Four Plus Years Out, More or Less

Mostly I am grateful for reasonably good health, for my new hip, and especially to finally being able to see.

Beyond that, four plus years out after retirement, I have realized:

1. Napping is my superpower.

Naps are good. A half hour mid-afternoon nap doesn’t restart the day, exactly, but it does provide an energy boost. It is my retirement version of falling asleep sitting up while watching the 6 o’clock evening news, a workday habit for many years.

2. I never thought of myself as a cat mom before I retired. But after spending time with them every day, many hours, a cat mom I certainly am. In some ways, without the obligations and the other obligations of my work life, my life is more similar to theirs than I would have imagined, now that I think about it, but that is a subject for another day. In cat years, Moonbeam is my age and Swishy is middle aged. They take good care of me.

3.  I still don’t miss the meetings (not even ones I called) and even now I try to avoid anything even vaguely meeting-y. “Going out” some days means going out to lunch or to the pool or buying groceries, but then I have never been one for big par-tays anyway, so no matter. It’s nice to finally be able to let my introvert flag fly. Finally. In the relentlessly social workaday world, introversion is grievously undervalued.

As Neil Young sings, “Myself at last.”

If I were one to bother to advocate, to take on the world at this point of my life, I would make a loud public case for introversion to be recognized and valued far beyond what it is. The comparative peace and quiet of retirement has reinforced my notion that the world would be a better place if any number of extroverts SHUT UP. (You will never convince me that there is no obvious bias in the workplace for the terminally social.)

And when I hear just enough about how life is continuing just fine without me at my previous place of full-time employment, I am grateful to be gone.

4. That said, there are a few people from work that I miss if I stop and think about it, but I haven’t stopped to think about it that often. There is nothing keeping me from contacting or seeing them, but usually I don’t--even if I am really glad to see them when I run into them. And social media keeps us connected just enough. This one is doing this, that one is doing that.

This is a more recent version of my reaction to the people I knew in high school. I attended one class reunion maybe 11 years ago and that one surreal evening was enough. It was nice to see people (well, I remembered some of them) but I can’t say I have gone out of my way to see any of them again. Nor have they reached out to me.

Fair enough. I mean, it has been a very long time since high school.

That said, someone I knew for twelve years of childhood schooling—someone I have not thought about since never mind what year-- recently sent me a Facebook friend request and I found myself pleasantly surprised to accept and to see that he has done well for himself. Small world in a new way.

Nothing more or less than that.

5. Work, defined here as whatever it is you are doing in retirement, really can expand to fill the time you have to fill it. The time can be interrupted and delayed (as has the writing on this blog). Except, that is, if I am washing the floor or vacuuming it because the job is always fast and perfunctory. A good enough job. But other distractions can be….well, interesting.

6.   I have more time than I ever expected to have for myself and the quality of that time is different.  I have more time that is just mine to use. I have learned once again and very thoroughly that on some days I am excellent at doing nothing. So be it. Managed-enough procrastination is okay.

Twenty years ago I did not know that I would ever be my current age. And retired. I didn’t even think about retiring beyond socking money in my retirement account so that I might have enough money if (and only if) I decided to retire—if I were ever able to. How or when or even I might retire I had no idea.

More than anything, retirement equals time, time that is mine to use. For a change.

Morning coffee does not have to be rushed.

7. Many people have things far better than I do, but I do have things pretty good. Granted, these days I am not much of a material girl compared to many. I am also not going to jump on the fad bus of decluttering even though now and then I fill a bag or two for recycling or for the garbage. I just go and do things at my own speed. The difference between working full time and part time is the locus of control, and these days I really do live on Sandy Time.

BUT although I have thrown out 99% of my work clothes, I have discovered that, yes indeedy, from time to time even in retirement you do need to buy new clothes. A fifteen year old ratty sweater is a fifteen year old ratty sweater, after all. I think of new clothes as wardrobe maintenance. But these days the need is for warmth and comfort, mostly, with an occasional very brief glance toward fashion. (Because I recently attended wedding festivities, I now have two new dresses.)

Still, I am less and less a material girl. That said, over the years I knew I was approaching a no-definite-date retirement, I decided what I wanted: a dry sink, and later a roll-top desk, both of which I found used versions of. I have comfy shoes. I wear comfy clothes. I have long thought that a woman needs comfortable shoes and a good bra. After that, as the kids say: whatever.

