People, now that I am supposedly retired, keep asking me what I do with my time.
In fact people, who are still working, will hurdle moving cars, leap over newsstands and cross dangerous streets just to ask me accusingly: “What are you doing in town?” as if I was unlawfully on the asphalted premises of my own fair city.
If I venture within rolled-up newspaper throw of my old place of employment it suddenly spews anxious employees, crying: “Can’t you keep away from the place?”
This seems a common experience with retirees.
Where have they gone and are they behaving in the patterns that society prescribes for them? Or are they getting into mischief?
Some people are concerned that I haven’t taken up bowls, which, of course, I did years ago. They were neatly made, hollowed bowls and held mostly chocolate mousse.
Greenkeepers are just as happy keeping me away from bowls. They reckon my weight would cause me to sink clean through the rink and dislocate the pennants for weeks.
Some are worried that I am not camping in some out-of-the-way place dealing with a broken axle in some northern creekbed; camping beneath a sky dusted with stars and a terrain crawling with tiger snakes; huddled beneath col lapsing tents in torrential rain.
“We thought you’d be way beyond Andamooka by now”, they say fretfully
Others are simply livid that we haven’t gone overseas. Taken the trip. What, not even New Zealand? Tasmania? Dear me!
So Beefeaters of the Tower, calm yourselves. Gondoliers ride gently at your moorings in Venice. That’s not the Fatchens approaching. Be patient Disneyland. Sleep on Isles of Greece where Sappho sang.
Don’t wait up, girls of Montmartre.
A few people who have been trying to find out where my lump sum went, say that I have gone into real estate on the Gold Coast. Even I know that people who go into Gold Coast real estate rarely ever come out again.
To tell you the truth I am spending a lot of time in my presentation chair. It was designed especially to fit my back and its width could accommodate the hips of a rhinoceros. It is superbly and seductively comfortable. It settles with a satisfying hiss when I sit on it as if I have just sat on a carpet snake.
It has some kind of hidden hydraulics and is as cunning designed as a space shuttle It is on rollers and it swivels. I can roll and swivel, traverse and reverse by using nifty legwork. I can make circuits of my study in a true poetry of motion, skimming past the bookcase and hot-rodding past the filing cabinet.
Or I can lean back and twiddle my thumbs. Indeed it is something I wanted all my life, a thumb-twiddling, revolving back-fitting, swivelling, roller-coasting study chair.
Already my wife sees it as a mistake.
“What’s Max doing?” the telephone callers ask anxiously.
“He’s sitting in his chair, twiddling,” she says.
Shrieks on the phone.
“Not that, TWIDDLING,” she says, spelling it carefully.
Or they say, “Is that thunder?”
“No,” she answers, “It’s Max drag-racing down the passage.”
Some people are afraid to visit us. I collected two callers on my lap when they were a bit slow. We now have the only house with a zebra crossing in the passage.
My wife is talking wistfully about people who get active retirement presents such as garden tools.
And crystal decanters. There have been a flood of them among retirees in our street; crystal decanters flashing in the sherry light.
Some people have scored prints of Australian landscapes and even coffee sets. Everyone knows what I have. I have my presentation chair.
“Go, go, go,” scream the larrikins as I do a wheelie.
Sometimes I sit in it as I am now and stare out the window at the burgeoning spring, at soft-plumed honeyeaters sucking nectar, at homeless bees trying to squat in the ventilator. Skylarks soar and the green crops in the paddocks wave like a sea. Blossoms make a little snowfall on the lawn.
My chair holds me closer.
So there we are, sitting pretty together awaiting your call to ask me what I’m doing in my retirement.
Max Fatchen