Retirement, Take Eight: Just Visiting

During the past year of retirement, I have been teaching one class online, but other than that, I have been work-free, which is to say my time has been my own. The exception to this was my role in the recent hosting of a visiting professor from Vietnam. The good news was that since I had done this for the seven previous years, I had a routine of a sort, a schedule for the nine weeks: the trips to and from the airport, the campus and bibliographic orientations, her weekly meetings with the resident directors, the brewery tour. I also had a sense of what I was likely to  do and to hear: yes, on campus it is difficult to tell the instructors from the students. Yes, American coffee is comparatively watery, and a coffee break at work does last only fifteen minutes or so. Yes (again), the weather is cold but it will get warmer and by the time you leave to go home in May, we will not even be wearing sweatshirts. (And all this is hard for them to believe.)

Although I knew things would not go as planned--they never do--I did not anticipate how much time it would take to address an error, a transposition that should not have happened, in the visa paperwork completed by someone else. This  resulted in a good extra ten hours of my figuring out and addressing the error since it had implications for her compensation. This was the bad news, pretty much the only major bad news.

Please keep in mind that I was doing this hosting pretty much pro bono,  If this bad news situation was stressful for me--and it was--no doubt it was also for the guest. And unnecessarily so. And even separate from that, I realized how much I had done in the past; this hosting gig was a full-time job, albeit more some weeks than others.

I knew the visit would be labor-intensive along the way, and that it certainly was. I did have a lot of help, but I also found myself wishing that I had even more help--help with the not-going-out-to-do-fun-stuff but with the daily, more routine stuff, the less-glamorous trips to the supermarket, for instance.

And I knew this as I recognized that I had been spoiled by being retired for ten months, by doing whatever the hell I wanted to do.

Don't get me wrong: I am grateful for all the help I had. And I had a lot. In fact, in many ways, my faith in humanity has been revived  every one of these last seven--now eight--springs. At certain points in the visit my faith and trust in other people is just buoyed.

Being the default  during the visit, though,  got old a couple times, especially when I was sick off and on for a couple weeks. Plus, despite disclaimers, visitors to any location sometimes have expectations. I mean, they left home for a reason. They may or may not be expected to be entertained 24/7 (or say they do not expect to be entertained), but their idea of appropriate activities may or may not include a trip to the post office or the allergist on the way to the Asian market. And sometimes it is just necessary to stop and put gas in the tank, be you at home or overseas.

There is a travel philosophy in here somewhere: life is made of small, real events, and if the tourist why-not-see-even-more-of New-York-City isn't balanced by these small typical events, then I am put in the position of organizing something that is more a trip for tourists than a modest but meaningful representative cultural experience. A cultural exchange is not just about seeing landmarks that you can already identify. There is a difference between a tourist and a traveler.

My name is not Sandy Tourism.

And since my retirement, I have taken up a different role in the work/institution universe. During the visit, another thing I realized resoundingly, almost with a THUD, had to do with the people at the school. Before the visiting professor arrived, I went on campus maybe once a week to pick up my el cheapo educational discount New York Times in the school library. Sometimes I would see a librarian or two--which I was always glad to do--but that was it, pretty much. What I didn't fully realize before the guest arrived was how much I enjoyed seeing, even in passing, many of the people I used to work with full-time. Granted, I don't know all the newbies, and sometimes, although I know someone's name, I have to ask,"Which one is he?"

But for nine weeks and change I spent a lot more time on campus.

I don't know everybody the way I used to, and that's okay. What I have more fully realized, though, more than I ever did when I was trying to detach and go on campus only once a week, is how much I enjoy having contact with the people I know and like. I cannot say I know any of them well, or even that I have friended them on Facebook (or they me). I have never seen most of them outside of work and it is unlikely I ever will.

But if the place I invested thirty-nine full-time years is on a trajectory to become a place in many ways unidentifiable to me within the next five to ten years, so be it. At least for a while, good people, work friends of a sort, will continue to be there: Paul K., Jason, Mark R., Sharon Z., Jean L., Jill H., Both Sergei's. And others. And there are some who are comparatively new: Mary N., Gloria K., Jim and Norma, Joann D., Carolyn D. Jake.

I cannot list them all.

It is always great to see them, even fleetingly. But even so, I would not go back to working full-time. (And every once in a while  I am not sure I even want to work part-time although right now I don't want to think about not  going in once in a while to get my newspapers.)

These days. as I approach the anniversary of my retirement, I realize that I have walked away. In some ways I am a visitor, too. And that is just fine.

Retirement, Take Three

My name is Sandy, and I am a recovering employee.

I only realized this lately, and I had no idea, really, that this was coming. Until I started to think about retiring, I was for the most part reasonably content at work, at least on most days. Once retirement seemed possible and I considered the alternative of not retiring (more meetings, more of the same that was starting to lose its shine), I had little problem hitting GO. (Although I like to think I do not consider peer pressure as much as many do, the fact that a lot of people my age seemed to be living lives of leisure in retirement did have some impact, if only because they never looked tired.) Truth be told, there have been a few small annoying bumps to this transition, including sorting out the official date of my retirement. (You would think a retirement start date is a start date, but not so. Oh well.) Social Security does not automatically tell you to let them know how much you want taken out for taxes. But those bumps were balanced in the long run, really, by the fact that the retirement incentive that my employer offered did end up in the bank right on time. (I checked the very day it was scheduled to happen.)

