At random 5/25

Sunday, May 25, 2003

I don't know anybody who was prepared for retirement when the time came for it. But neither do I know anybody who would give it up, once they'd tasted it. I taught English at Cottey College for 30 years -- until this past month. Why am I so unprepared for retirement? I guess because, until my very recent health problems, I loved teaching there so much. I've got to do some major shifting of gears -- and soon. Summer has always been the time to be outside, to hop on the John Deere tractor and make the 85-acre pecan groves look as carefully trimmed as a putting green. These days, I can accompany Ginny out to our 10-acres spread on County Road BB, the site of our newly refurbished 150-year-old stone house, where we have also recently built a barn with a second- story studio apartment. That latter needs some minor work (sinking nails, installing a toilet and sink, arranging furniture, hanging some pictures) and some minor painting (trim, a flight of stairs). With my fake leg, I can no longer get up on the roof, so I content myself with these relatively minor tasks. Yesterday (Wednesday, May 21, a sunny but relatively cool day), I was mowing the lawns out there, and when I got home I looked in the mirror and discovered I had got a sunburn. I haven't had one of those for five years. The carpentry chores will soon be completed, but the mowing will need to be done as long as there's a spring and summer. This morning, when I looked at my wall calendar, I automatically calculated how long I had 'til mid-August. Then it occurred to me that I'll never have much use for a calendar (wall or otherwise) again, and that gave me a funny -- and momentarily dismal -- feeling. For, if you have a feeling that you're "due" somewhere at a certain place, that means there are people who expect you. And even though you may curse the shortness of the free time left you, it's nice to feel needed and expected. But if you‚re not expected anywhere, that's the same as not feeling needed anywhere, and that's going to be new for me. I'm already prepared to dislike it. Mentally, I've long been lining up books "to be read" during retirement, and that line already reaches from my house on North Spring Street to the traffic light on Austin and Ash. I find that the problem with having an unlimited time to read is that it can skew your waking time, if you let it. On Christmas and Spring Breaks, for example, I often read until 3 a.m., then slept until 1 p.m. Every day, my schedule became more and more "out of synch" with the rest of the working American public. Now it won't matter much. If at all. Is that okay? I guess so. In any event, I'm going to start with a wonderfully large volume of first reactions to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that my colleagues on the Cottey faculty gave me as a bon voyage gift last Sunday. Then I may just reread some of the meaty works of that great American realist Theodore Dreiser (whose Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy were partly responsible for my declaring an English major in college). In the meantime, I plan to finish reading one of the available histories of P.E.O. that I began reading in preparation for at least thinking seriously about writing a history of Cottey College since the tenure of Blanche Hinman Dow. In the time I'm not reading any of those, I will continue reading and reviewing soon-to-be-published books sent me by Library Journal every couple of weeks. I hope my eyes hold out. I think they will. In preparation for my retirement, Ginny was trying to get me interested in gardening -- without the slightest success. And it was Jessica, who, together with Ginny, last summer got me into a kayak and out rowing in the middle of our 2-acre pond on the 10-acre spread on BB. Why do I think rowing won't be one of my major pastimes during retirement? Probably because it took both Ginny and Jessica ten minutes maneuvering me and my fake leg into the silly thing. I must admit, however, it was good exercise for my arm muscles, which usually get little more exercise than holding a book open. For now, my main retirement project will be to devise a clever way to end these At Random columns.

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