Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of my retiring from my full-time job.
Shortly before retiring, I decided to periodically reflect on if and how my reactions to being retired felt. I wanted to do this because my memory is so poor that I figured I would otherwise soon forget how the retirement process unfolded for me – especially psychologically – and I wanted to remember that process in detail.
I did write lengthy blogposts on how retirement felt
- after the first day
- after the first week
- after week #2
- at the three-month mark
- at the six-month mark
- at the end of year one
- at the end of year two
- at the end of year three
But when my fourth retirement anniversary rolled around in 2017, I decided that so little had changed since my previous annual report that there was no point in writing about Year Four. Now that the Year Five mark has arrived, I remain convinced that perhaps the most radical changes – psychological changes, anyway – of transitioning from the status of fully-employed to fully-retired must’ve occurred in the earliest months.
The most definite thing I can report at the five-year mark is that my recollections of my working days – those 31 years of working in public libraries and the 9 years before that working in the mental health treatment field – are infrequent, vague, and feel alarmingly remote from my current circumstances. I really cannot summon up in any vivid way the feeling of what it was like to have my daily activities and whereabouts constrained by a schedule dictated by someone else, and/or the need to generate an income sufficient to maintain my economic independence and the comfortable mod cons that go with that status. Only rarely do I have flashbacks to – or even have dreams involving – workplace scenes, even happy or pleasant ones. (And, lest I forget, there were a lot of happy times during my work life. Not only am I fortunate as a retiree, but I am one of the lucky, lucky Americans who enjoyed – most of the time – having the jobs I had, and, with certain notable exceptions, who enjoyed working for the supervisors and colleagues I worked for or with.)
Although, for a while now, I’ve taken for granted my newish circumstances as “the new normal,” I am – at least sporadically – aware of, and feel gratitude for, my good fortune. What few challenges have come my way since retirement fall firmly in the sphere of “First World Problems.”
For example, I’m still not thrilled with the way I’ve managed – or failed to manage – a satisfying balance, post-retirement, between voluntary activities that are solitary and voluntary activities that are more social. Like my other “First World Problems,” this one pales before the great good fortune of my current circumstances.
I am certainly not juggling with what the great majority of my fellow Americans. including many people I know, are coping with:
- Holding down a part-time job to make ends meet. So far, I’ve managed to live my first five years of retirement within my (savings-generated) income.
- Parenting children – and All That That Entails, attention- and energy- and anxiety- and cost-wise.
- Sharing my house with two aging parents, or even one aging parent (as my sister Lori did for an entire year before my mom moved to an independent living facility).
- Living with any constraints or complaints resulting from serious or chronic health problems of my own.
- Being confronted (thus far, anyway) with some huge remodeling or repair expense that owners of old houses (like mine) must inevitably deal with.
- Foregoing – for financial reasons or for one or more of the reasons I’ve just listed – all non-necessary pleasures, such as eating meals in restaurants or traveling. On the contrary: I still treat myself to meals that I don’t cook myself and I’ve been able (financially and otherwise) to travel overseas twice since my most recent retirement blogpost (most recently a three-week jaunt through Italy last fall).
So I know I am lucky in almost every respect one can imagine: I’m still healthy, solvent, and, relatively speaking, free to pursue my own interests and to indulge a lot of my passing whims. I am also increasingly conscious of how ridiculously lucky I am to live in a society that – at least for a privileged subset of a particular generation of citizens that I happen to belong to – allows for a person to live at least a few decades of his life without the drudgery of wage slavery. (Not to mention the good fortune of not living in a country whose residents are being bombed, plundered, or enslaved. And even with Trump and his enablers temporarily fumbling around with the levers of government, I’m in no danger of being deported or otherwise separated from my loved ones. And while I hardly live what I would call a charmed life, I am not, as many of my fellow Americans are, coping with polluted water, a blighted or dangerous neighborhood, or month-long power shortages.
I can think of only a few as-yet-unreported factors that have affected my retirement routines within the past two years:
- My 90+-year-old mom’s move to an independent living facility almost an hour south of Atlanta; my taking on responsibility for managing her finances; and, most recently, helping my siblings with my mom’s recovery from a hospitalization for pneumonia. These events have resulted in considerably more time (vs. the first three years of my retirement) helping to attend to my mom’s needs as well as my own. At the moment, it is unclear whether or not my mom will be able to safely continue living in her own apartment; the inevitable (if impossible to predict) changes in my mom’s living circumstances will doubtless affect my own activities in some as-yet-unknown manner.
- I am still sorely feeling the lack of a weekly calligraphy class in my schedule that resulted from my former instructor’s deciding last spring to stop teaching calligraphy at the senior center where I had been taking classes for several – and very rewarding – years.