 Comfort is underrated.

 Flannel is good.

8.  On the rare free association moment when I find myself looking backward, I am amazed (and sometimes horrified about workplace life) here and there during the Later Middle Ages: the three women faculty in a department of fourteen being assigned the eight a.m. classes until we spoke up; the new locally-grown supervisor (“stupidvisor” is a word I recently encountered) asking me where I went to high school after I had a Ph.D.  Many days I went from class to meeting to office to allergy shot appointment to supermarket to dinner to preparing for the next day before going to bed and getting up at six to go to work and start it all again. Work took up a lot of psychological space—and at the time I was happy to do it. And I was by no means the only person who lived that way.

The other day I found myself agreeing with Michelle Obama when she was asked what it felt like to find herself the only woman at a table full of men: she observed that you come to realize many of them are not terribly bright. (Not that all the women at the table were geniuses.)

Recently I threw out the final batch of souvenir documents I had for whatever reason saved from my workplace, and as I was ripping them up, I realized that I could not remember some of the things I had done. For instance, I found my signature—one of at least fifteen--on a memo to the CEO requesting that we middle managers be told why, since enrollment was up 11%, we were being asked to reduce our budgets by 3%. We asked to see the whole institutional budget to better understand what was going on. (We had a lot of responsibility and wanted more authority.)

I had to stop and think hard, but I don’t think we ever saw any results, really, but those of us who signed it, the fifteen of us, kept our jobs for a long time afterwards; I’m not sure this kind of event would happen these days (and certainly not without some kind of later deniable retaliation on the part of upper management).

And as a more experienced colleague told me very early in my management career, a lot of what people do on the job is what increases the chances that they will keep their job, not necessarily what is best for the institution or the students/customers (or what would now be called “brand”).

 That was then and there. These days: not my circus, not my monkeys.

9. People bloom in different ways at different times, and I am not sure how much of that blooming is predictable. Even in retirement—maybe especially in retirement.

I spent a career watching this happen in the classroom and out: the eighteen year old student who starts to bloom after she discovers—after four years of misery in high school—that she does indeed have interests and skills; the former factory worker (“I worked at the finger factory,” a place repeatedly cited for OSHA violations before the work was shipped overseas) who returns to retrain into nursing: “I never thought I could do this.” The person who has a transforming experience during an internship or a seven-day study tour to London or a community college class reluctantly taken during a stint as a prison-inmate.

We get interested in what we get good at. I was good at my jobs, but hey, to everything there is a season.

10.  Long ago a fellow student in grad school whose name I don’t remember beyond Laura Somebody from what I now know as Tom Petty’s hometown in Florida took a look at my palm and told me my quick fortune one afternoon in the student union. She began by looking distressed. Then she said, “There will be some problems early on, but then you will live a long and happy life.”

Why that bubbled up recently I don’t know, but I like it.

Age is relative. It has always been relative, especially when it seemed to matter less. I know people my age who are infirm and others who act like they are fifty (or far less). I am not going to bewail my age, or wish I were younger (well, not often, anyway). Age is what it is, and there is a good deal of truth that attitude and resourcefulness make a big chunk of difference.

Perhaps it is the case that age matters more during the younger and older years than it does during midlife, but then again, maybe not. Think of the difference between a ten year old and a fifteen year old. How old would I be if I could be any age? Maybe I would shave a few years off, but not many. Retirement is too good to go back to a younger age where I would have to go to work every day.

I’m not only retired; it’s a time of my life, not my total identity. That may be something many non-retired people do not see in our celebrity-driven, youth-worshipping loudmouth extrovert culture, but it is true. Still, even now the glow of retirement has not yet worn off, and recently I found myself driving past my former place of full-time employment singing “R-E-T-I-R-E-D” to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”. Again.

We make what we can of what we have. Never could I have predicted any of this, and although the Fates could reverse the turn of my wheel at any moment, these days I prefer to chug along, making my way through this time of year, this official season of giving thanks and of celebrating in both religious and secular terms two food holidays. Soon we will celebrate the birth of—as one person I know pronounces the name—“Baby Cheezits.” More than food nurtures us, and, as they say, any day above ground is a good day.