You sold your accounting practice and followed your husband to Oregon. You’re too young to retire. You’re simply taking a break. This is an interim step and soon you’ll make a career change, get a new job. You bristle when people ask you how it feels not to go to work every day. You curtly assure them this is temporary. You haven’t a clue about what you want to do next.
You have a lot of time on your hands. You feel energetic. You clean out the kitchen cupboards, wash every piece of china, all the crystal, the serving dishes and arrange the cupboard as though it’s a display case in Tiffany’s. You dust all the cans in the pantry, wash the shelves, and neatly arrange the condiments. Your spices are lined up alphabetically. You find it satisfying to have tangible evidence of your efforts.
You take an interest in bed linens. You decide your next project will be creating the perfect bed. You read up on percale versus sateen, thread counts, long-staple Egyptian cotton, Italian weaving. You order pillows from Cuddledown of Maine, a down duvet from Williams-Sonoma, a heated mattress pad from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. You discover ironed sheets are luxurious and only take an hour to iron. You decide to change the sheets every other day. You’re surprised when your husband doesn’t notice and you decide not to tell him, for reasons you’re not clear about.
You give dinner parties. You spend days with your cookbooks, reading recipes, creating menus, testing new dishes. You clean the silver. You wash the china, crystal, and serving dishes in case they’ve gotten dusty in the last month. You consult with Sheldon at Tommy’s Wine Shop for the perfect wines to compliment your menu. You create beautiful tables with artfully arranged flowers, sumptuous silky tablecloths, jewel-toned napkins to match. You serve soup as the first course—very elegant. You serve French press coffee at the end of the meal—very elegant. Your guests seem to enjoy your efforts, but they never reciprocate. You wonder why.
You volunteer. You need to stay busy. You have lots of energy. You sign on at a shelter for battered women and their children. They ask you to join the board. The board president assigns you to the finance committee to help with the budget. She explains they have never been able to produce a realistic plan and with your background she believes you should be able to guide the committee to produce a viable budget. This feels like work to you. After a decent interval, you resign from the board.
You’re invited to join the board of the Eugene Ballet Company. You’re excited. This is more like it. An arts organization will put you into a creative milieu, just what you need after years as an accountant. You look forward to interaction with the dancers, the choreographer, the costume designer. They ask you to help with the budget. They’ve never had confidence in their money handling efforts. For good reason, you discover. This really feels like work. After a decent interval, you resign from the board.
You take classes at Lane Community College. You’ll learn something new, maybe you’ll discover hidden talents. You sign up for weaving, bridge, expressing yourself through movement. This isn’t fun. After a decent interval, you drop out.
You convince yourself it’s time to go back to work when the owner of Prudential Realty says you’d be just the right person to join her newly formed commercial real estate division. It sounds intriguing. You can use your financial planning and accounting background in a new way. You’ll work with investors, assist businesses moving to town, brainstorm with the staff about new ventures. You find out it’s a solitary venture and clients are hard to come by and other real estate people are not collegial. No, they’re competitive, surly people except when they’re with a client. You realize you’re not cut out for sales. After a decent interval, you resign.
Tax season comes and goes and you’re thankful not to be preparing tax returns but you’re still looking for your next career, so you work with a career counselor who charges you $500 for a battery of tests, the results of which tell you nothing you didn’t already know. After a decent interval, you leave the career counselor.
You sign up for a memoir class. You do the assigned writing exercises: first memory, first day of school, first kiss, first marriage, first divorce. You do not read your work in class. You are too shy and besides there’s one person who dominates the discussion, reads everything she’s written, then discusses at length her feelings as the memories came to her. She intimidates you. You learn she is a psychotherapist, and you wonder where she got her training (she hasn’t gotten to that part yet). You make a note to look up her credentials and never use a therapist with similar training.
You find another career counselor. Irene’s job is to help you find your true calling. You meet weekly for a year, slowly constructing a template for the perfect job: you examine your family, make lists of things you like to do, fill out worksheets designed to help you tap into your subconscious mind for clues. You create lists of your abilities, desirable components in a job, the ideal workspace. You still don’t know what you want to do.
One day a childhood memory resurfaces. Now that you think about it, it was an epiphany. You knew you were meant to be a writer. But you didn’t know how to go about it, you didn’t know any writers, and you let the idea go. Irene looks at you, surprised, possibly exasperated. “How long have you known this?” she asks. “I guess it’s always been there, but I just remembered.”
Twenty years later you have two books published and over fifty nonfictions and short stories published. You are a writer.
–
Susan Knox’s stories and essays have appeared in Barely South Review, CALYX, Cleaver, The MacGuffin, Matador Review, Sequestrum, Still Point Arts, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. She and her husband live in Seattle, near Pike Place Market where she shops most days for the evening meal.
© 2024, Susan Knox
Halfway Down the Stairs 