind of like, “Yeah, we actually do have automobiles, now, people just don’t get around with a horse and buggy any more.”  “Well golly!”  Okay, admit it, if you, are sometimes one of those bumpkins, reflect upon how great it is to experience something wonderful for the first time.

So, the singing…people don’t seem to sing like this anymore.  How beautiful that was.  And it was enlightening to know so much of the music, but to have had no idea that this was where it came from. Even a more obscure song (that I hadn’t heard in about forty years), “My Lord and Master”, but also better known songs, such as “Hello, Young Lovers” and “I Have Dreamed”, I didn’t know they were from The King and I. 

There were so many wonderful songs, and I kept thinking to myself, Well, yeah, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and you like Stephen Sondheim so much, you know Oscar Hammerstein was Sondheim’s mentor.  Okay, I am so glad that Ted is way more sophisticated than I am, it was his idea that we go see this, I doubt I would have on my own.

The song I actually liked the best was “Getting to Know You” and I swear that if I were a teacher, I would sometime in the first trimester sing this song with the students and have them learn it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvnGaZRpj8  I remember when I was in elementary school, all the teachers sang (remember the little note or tone whistle thing, whatever that was called) whether they considered themselves to be good signers or not.  The point is to do it and have fun with it, you don’t have to be Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra.

So, the play was great, but also was the dinner we had before hand.  We chose a Thai restaurant, Thai Dishes on Broadway, only a couple of blocks away from the Laemmle.  I really loved it.  They had a nice outdoor patio, but we ate inside.  The service was excellent.  The waitress came up to ask us for what we wanted to drink but first saying that they had something new, “Ice milk green tea”.  I have lately been reading how beneficial green tea actually is (to the extent that people are recommended to drink a cup of it at all three daily meals), so I decided to have that.  I said to the waitress that I normally would order a Thai iced tea, and she explained that this was like that but with green tea.  It was out of this word delicious, surprisingly so.  Up to now, I had felt that green tea didn’t really have any kind of a taste, but wow, something about that combination with the milk absolutely ramped the green tea taste up to utter fresh goodness.  So that was truly a hit with me.

To eat, I had a yellow curry (chicken, carrots, onions, and potatoes in a yellow curry sauce) along with white rice, and the curry dish came in a heated bowl.  Again, a total winner, I kept thinking about how amazingly delicious it was.  Ted had some complicated-looking bowl full of various kinds of seafood and vegetables, which was a lot of food, but he certainly ate it all.  After we finished eating, we still had half an hour before time to go to the theater, so I asked the waitress if we could stay a bit and she said, “Of course”, so I ordered a coffee drink but I can’t say what it was called…it seemed to be like a chai tea but with coffee instead of tea, and had a sense of chocolate involved.  Anyway, it was yet another winner.  I walked out of that restaurant really happy and planning on going back there again very soon.

As we walked to the theater, I saw a couple of other restaurants that I would also like to try out.  I may be making my way down to Santa Monica quite a bit more.  Ted suggests taking the Metro to get there, but that would be about a two-hour one way trip from Tarzana.  He likes to avoid paying the high price to park in Santa Monica.  To get to this movie theater, he parked at the Metro station at Bundy and Olympic for $3.00 and took the train down to the last stop in Santa Monica.  I had parked in the city garage right across the street from the Laemmle and since the movie was three hours long and we had met down there two hours ahead so that we could have a leisurely dinner, we were there a total of five hours and that cost me $14.00 to park.  Oh well, it is all very convenient, though, and I like how when you come down the elevator and get out to the street, there is a crosswalk right there in the middle of the street takes you right to the Laemmle.

Oh, to to ad the magic of that evening, after I crossed on that crosswalk, who should I see waiting there at the theater but a man I hadn’t seen for 20 years, a man whom I had met doing extra work on movies and television, and who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood where I lived before I moved to Tarzana.  He was there to see a movie that was starting in a few minutes, so we couldn’t visit with each other very long.  But I take those kinds of chance meetings to be “good omens” of some kind.

