Frederick Van Epps, Retired

Van Epps Tries to Think of Three Good Reasons to Get Up in the Morning
First, because I always have before. So far, at least. Up till now.
Second, to get right to stretching a new canvas and painting that complex,
gnarled, lovely landscape that could have surfaced just before my eyelids
closed and that Ill certainly be able to recollect the minute I get some coffee
in me; or to read over with satisfaction the story I might have begun at whiteheat an hour after midnight and prudently left in mid-sentence; to polish the
sonnet that sprang from my brow after dinner orwhy not?the sestina.
Im having trouble coming up with a third reasona good one, that is. I could
tick off plenty of middling reasons like: a) not having died overnight, b) being
curious to discover what new messes the world got itself into while I was at
the Feather Ball, c) irresistible compulsions to micturate and masticate, or at
least to ambulate, d) the urge to check email for something non-exasperating,
e) resuming my re-reading of all of Dostoyevsky which might put me back to
sleep. Anyway, all these only bring me back to reason one which is, lets be
honest, pretty sad.
I think (thinks Van Epps) you can tell how old a person isnot just
chronologically but spiritually, morallyby the degree of alacrity with which he
or she bounces out of bed on an ordinary morning. Or doesnt.
Van Epps Reflects on his New Condition
They gave me the clock. It chimes eight times at twelve, four, and eight, then
one, two, and so on every half-hour. It does this three times a day. Nautical
chimes, marking the watches. Did they imagine Id take to the sea, a new
Flying Dutchman? So, Im out to pasture; Ive hung em up. Ive embarked on
the Golden Years which, so far, havent exactly sparkled like a blue lagoon at
noon. Its only been three months, but I cant see how things will change. Im
certainly doomed to grow old but Im not cut out to be a retiree. I know people
whove embraced retirement like a lost childhood friend. Retirement is
glorified, in ads where men may be gray but are never balding, in robust
health, trim, not coughing, where the women are smooth and dont look
anywhere near their age. Happy golfers in jackass pants. Love-birds,
unwidowed, undivorced. Lusty gobblers of Viagra and Cialis. All spectacularly
compos mentis. There are the cruise-takers, hikers, book-club organizers, and
saintly volunteers; there are the ambitious gardeners and adventurous
gourmets. There are the tanned citizens of waiting rooms in Sun City or Delray
Beach who watch the early news where theyre pitched pills that promise

immortality or, at the least, will stave off dementia a little longer. There are
the bird-watchers and consumers of the early-bird specials, the buyers of
recreational vehicles ticking off their list of national parks. And there are the
doting grandparents who have to get up early to feed and dress a generation
they didnt think theyd have to raise but who, despite their wrinkles and
smells, delight the toddlers, their priceless genetic heritage. But I suspect for a
lot of us, even the ones who put money aside, retirement signifies
fecklessness, forgetting, being forgotten, the dissolution of routines which we
miss, including the ones we detestedstill detest but still miss.
How Van Epps Came to Retire
He tells the tale in a long email to his college roommate, an ex-lawyer now
happily retired, remarried, a Montanan piously devoted to his states
established Church of the Dry Fly.
Hi, Bill. You ask about my deciding to retire when last the topic arose I was
pretty voluble about my plan (Inshallah) to keel over in the middle of
delivering a lecture on Sren Kierkegaard. It wasnt my health, as you tactfully
hint. Neither body nor mind, of course, are what they once were, but both can
still function within employable parameters. Still, Im retired. Ill give the
explanation dramatically.
Scene: My quondam office. Walnut veneer desk with a drawer that locks
though Ive never locked it. One of those desk chairs that look like suitable for
a trip to Mars; two worn midcentury modern seats, a bookcase, a large bulletin
board covered with postcards I collected from museums or sent by former
students who go to museums, and a long radiator which Ive covered with a
rug. Theres also a waste basket. I mention this only because the Colleges
self-righteous but short-sighted Sustainability Committee wanted to confiscate
it to save the world on the cheap. I remember that day well. Two
spectacularly well-meaning young women came to the door asking to take
away the waste basket, sure Id agree. I pointed to the rug covering the
radiator, the open window, pointed out that it was February and offered to
surrender the waste basket just as soon as the College got itself a 20th-century
heating system and replaced the Potemkin thermostats. The radiator extends
under the big window that looks over a railroad marshalling yard, an eight-lane
expressway, a river, the pleasant town across it and sky above. If you scooch
down just a bit in your chair, you dont see anything but river, town, and sky, a
prospect worth dragging yourself up five flights for, unless you have stroke or
heart attack on the way.
Characters of the Colloquy:
Your Old Roommate, in his professor outfit of sport jacket, sweater, no tie, and
tan jeans that feel almost as good as the blue ones.

