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Chatting with children about it wasn’t any good, teenagers rolled their eyes, younger colleagues didn’t want to hear it, but my contemporaries were all in. Young people have Game of Thrones; we binge on retirement talk: Social Security, Medicare, senior discounts at the day-old bread store. It’s as fascinating as it sounds.
I asked actual retired people how they enjoyed their state of non-working. Most grinned and said it was wonderful; they couldn’t imagine how they were ever able to fit a job into their schedule. The happiest resembled kids who’d gotten away with something, such as raiding the family’s Girl Scout Thin Mints.
Very few told me they disliked it. A salesmen who’d once had an auto parts route missed the social contact and, presumably, the aroma of refined petroleum products. A woman sorely missed the people in her office. I wondered if her feelings were as warm when she was with them day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, and so forth.
One retired friend told me, betraying no irony, “I never wanted to work.” Some part of me understood. My newspaper career offered interesting work, but at various stages there was altogether too much of it. You might think typing and clicking and staring at a computer screen all day is pretty glamorous stuff, and it is, since you wield the incredible power to change “that” to “which” and “which” to “that,” or to rescue a contributor from a misused “your” when “you’re” is needed, avoiding utter disgrace for a writer and his descendants, and earning you untold thanks and praise. (In your imagination.)
Still, in the summer of my 64th year, my heart started calling to me. On each pleasant day it seemed as if all the glories of nature summoned me outside, away from my desk, my office, my wage prison. Even at the Valley News’ home offices on Interchange Drive in West Lebanon (behind the McDonald’s, we like to say), when I stepped outdoors I was stirred like Byron, Shelley and all the Romantic poets I mix up when answering questions while watching Jeopardy. I saw mortality in a maple’s flaming foliage, eternity in an oak’s persistent leaves. A fry bag fluttering in the wind suggested the transience of all things, starting with potatoes.
After 42 years of my professional career, not counting earlier part-time work cooking hamburgers, washing pots and pans, keeping watch as an overnight security guard at a sleeping chemical plant (I once read The Exorcist between rounds, not ideal in a place of darkness and shadows and hissing pipes), there was only one word for it: enough.
Even if Donald Trump, the Dalai Lama and Bill Belichick formed a task force to ask me to delay retiring, I would not work to 66, never mind 70, which is sometimes advised by financial planners who don’t pay much mind to obits or cemeteries.
So as of this writing I am indeed retired or, as I like to think of it, my trust fund has kicked in.
Just a week or two into this new stage of life, people ask me how I’m enjoying it. Considering it included an office ceremony where I was praised and people politely omitted my failings, then in quick succession Christmas, my birthday, New Year’s and a cold snap that vindicated my stockpiling of warm clothes fit for the siege of Stalingrad — well, it seems pretty lively so far.
The plan is to write some, to discover whether the desire to do so comes from passion or habit. I’m going to find out if all those ideas I had about things I might accomplish if I had free time were real or self-delusion.
I think of myself as one of those cliff divers in Mexico: I’ve jumped off solid ground toward uncertain waters. New things await after decades of workplace repetition, when the order of the day was set mostly by needs and deadlines. As excitement swells and I feel suspended between the past and the future, I recall that I’m not an experienced swimmer. Oh, well.
In the meantime, I’m setting personal goals and guidelines. Here are just a few:
First, avoid abject poverty.
Complete 1989’s Home Project To-Do List.
Exercise regularly and, at least some of the time, vigorously. The New York Times says it can make you happier (sweating is bliss) and extend your years. Then again, the Times believes in climate change, Russian meddling and the rule of law, all subject to denials.
Most of all, absolutely no tweeting: After 65, it can produce symptoms of early-onset covfefe.
For me, the rest will reveal itself, or not. I wonder why perfect life clarity might come at this late date, but would welcome it if it does.
Dan Mackie, a retired
