[Image: “Wu Wei,” copyright © 2013 by George Clark, a/k/a user Buddhadog on Flickr — which, of course, is where I found it. (I use it here with Mr. Clark’s generous permission. Thank you again!) Finding images of these Chinese characters on the Web was no great challenge — but they’re generally straightforward representations. This one, unlike those others, exhibited character, not mere characters.]

Midweek — yesterday, as I write this — I joined the ranks of the idle aging. (Some confusion persists, at least in my head, over whether my “retirement” began on Tuesday or Wednesday. But it doesn’t really matter. All that matters to me, now and forever going forward, is that I no longer must follow a daily schedule and to-do list prescribed by someone other than me and, of course, The Missus.)

Spring 2020, almost anywhere in the world by now, is an “interesting” moment in history to find yourself with an empty calendar. I’ve had the luxury to imagine in advance how my days might pass; I haven’t been abruptly launched into a thumb-twiddling vacuum of inactivity — hanging in space, dazed, wondering what the hell just happened. I’ve appreciated the flood of newspaper and magazine articles presenting ideas about things to watch on TV, about the rediscovered pleasures of neighborhood walking, about books in which to linger. But honestly? Those pleasures have been on my radar for months. Nor have all the social-distancing rules of engagement freaked me out nearly as much as they have others. The Missus and my families live hundreds and thousands of miles away; we haven’t had much of an active in-real-life “circle” for years, not since our old writing workshops disbanded and the other participants — friends — moved away. The bulk of our daily human contact with loved ones hasn’t moved online: it’s been there for a long time.

And it all fits in quite neatly with a state of mind I’ve cultivated — knowingly and otherwise — all through adulthood…

One pre-retirement plan we had, back in the days before the hammer of COVID-19 flattened all plans everywhere, would have had us on a five-day “weekend” trip to Tampa, primarily to attend a large-scale classical music concert in an arena there. Secondarily, The Missus was toying with the idea of getting a tattoo; she has none, but a friend she knows professionally had recently opened his own tattoo shop in Tampa. She’d promised to stop by to boost his new career a little. She asked me, “Do you think you might get a tattoo while we’re there?”

Now, I’d never considered such a thing before. I’m not a joiner, for one thing: no need, real or imagined, to brand myself as a member of one herd versus another. And on an aesthetic level, well, I accept that body art — like other kinds — can work well as a form of self-expression… but have never been interested in it, as such, for myself.

But I promised to think about it. And as she worked up various possibilities for her own — possibilities which coalesced into probabilities when she first thought: An elephant! — I just sort of let the notion percolate in my own head.

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