retirement for dummies
I got a lot of retired neighbors. You see em walking the dog 17 times a day or mowing lawn 3 times a week or driving to town 2 times a day. They’re not acclimated yet to days on end, empty as a TV, that they have to fill up every morning all over again.
Retirement, as I’ve known since I took mine at age 27 or so, is no easy job. Folks wait most of their lives to get to that stage of life, not really imagining the reality of it, just hungering for a cessation of their hellish jobs. They think VACATION! Years of it. They think a really long weekend. Drink a few beers, watch some ball games, clean the garage. They don’t think of what happens when the garage IS clean, the ballgames aren’t on everyday, and a few beers becomes incipient alcoholism. Their wives do. They never imagined, though, that retirement meant having to share the house, share the days, share their old privacy.
I know: I should write a Self-Help book on Retirement. Save some marriages, save the neighborhood, even save some lives. Get rich doing it too. But … as I said, I’m retired. Not exactly looking to start a career at my advanced age. Probably be Chapter One. Or my epitaph.
Retirement’s a tricky act. It’s not really institutionalized indolence. It’s actually learning how to create your day. Day after day. Week after week. Year after …. Okay, you get it. But a lot of my neighbors don’t. Course, they don’t have my advantage of many decades of trial and terror. Mostly terror, sure, but you spend as much time as me figuring out Time Management as an Art Form, you got a leg or three up on the poor schnook who stops the 8 hour, 5 day a week regimen, bam! And then hopes to just live out the remaining years in the Lazy Boy with a remote and a faithful missuz who maybe isn’t ready to be a 24 hour maid service or an indentured servant. Gonna be trouble, guaranteed! Gonna be stress, high blood pressure, the inevitable heart attack. For some of them, retirement might be a little more ominous than a trip to Maui. If boredom doesn’t kill em, the missuz might.
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