One more thing before I post this blog entry.  I said that I had been doing more cooking for myself instead of eating out.  For years, I had been trying so many various diets, none of which seemed to really work all that well.  What worked best was fasting for seven days with only water…but then the weight still quickly came back on afterward.  The eating out was not due to laziness, but because nothing I cooked really tasted very good due to all these diets with what you can eat and what you can’t, which mostly is all you want of what you don’t really care for (or get sick of) and nothing of what you really like.  So I would go out to eat just to actually eat something that I wanted and that tasted good.

But now that I am retired and really wanting to eat more at home, that has made me take off the shelf some of my cook books and do a different kind of “reset”…why not eat things that I want to and actually taste good, but just greatly reduced portions.  Usually the way this has worked out is that I end up having only one, and sometimes two, meals in a day, which ends up being a kind of modified fast by default, and all the food tastes really good.  I don’t yet really know how well this will work “diet wise”, but it sure does make me happy and that seems to be much more important at the time being.

I have been playing around with a marvelous cookbook set that is the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cooking, in 12 volumes, 2,000 pages, 1,500 colored illustrations, 8,500 recipes!  Printed in 1966, the year I graduated from high school and then started college.  I don’t know if that had been my mother’s, or one of my Uncle Ham’s (I have books from both of their collections).  Both of them were wonderful cooks.  I will always crave my mother’s cooking, as well as the cooking of both of my grandmothers.  In the latter years of his life, my Uncle Ham would write about cooking for various European magazines.  He would devise menus for various parties and occasions and then make gorgeous photographs of the dishes in amazing settings, such as an Italian feast photographed in a lay out on the Rialto Bridge in Venice with the Grand Canal flowing underneath.

So with this book series, when they say encyclopedia, they mean it.  It isn’t just a book of recipes, but it teaches about food like you just can’t believe, but also includes poetry and essays about food.  Where I will be going Christmas, while it isn’t a pot luck, they do like if you bring a dish.  So I looked up in the encyclopedia under the entry “Christmas” to see what I might want to make.  I’m not sure, yet, but I got entranced by some of the essays regarding food and the Christmas season.

One woman, named Jean Hersey, I don’t know if she was a famous writer back in 1966, or a person who worked on the staff of Women’s Day, wrote an essay entitled, “Twelve Days Before Christmas” which was about how every year she makes a loaf of bread every day of the twelve days before Christmas.  Some of the loaves she and her family will eat, others they will give to visitors during the Holiday season.  And can she make the idea of baking bread appealing!  Now, I have a bread-making machine, that I like to use (so easy!), and I can make bread that is healthy because I can choose the ingredients, but of course Jean Hersey would make her twelve days of bread by hand.  I am tempted to make at least one loaf of bread her way.  Here’s something that she wrote:  There is something so solidly satisfying to me about making bread. Is it perhaps, because, after all, yeast is a plant and it is always good to feel any plant grow in your hands?

Or this, The baking time is when the fragrance reaches its peak of delight.  Ask a friend over for tea just to sit there beside your glowing fire, with the bread baking.  Simple pleasure, but oh so delightful.  I can understand now how I so often feel that I have completely missed the feeling of a particular holiday.  One has to really get into it in whatever way strikes you.  This woman, essentially anonymous writer who nevertheless used her skill that inspires a person 52 years in the future, puts a whole different perspective on the meaning and power of a life.  It’s the depths of the nows that matter.  One of the things that I am learning from retirement is to stop the habit of rushing forward, and instead, experiencing each particular moment as being the whole thing.  It certainly gets rid of the complaining, moaning, and fearing.

I swear, one could even be hanging off a cliff 2,000 feet above a rocky gorge, holding onto a tree root for dear life, scared to death and thinking that in a few moments you will be falling to your death and you just can’t hold on any longer, when suddenly you will notice the awesomeness of your surroundings and be amazed that you are there to witness such spectacular beauty.  I will bet that at the very next moment, you will happen to see a previously undetected toehold that is enough for you to use to get yourself back up to the safety of the ledge above you.  That’s not a miracle, it’s that the answer is right there right in front of your nose, if only you will stop long enough to be able to see it.