The Dean, a woman of forty-five, new to the job. She wears a spiffy dress,
dark with arabesques, an eighty-dollar haircut, and a still more costly scarf.
The Dean may favor scarves the way I used to my sports coats, as a mantles
of office. You should know that deans dont visit their faculty; they summon
them. The exception is when they want to be able to get up and go, as, for
example, when firing somebody. Phone calls from deans are bad enough;
visits tend toward the lethal. The Dean is what they call task-oriented, a
bottom-liner. She focuses on her aim the way a hawk does on a vole. And her
aim that day was to get rid of me.
Heres how it went, more or less.
Dean: You know enrollments down.
Me: I noticed.
Dean (sighing): And going lower next year.
Me (holding down my end of the conversation): Yup.
Dean: Its the recession. Bad for liberal education; everybody wants their kids
in the business school. (Getting ready, the royal, exculpating pronoun): I
dont see any avoiding it. Were going to lose people.
Me: If you say so.
Dean (looking at me meaningly): You know Jeffrey Coombs?
Me: Nice young fellow, Jeff.
Dean (seeing an opening): So you do know him, then?
Me: Just to say hello. Not all that well.
Dean: Do you know hes got a four-year-old?
Me: And a wife too, I suppose.
Dean: Well, not actually not any more. Shes left him.
Me: Left him?
Dean: For a woman. Jeffreys a single parent now.
Me: I see.
Dean (frowning humanely): He was last hired. If nobody else leaves we wont
be able to renew his contract.
Me: Doesnt his wife work for a bank?
Dean (prickly): What does that matter?
Me: Oh, I was just thinking. He happened to mention thats why they moved
here. She got this big job.
Dean (back on task; not averse to gossip but also not one for digressions):
Jeffreys promising. Good student evaluations. Two articles in sound journals.
Has been very active on three committees.
Me: A good start.
Dean (pouncing): Exactly. And hed be absolutely crushed, especially now.
Losing his salary and benefits too. Can you imagine? It could destroy him.
And youve have to admit we need new blood, people like him.
Me (catching on): Im old blood?

Note: In an indiscreet moment the Deans predecessor once pulled out a huge
black loose-leaf binder which he called How To Be A Dean. Over 700 pages,
he said in his unbuttoned mood, but only this one matters. And he showed
me a page listing the income/expense ratios of each of the Universitys
schools, colleges, divisions, programs, and institutes. Numbers have a
peculiarly beguiling effect on administrators: show them numbers, they stop
thinking. And they always want numbers. Our current president never calls
them numbers, though. He favors the more technological term metricsas
in the imperative Give me metrics. In one meeting I found myself
wondering if was asking for somebody to speak up in iambic tetrameter.
Me: It pains me to say it, Dean, but you cant fire me
Dean (mock-shocked): Fire you!
Me: unless you can give a good cause, moral turpitude, for instance, or
embezzlement.
Dean (laughing nervously, pushing the thought away with her extended
hands): Oh, heavens no, Fred. Fire you?
Note: Its not only very bad when a dean shows up at your office but also
when one of them starts calling you by a diminutive of your given name.
Dean: But look, Fred. Sylvia retired two years ago and she was whatfive
years younger than you?
Me: Only one, actually, and poor Sylvia was ill. Im afraid Im not just tenured
but, for the time being, reasonably in the pink.
Dean (gloves off now, in Iron-Lady mode): I can assign you new courses, Fred.
Gigantic ones without graders. I can rearrange your schedule. How would you
like all eight oclock classes? Or perhaps joining one of our overseas
programs? The Universitys planning one in Abu Dhabi, I believe.
Me: Yep. I suppose you can do all that. You can also deny me merit salary
increases too. Move my office to a broom closet. Even stick me on the
Pedagogical Innovation Committee.
Dean (sweetly now): Really, Fred, dont you think its time you relaxed? I
mean youve certainly earned it. Decades of service. Good service.
Outstanding service. The big teaching award. Three books in the last six
years, isnt it?
Me: Only two.
Dean: Well, two then. Thats more than enough.
Me: Is it? For what?
Dean: Of course you dont want to just repeat yourself, or push yourself like
you used to. And think of poor Jeffrey. And the child.
Me: And of you? Are you saying you want me to spare your feelings. So you
dont have to let him go. That it?
Dean (picking at her scarf, looking focused): Did you happen see that article
in The Chronicle?
Me: You mean Retire, Already?

