A Day in the Life of a Retiree and unprocessed writing

I just got off an e-message to a friend I wanted to invite to lunch before or tea after a show.  (Candide at Yerba Buena Center.  Samovar.) I'd already invited him and his husband to Oscar night but, as I suspected, they already had a well-established Oscar group, not like mine, which is composed of Javier and me already in our pajamas or a group small enough that everybody can lie prone as they wash on a sofa or a recliner.  But as I was proposing lunch or tea, I got a better idea:  A dinner the Monday after the Oscar telecast.  I could still serve food from the nominated movies and we could complain or rhapsodize about the results.  I didn't go back an rewrite because as I told him, a retired English teacher, "At this point (Why go back and rewrite?  Our students never did that when they changed their mind about their thesis!) I like the post-Oscar idea!"

But this is how a day goes in the life of a retiree.  A day is like unprocessed writing. 

I am already up at midnight, finishing an e-message to a friend who was once a romantic interest.   (I proposed a short-term marriage the day before we were to go to our villages in  Peace Corps Tonga back in 1970, but he wasn't ready--not even for the Peace Corp.  He dropped out and wound up in the original case of Grease, and invited me, after performing my two years of service and on my way to Spain with my Peace Corp readjustment allowance, to join him in New York and be his date at Sardi's after opening night.)  Jim has been on my mind because of the east coast blizzard (Did it affect his wife's dream house in Connecticut?), Birdman (He lived in New York as an actor and then flew far above the theatre to wind up teaching classics at a boys' school), and "Ave Maria," which I heard yesterday at a memorial service at St. Cecilia's.  (I begged him early in the Christmas season to put the recording of him singing that on YouTube.  But all YouTube has is "Magic Changes" from Grease.)     

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRo6a8uYzYs

I look it up, and it's better than ever.  But it's not "Ave Maria."

I want BOTH!

I make a quick and easy entry to my writing journal, expressing concern that I'm spending my brightest, freshets hours of retirement responding to and deleting e-mail and arranging appointments for hand rails and roofing. I created one bit of dialogue representing a scene from when I saw Jim in 2003, after not seeing him for fifteen years.

Tina:  (Opening door at the Eastgate Towers)  Jim!  You look wonderful.  I thought you were going to be fat!  And old!  Hey, we are old now.  What's the matter with you?  Are you in denial?    Did I say that before?  Hi!

Jim:  Hi!

But now  more than a decade has passed, and we are almost seventy.  My dark hair has turned to the bottle. 

To be continued