where to be

There has been talk these days of retirement and retiring.  As if one has, inevitably, arrived at the one place, or time, meant for waiting in whatever way we may so choose to wait.

Ralph, he says, "in my dotage", and dotage is the word he did use, "I will stay here in B*."  We are in a cab, familiars and visitors of B*.  I look through the cab's rain pelted windows, to what I imagine as mountain folds hidden in the fog.  The world outside is wet.

We pass by a park and I'm randomly reminded of firewood, fire trees, and fireplaces; and the persistent mist that covers the windows, the drafts that let themselves in in rooms.  Early mornings at the hotel, I stay in the sunroom.  

I tell Ralph what would he do in such cold a place.  Will he be writing?  Be with a new, younger lover?

I say I write better too in a cold place, preferably with rain.

But I do not say I'd like to stay close to sea.  No matter how much I love keeping hands on a garden; maybe, no matter even that I'd want to tend bonsais the way my mother used to do when I was so very small I can hardly remember.  Teach a potted old tree to bear flowers, or to bend an arm like this to catch the sun this way.

We arrive at the fellowship dinner place early.  Jay, still quite unstable after the afternoon vodka, and I decide to take a walk.  B* is a beautiful place.  I wish I had a cigarette.  We talk about politics.  And B*.  And retiring.

Maybe not here, Jay says, I'd like to see fields after fields of sugarcane when I wake up in the morning.

I laugh and say "You sure take after ---*." 

He shrugs, still looking pink because of vodka.

My own literary parents are retired.  When I visited M* she showed me her garden of herbs and gave me turmeric and local varieties of basil.  J* too wants to farm:  Like my father before me, he said.

What I'd want to do in my last waiting days is to always see the moon, rise gold, rise silver, rise quiet.  And maybe instead of running with dogs, I will be paddling a boat out to sea.