Dean: Bingo! Thats the one. It made its point rather well, dont you agree?
Well, Bill, it went on a bit longer, but I wont. I gave in. A guilt-trip to oblivion.
Made way for the young. When the news was announced I heard from a
gratifying number of former students, though I suspect most of them were
surprised to learn I was still alive. The Alumni Association wanted to host a
formal dinner but I turned them down, which didnt exactly delight the fundraisers in the euphemistically named Development Office. I did, however,
accept the title of emeritus. Thats Latin for honorably chucked out. But you
get to use the library.
Yours down to my L. L. Bean moccasins,
Fred
P.S. We fired Coombs anyway.
Retirement Cards
Fred set the score of store-bought retirement cards aside. They were all pretty
awful but not equally so. One afternoon, to kill time, he ranked them. In
primary colors, the second runner-up reads:
RETIREMENT SCHEDULE
MONDAY BRUSH TEETH
TUESDAY SHAVE
WEDNESDAY SHOWER
THURDAY TRIM TOENAILS
FRIDAY TRIM NOSE HAIRS
SATURDAY CHANGE UNDERWEAR
SUNDAY DRINK BEER
Fred tries to picture Norm Weiser, or his somewhat loud wife Erma, picking out
this card. Did he/she/they think about it or just grab the first thing from the
slim Retirement section at the drug store? Evidently better than having to
write something. Yet Fred mustered some sympathy for the card. It so badly
wants to be funny and falls so flat that its funny the way a bad but earnest
artist can be funny, or a crude joke whispered at a funeral. And what is the
joke anyway? That the life of the retired is empty, each task needing to be
hoarded to make a day eventful? Is that amusing or just cruel? Actually, Fred
thinks the backhanded schadenfreude does more to redeem the card than the
final assumption that we all like beer and look forward to drinking it. Thats
why it didnt finish even lower.
The first runner-up apparently aims at cleverness via typography. Fred recalls
one of his students rolling her eyes and saying As if, back when Valley-Girl

elocution was fashionable. As if changing fonts and letter size so that all the
lines come out the same length could make any of them less vacuous.
Downbeat on the upbeat. Theres something Ionesco said that Fred had often
thought of and this card made him think of it too: Nothing makes me so
pessimistic as optimism.
Seven Day Weekend

Take
H A P

It

Easy
P

Retirement
Put Your Feet Up
U N W I N D

Afternoon naps
LAZY

DAYS

Time for Hobbies

LIFE BEGINS
A New Adventure
The winnerthe worstis a card made to look like an official diploma or birth
certificate, Old English font and all. This License to Chill, issued by the
Board of the State of Euphoria, includes a gilded Great Seal of the Working
Stiff above the motto, No work, no jerks, no problems. To the left are four
lines of doggerel which Fred imagines an unhappy working-stiff composing
carelessly yet yearningly:
Made my pile,
Paid my dues,
Now hand over
Those dancing shoes.
Fred was thinking of this card, carefully selected by his brother-in-law, as he
shaved (even though it wasnt Tuesday). He was forced to look at his face.
Inspired by this unwelcome sight, he sat down and made a card to himself, a
riposte to all the others. For the illustration he drew a fair facsimile of a flabby
geezer peering into a bathroom mirror. The reflection was of a robust fellow
about forty years younger, slimmer, and hairier:
Age is the illusion mirrors make real,

brute fact your adolescent soul belies.

