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A not-so shy and retiring kinda guy

Last Saturday, I did something for the last time that I’ve done every year for the past 44. I went to the Paul Smith’s College graduation.

I retired three years ago, so this was the last class I taught, during their freshman year. Given the number of students I had then, combined with the attrition rate over the next three years, I knew almost none of the graduates.

Add to that the number of employees who came either toward the end of my illustrious career or after it, I didn’t know whole lot of those peeps, either.

So for all the years I was involved with the joint, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Of course, it had to happen — it’s just one more part of the retirement experience.

Ah yes, retirement …

Frankly, there are a couple of reasons I never thought about retirement until right before it happened. One is I’ve never been able to plan or even think ahead — at least not more than a few days or in extreme cases, a few weeks. Second, I really liked my job. It was always changing, always challenging and sometimes a whole lot of fun. I never wanted to be anything except a teacher, and it was a good fit. It’s also a good thing since I don’t think I could’ve done anything else.

So while I never got tired of teaching, I got tired. I taught writing courses, mostly freshman comp, and the name of that game is assigning writing … lots of writing. Unfortunately, it also requires correcting the stuff. “A” papers are easy to correct, since there’s nothing really wrong with them and you can breeze through them effortlessly. Sadly, “A” students are a rare species, if not an endangered one.

As for the other papers? I found I could correct them in 20 minutes, and not much faster. So if I had 60 papers to correct, it’d take me 20 hours. And since I did all my correcting at home (no distractions), I’d be at it for three hours a night, unless I took a night off, in which case there were six-hour Saturday correcting skeds. If I took two nights off, you can guess what my Sundays were like as well.

It was all part of the job, and I was fine with it till I hit 60 or thereabouts. Then I couldn’t stay up late. In my gilded youth I could stay up till midnight correcting. As a doddering sexagenarian, I’d had it by 9 o’clock.

When I first started teaching I vowed I would quit when I was at the top of my game, and at 67 I did.

And then the question presented itself loud and clear: Now what?

Out to pasture …

Retiring was a lot like entering puberty — without the hype, hormones and hysteria. It was a whole new life phase, one you’ve read about, heard about, seen others undergo, but still have no idea how to do it, yourself. Also, with retirement — as opposed to puberty – you don’t have scads of people 30 years older telling you these are the best years of your life, for the simple reason there is no one 30 years older around … anywhere.

Uh-uh, podner, on this trip you’re flying solo … with some cracked wing struts, a busted compass, and the fuel gauge one micron above E.

And now the logical question: So how’s retirement going?

Actually, everything’s fine.

Simply put, everything’s a tradeoff. Not having to deal with all the components of teaching — coming up with new material and figuring out how to present it, dealing with students individually and in class situations, rapping with people who are experts in all sorts of fields — has clearly knocked off my critical edge. I’m just not as sharp as I was. I don’t think as well or as fast, and my recall is so-so. Then again, living as I now do, I don’t need to be all that sharp.

I’m fortunate I formed my vision of retirement as a kid, by looking at the retired old guys I knew. For the most part, they didn’t do much. Then again, precious few of them ever lived long enough to retire in the first place. And once they did, they had very short life expectancies. So they pretty much took it easy, which was not only expected of them, but was approved of as well.

Today, with drastically lengthened lifespans and contemporary health care, people can stay active and vibrant into their 80s and even beyond. As a result of them being able to do more, more is expected of them. They get another career. They take up skydiving and kick boxing. They attend every activity within 150 miles. And so on and so forth. But not me.

Frankly, I don’t do much. I stay up late and sleep late. I walk my dogs. I read crappy detective novels. I spend too much time on Facebook looking at what someone I barely know made for dessert last night. I do other stuff too, like my hobbies, but none of it is anything anyone’d find important, meaningful or even interesting.

Nor do I feel compelled to do anything, and I think a lot of that’s due to all vacation time I had as a teacher and my mother’s admonition not to wait till I was retired – and too old — to do what I wanted. And that’s what I did, year after year. So when I finally hung up my Bike #10, I wasn’t making long lists of all the things I’d waited for and could now do.

What most surprised me about retiring is my reclusiveness. I always liked my privacy, but I never knew I’d like it so much … or so much of it. I thought one of the hardest parts of retirement would be losing all the interactions I had at school. But come to find out, I don’t really miss them. I have my friends I see here and there — The Uptight Hit-ites, Joe and Jack D; Professor Longhair, Sylvia C, my Eastern European Connection, and others. And I wander around town a bit each day, shmoozing with pals of one ilk or another. But the vast majority of time it’s just me, my menagerie and my imaginary friends … and I’m fine with it.

All in all, retirement has been a bunch of changes, most of them good, none of them worse.

I think the best line about retirement comes from my pal Danny Finlayson and is the perfect ending of this screed:

“If I’d known retirement was going to be this good,” said Danny, “I’d’ve have hurried up and aged faster.”

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