I write this on Day 137 of Retirement. A new way of measuring time.

My retirement honeymoon, or at least the beginning of it, coincided with at least some of the time I would have had off in the summer had I not retired. This summer felt different, though, if only because I was still working out what stuff of my career to keep, what to give away, and what to trash. This was a summer of celebration, of grinning to myself before I even got out of bed because I did not have to get out of bed for a workday the way other people do. I didn't have to get up right then, much less get dressed for work.

I threw out even more work clothes than I expected to--and even more still need to be rehomed, so to speak. I have seen my family more this summer than I have in most summers, have seen friends, went for walks, talked to the cats and even watched some TV. For a change there was just about no rush. NO RUSH. I had also been wise enough to plan to travel overseas during the time when I would otherwise have been required to return to full-time work. (A blog or two on those travels will arrive....eventually.)  I put my online teaching into a box: I did the teaching, and I think I am doing it as well as I have ever been, but it is now clearly a part-time job that I do when I am wearing my bunny slippers. It is clearly not a way of life.

There's the rub.

I may be a new, or newish, me.

After a while I started thinking about what I want to accomplish every week: get the new windows installed, paint the trim, rearrange the furniture in the spare room. But that didn't work because in some cases I could get all those things done in one or two days at the end of the week. (But the rhythm of the week has changed, and by Fridays I am no longer exhausted.)

So then the plan was to try to get something practical and concrete accomplished every day: wash the cat beds, rearrange the living room furniture, pick up the dry cleaning, work on the blog, call my brother, have lunch with friends. That worked to some extent, but each day needed even a little more structure. I am far more capable of binge watching Last Tango in Halifax on Netflix or napping or surfing than I knew.

As much as it ate up time and mental energy, full-time work provided structure, even if it often came down to at-work/not-at-work.  I once looked at a long-term colleague  about a year ago after we first heard "work-life balance"  in a meeting and he said, "Balance? They didn't want balance. They wanted us to WORK."

I am way too happy and resourceful to dither away a lot of time.

I am hoping that I will not always be a recovering employee the way alcoholics and addicts are forever recovering. I have done no more searching moral inventory than I have ever done, and to go further down the twelve-steps would be to insult twelve-step programs. (A colleague of mine, himself a friend of Bill W.,  many years ago once characterized Alcoholics Anonymous as "the most truly Christian organization on the face of the earth." I can't say I have any personal experience with AA, but given what I do know of it and like organizations, it seems to me, that, hyperbole aside, there might be something to my colleague's observations.)

I can say that all those years of full-time work seem to be growing smaller, increasingly in the distance as I make my way forward. I have other things to occupy my mind, but I still do have to admit that I enjoy hearing the latest happenings when I run into somebody from work in the supermarket. Unfortunately, X's spouse has cancer, Y is retiring in January, and Z had a temper tantrum that resulted in whatever. These are all people I know. And I tell them my news. It is a chatty fifteen minutes.

I mean, I did spend 39 years of my life there, which if you calculate the time at ten months a year, at my age it was:

39 years x 10 months of employment per year=390 months
My age x 12 months in a year=780 months

Or roughly half the days of my entire left I worked in one location. Even if you factored out the sleeping time and weekends from both calculations, it would still be half my life.(IF you roll in time off at Thanksgiving, Christmas, semester and spring breaks, all into a nine-month year, the numbers will still be impressive. And yes I KNOW how fortunate I was not to have a fifty-week a year/two weeks of vacation job. Believe me, I know.)

It may take a while to fully detach--if I ever totally do--but it seems to me that I have made pretty good progress, all things considered.

Those of us with a reflective cast of mind like to think about things, and I really DO like to think about things now that I finally have enough time--what other people think (perhaps) of unlimited time since I am  retired and therefore obsolete, or so it seems to some, I think, though nobody says anything out loud because that would not be cool, and hey, overt discrimination is not professionally becoming. Think about this: NOBODY of any age has unlimited time. Ahem. Really, it's not live free or die but rather live free and then one way or another you will die. We all will. Get used to it.

So. Here is the mid-thinking-about-things plan as of now:

1. I need more structure and more exercise than walking and watching the DVD of  (okay, I do some of the poses) Yoga for The Rest of Us. Next stop: gym membership.

2. In the mornings I am likely to be doing something pleasantly solitary. Please don't call. Or if you call, lease leave a message.

3. Please do call, and when you do, please know that we can certainly plan.

4. To whatever extent that I have a choice, I would prefer not to dress up. I dressed up (some times more than others, granted) for a long time. Please cut me some slack here. I like jeans and sweaters for a change. Flannel. Ragg socks. Remember: I am recovering.

5. At some point or other, I need to make newer connections, people not directly connected to my former place of full-time employment. And I think it is also important for me to keep track of the number of days I have been retired, if only because I can, since it marks a new way of seeing my time and because, hey, on this calendar (of a sort), I don't have to ask for time off or rearrange my dental appointment (scheduled six months ago) for, say, a meeting that just cropped up.

I am in many ways (but not all) comparatively employer-free.

Similarly, I am for the most part supervisor-free.

Think about that.

Forward.



Copyright Sandra Engel