1/12/20

Yeah, so its been a month since I decided to retire.  I’ve been retired now for a week. I guess I’m a rookie retiree.  As regards retirement, I feel a sort of vertigo, but overall look forward to the time. 

On the last day of work, people wished me good luck and blessings on “my new journey.”  I don’t get it.  It’s the same journey, different route.  My journey never belonged to my work.  It belonged to me. 

Aside from the usual janitorial duties around the house, I haven’t been anywhere yet.  I look forward to experiencing all the stages of retirement.  Beats working.  I actually enjoyed my work, but the fulfilling part was being pushed into a smaller and smaller share of the total experience, due to, I think, The Tyranny of the Algorithm.  My wife reminded me that it was maybe a good time to retire.   

I thought to myself: ‘I could do a blog; that would be unique.’  I researched the steps, which hinged on having a ‘focus’ and ‘target audience.’  I found that there were some billion retirement blogs.  OK.  Good stuff. Clearly there is an interest. 

70 years is a long time.  I come from a different world (the Midwest in 1948 (I don’t remember much before 1953) and observed each piece of the new world fall into place, and pieces of the old world crack and fall away. Married with children. The young sometimes give the impression that we crawled out of the 1950’s and somehow fell from the sky into the present, like a chunk of yellow ice.  No matter that my memory retains myriad details of the intervening time, like watching a slow-motion train wreck – or the March of Progress, or some combination of the two. The Present is not as clear a concept now as it was when I was younger.

That will be my anchor, my touchstone: a kind of deconstruction of a 70+ year span, from the perspective of another baby-boomer.  I don’t want it to be about me, but about what I have witnessed.   By the time I was 60 or so, I began to realize that I was hiking up to a very good vantage point – it is like turning a mountain path out of the trees and having a great landscape open in front of me. 

It could also be that my brain is running low on neurons, and there is less clutter. 

And that is OK, too.