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You know how they say you've mastered a foreign language when you start dreaming in it? During the day I feel totally disconnected from my old job. I did however have a dream about work last night, so I guess I'm not quite fluent in retirement yet.
Practice makes perfect.
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Lazy Person's Guide to Retirement
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Wow, where did August go, this first month of my re-retirement? It was packed with the sounds of blues bobbing
along the Hudson
River, jazz wafting in Washington Square,
and classical music echoing Central Park’s Bethesda
Arcade. It was filled with the
aromas of the gyro cart in Greenwich Village after a late night set, the pungent
cheeses on Murray’s cave tour,
and the occasional olfactory assault from the mounds of garbage bags lining the
curbs.
Starting each day right with a morning walk around Jackie O’s Reservoir. Pedaling from Lady Liberty’s view up to the Little Red Lighthouse tucked under George Washington’s Bridge. Exploring New York’s boroughs--the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park and City Island, Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill and Heights Promenade; no time for ferrying to Staten Island this trip.
We did so much and missed even more.
So now I’ve got this retirement thing down . . . in New York City! The trick is to transport it back home. I will admit though, I’m looking forward to slowing down the pace a bit, getting some dirt from my garden under my fingernails, and eating a few more home-cooked meals. Catching up with friends and also with sleep. But I will certainly miss this city of energy that zaps me of mine.
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Intro to the Home Exchange Vacation
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As I’ve mentioned before, not working is one thing, but not thinking about work is the real reason to retire. And since the truth about retirement is that no one is paying you to think about what they want you to think about anymore, you get to think about exactly what you what you want to think about every day.
So what exactly is it that?
I jetted off to New York shortly after my last day of work, solving that immediate predicament. A lot of what I think about here is in-the-moment stuff. What subway line do we take to get from here to there? What to do once we get there? Walking or biking, a play or jazz, and what should we do about dinner? Retired life so far has been filled with stuff to think about.
Between that and politics, my brain is currently at capacity.
So now I’m kind of wondering what I’m going to spend my brain on when I get back home? With no vacation to orchestrate and no work to be thinking about, what will I replace that white space with?
Oh yeah, anything I want.
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Is There Life After Retirement?
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(Posted in Photo Fridays)
Last week on a cross-town bus headed for Grand Central Station, we sat in front of three chatty ladies, probably in their late 70's. One of the golden girls commented that she had been happily married for seven years.
"But honey, you were married for 47 years!"
"Yeah, but you asked how many years I was happily married. If you add up those days, it all adds up to seven years."
Doug and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary this week at this colorful spot on Shelter Island. Since we were together for seven years before we got married, I always think of it in the opposite direction. If you add up all those days, it feels like I've been happily married for 27 years.
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(Posted in Photo Fridays)
No disrespect to Frank Sinatra, but I think New York City should be described as the city that always makes you feel like you are missing something. No matter what you are doing, there is always something else going on that you are missing. Whatever path you choose to meander through the streets, you're missing what's happening on the street around the corner. Each time you choose where to eat, you are foregoing the pleasures behind other doors. It seems you could spend a lifetime here and still miss something.
What a lovely problem to have.
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(Posted in Photo Fridays)
Three and one-half hour fight delay. No problem.
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(Posted in Wellness Wednesdays)
Re-retirement, Day 1: I participated in my own version of a triathlon, 15 mile bike ride, 4 mile walk, and 2 showers.
Re-retirement, Day 2: I improved on the triathlon, 12 mile bike ride, 5 mile walk, and 2 beers.
Week one shaped up to be a real shape-up week, 87 miles of biking, 20 miles of walking, and one pound of fat gone. Not to mention my house and garden are now also in stellar shape after a week of cleaning and clipping.
I’m off to a much better start this time around.
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Every year on this day, the first Sunday of August, I wake to my alarm at 6am and ask myself, “Why am I doing this again?” I pull myself out of bed and put on my biking clothes, “I am never doing this again.” Halfway up the first big hill, in the drizzly fog, I glance down at my odometer and wonder, “How can it possibly be that we’ve only ridden 5.74 miles?”
But at mile 22 I feel terrific! It’s only nine more miles and they are all down hill. When it’s over, I’m so glad I did it again, the Tour de Peninsula, a fund-raising ride for the San Mateo County Parks Foundation. Doug and I, and whichever friends have decided to join us on the Slow Motion Riders team each year, head over to the local brew pub to enjoy our traditional celebratory lunch of whatever the heck we feel like eating and drinking, guilt free.
I love it.
Which brings me to the subject of other things I think I hate and will never do again, and then do again and actually enjoy.
When I retired on March 1st of 2008, I thought I’d never work, ever again. Never. And then in August of 2010, I signed up for a part-time consulting gig in my old field, and strangely enough, I really enjoyed it. As you know, I just retired from that one on Monday, not because I didn’t enjoy it but because, even though it was a part-time job, it grew to be a part-time job with full-time responsibility. Even when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work, which as you might imagine, was really starting to cramp my retirement!
At this moment in time, it feels like I’ll never want to work again. I’ve felt so light and carefree this week. I love not thinking about work. Not working is one thing, but not thinking about work is the real reason to retire. So right now, it feels like I’ll never want to work again. But never is a long time.
While it may or may not be probable, it is possible that I will live to see 100. That’s over 50 years of retirement. Here I am in year five of retirement, and I realize that I have no idea what I’ll actually be doing over the next 50 years. I’ll tell you this though, I’m going to spend it doing whatever I feel like doing. Right now, I definitely don’t feel like working, even a little. So that’s what I’m going to do right now, not work, even a little. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll stop using the word never.
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Every time I go to Aldo’s Harbor Restaurant in Santa Cruz I think about Mitchel and his mouse-breath.
In high school, my friends and I lazed away many summer days on the beaches of Santa Cruz. A quick trip over the hill had us escaping the summer heat of San Jose to the costal breezes of our own teenage playground.
Freedom. Summer. Carefree days.
But back to Mitchel and his mouse-breath. Well, first to Steve. Steve was my boyfriend as we headed into summer break junior year. That day, Steve took me to Aldo’s for lunch before we headed to the beach. As usual, Steve was keeping me in stitches with his humor, basically a stand-up act about why jetties are called jetties, when down the jetty bounded a white puff-ball of a puppy, Mitchel. Mitchel’s owner was chasing him down toward the beach, “Mitchel, drop it! Drop it Mitchel! Mitchel drop that mouse!”
Mitchel did drop it, a dead mouse, right in front of Steve and me. Steve looked at the dead mouse, looked at me, and said in that voice reserved for babies and puppies, “Oh no, Mitchel has moosey breef!”
Aldo’s and Seabright Beach remain symbols of freedom for me. Which is why I had my new boyfriend, ok, my husband of 20 years, take me there on my first official day of re-retirement. Fried calamari, a Sierra Nevada, and a view of the harbor provided the perfect backdrop for re-entry into the world of leisure.
Freedom. Summer. Carefree days.
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Photo Friday: The view from the deck of Aldo's Harbor Restaurant on my first official day of re-retirement. Happy to be back.
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