The mirror wont reveal what you feel,
just someone worn and wizened and unwise.
Van Epps Future
Three months in and its September once again. Van Epps has gone off
to school every September since he was four years old. During the afternoon
he ferrets out an old poemvery likely written by himabout September. The
poem is quite long. It has eleven sections and this is the eleventh:
Take heart from renewal though cringing at
the strain; dont weigh the burden, only lift.
It can be a good month, as Trilling says,
before aspiration collides with effort,
a honeymoon of tentativeness,
a congeries of inchoate faces,
of muscles settling under a load,
a fumbling among chrysanthemums,
new footwear, old faces,
early classes and late leaves.
To people of his stamp, nostalgia is always suspect, and Van Epps carefully
monitors his sentimental tendencies, polices them rather. Nevertheless these
linesprobably his own, written not so long agomove him.
Van Epps watches what has become his customary two full hours of news from
Deutsche Welle, BBC, and PBS. All lead with the identical stories, the same
videos; but, later, there are the small local items he watches for: the
detention of a Hamburg jihadist whose father is a Lutheran minister, the
Derbyshire town where they still celebrate the wedding of Richardsons
Pamela and Lord B, the suicide rate at MIT, etc. But now its seven oclock
and hes bored. Hes often bored yet cant get used to it. Its as if he thinks
he shouldnt be bored or that boredom is the one thing human beings ought to
be used to. In this mood of vacancy and discontent he sits down at the desk
where used to grade papers and write articles, and drafts a future for himself
the first of two, as it turns out.
Future One. More of the same, which is to say precisely what he always
thought retirement would be for and do to him back when he was sure hed
never retire, would be spared it by sudden death at the lectern, if only he
didnt lose his marbles first. It would literally bore him to death. What the
Church calendar had been for medieval peasants the academic year provided
him, the ordering of days and seasons. Whats more his job was the locus of
what he had by way of a social life, talking with post-adolescents who never

grew older (only younger every year) whom he was grading and so he had the
upper hand. He already notices himself become crotchety, over-fastidious, set
fast in pointless ways, withering like one of the hosta in his garden. So it will
go, he reckons, until he dies of something or other, which he estimated will
take a year, two at the most.
After he wrote that last sentence, as if it meant to agree with him his pen ran
out of ink.
Its eight now. He settles down on the couch and watches a DVD of Band of
Outsiders. He loves the dance with Godards muse Anna Karina and her knee
socks, likewise the actor who looks so remarkably like Kafka. A doomed but
jolly bande part, contemptuous of convention, carefree, young, improvising
life as the New Wave did its films. By then its going on eleven and because of
the movie Van Epps mood has altered. He returns to his desk and refills the
old Mont Blanc the woman he nearly married gave him when he got tenure.
Future Two: Suppose I overcome my lifelong aversion to joining anythingthe
Cub Scouts, fraternities, the Marine Corps, AAA, AARPand become a member
of a group, several. I make new friends and one of them, an ex-physicist,
recruits me to his slow-pitch softball team. Great guys and, after half a
century, I get my timing back, hit for average and turn double-plays at second
base. We go out after the games for good pizza, craft beer, companionable
colloquies. Urged by the center fielder, a former cardiologist, I go to the
pound and pick out a dog because the heart specialist assures me says Ill live
longer. Now there are walks before breakfast, at midday, after dinner, feeding,
petting, all part of my new routine. Theres somebody else alive in the house,
exuding carbon dioxide and, if not affection, at least dependence. I open
accounts with Twitter and Facebook. Im on the computer for hours and hours,
in virtual confabulations. I look up people I used to know. One night, on a
whim, I search for Diane D, on whom I had a crush during the last two years
of high school. Theres her page, with a photo of an older Diane, still
recognizable, still appealing too. Shes widowed, lonely, and smart. She
posted some of her paintings and I dont have to pretend to like them. Her
daughters are grown and live in California. Diane loves her girls but not
California. After weve been emailing for a while I confess that Ive never been
to California, that its going on my tombstone: He Never Went to California.
Diane gives me the old LOL. She still has that swans neck and dark eyes,
though her hair is shorter, which I tell her I regret and she explains theres a
rule about that, a strict age-limit on flowing locks. Thirty-five. Ah, I say, that
explains a great deal. We decide to meet in New York; well eat a fancy dinner,
take in a show. No musicals, she writes. What a relief, I reply. We pick our
own hotels. To say we hit it off would be putting it far too mildly. Did you
really have a thing for me? she asks over dinner, pert and pleased to know
what the answer will be. Did I! In the fullness of not much time, Diane and I
get married. We buy to an old farmhouse in Vermontstudy for me, studio for

her--travel to Italy and Greece in the cool months, and try our best to make up
for the fifty years we didnt have sex with each other.
Van Epps screws the cap on the fountain pen and is smiling as he trudges
upstairs to bed and the next chapter of The Idiot.