- Last October I embarked on an intimate relationship with someone. This ongoing adventure has wrought all sorts of changes in my general outlook, in my daily routine, and in my former plans. These changes are wonderful, but they are still relatively new, so I am still adjusting to them as Randy and I continue to share more time with each other.
- I’m either not quite finished with a certain volunteer project I’d hoped to have concluded by now, and am about to plunge into a newer one. So there’s the mild frustration of wishing I could more quickly conclude one activity and more quickly begin the other one. I’m also between trans-Atlantic trips: my long-anticipated trip to Italy now receding with great speed into the distant-seeming past, I haven’t quite gelled my plans for, later this year, a much-postponed return trip to Spain (re-imagined now to include Randy).
- I experimented for several (pre-Italy trip) months with incorporating an hour’s walk into most (good-weather) days, and look forward to (vs. dreading) resuming that feature of my daily round as soon as warmer weather returns.
Otherwise, I am still a contented retiree:
- Still reading (though not reading as much as I thought I would: I tend to fall asleep after a mere hour or so!), and still documenting my reading with mini-reviews in the sidebar of this blog.
- Still gardening or fantasizing about what I plan to do next in my tiny plot of ground. (I’ve recently learned, however, that I need to remember to interrupt my what can easily become rather obsessive gardening or garden-related activities with more breaks in general and with more naps in particular!)
- Still taking tai chi classes once a week (and still practicing the form at home most days).
- Still enjoying doing most of my chores and errands, weather permitting: after my twelve-year-old scooter finally gave up the ghost last December, I promptly bought myself a new one.
- Still enjoying living in the incredibly congenial neighborhood I was fortunate enough to buy a home in, way back there in 1993.
As a final note, I hope to remember something the aforementioned calligraphy teacher – and all-around Wise Person – Sharon Ann Smith, told me recently. She thinks the term retirement is misleading because it inaccurately describes what most people she knows – including yours truly – are doing with their post-fulltime-employment years. “We aren’t retiring from anything. On the contrary: We are re-inventing ourselves!”
In many respects, it does feel that way. May it be so!
Beginning in mid-September of 2017 I spent three weeks in Italy – my fourth trip to this apparently irresistible country. My fellow travelers for the trip’s first two weeks were four other gay men who live in Atlanta: Bill, John, Randall, and Randy. 
Read this for a book club. Interesting concept (skullduggery involving a lost painting against the background of the contemporary art selling scene in Britain), but most of the non-major characters were unlikable and stereotypical. I learned a good deal about art history and about the business of buying and selling art, but this book was, otherwise, forgettable (or, more charitably, “optional”). The ending of the story especially seemed like a rushed job.
(Read this for a book club.) Excellent, articulate writer. In fact, some of the best, and funniest, passages of 21st-Century American Jewish angst, that I remember reading. On the other hand, despite the exciting fact that Skibell’s main character gives voice to lots of things I obsess about myself, I somehow never felt very sympathetic with the novel’s narrator. I also felt like I was reading a screenplay of a movie written and directed by Woody Allen. I did learn a lot about Carl Jung and Gustav Mahler (none of it very flattering), so I’m glad I read the book, and I might search out Skibell’s previous novel, A Blessing on the Moon.
A gorgeously written, astoundingly sobering memoir of a neurosurgeon in his mid-30s who’s diagnosed with fatal cancer. I will be very surprised if this book doesn’t end up being the most memorable one I will read this year. Kalanithi loved literature before he trained as a surgeon, and that’s very evident in his allusive and reflective writing style. Haunted by his life-long search for the meaning of life even before his years of encounters with his patients and their families battling horrific brain injuries, the author’s unique perspective as a compassionate neurosurgeon who’s suddenly another doctor’s patient lends Kalanithi’s account of his final days a wisdom and poignancy that I will long remember. The book’s introduction (by a mentor) and its epilogue (by his wife) are also excellent and equally memorable. It would be difficult to recommend too highly this heartbreakingly brief book, and I shall always be grateful to my sister Gayle for recommending it to me.
A graphic memoir – meaning that it’s told via cartoon drawings – by the justly famous and beloved New Yorker cartoonist. Chast recounts the complicated, demoralizing, and often hilarious decline of her elderly mother and father – a story made even more complicated by the fact that she needed to coordinate their care (at first at home, later in various hospitals and eldercare facilities) from a different state than the one her parents lived in. Anyone who is caring for an elderly parent would love this book. I read it in three sittings, and would gladly have read it in a single sitting had I not been visiting friends when they showed me their copy of it. Chast is a genius, and can find something humorous in even the grimmest situations. Highly recommended.
Part memoir, part history of philosophy (especially the philosophies of American-born philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, William James, Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Pierce, William Ernest Hocking, and John Dewey). I loved every chapter, virtually every page and every paragraph – almost every well-crafted sentence – of this book! Instead of writing the author a fan letter, I went out and bought a copy to read again – plus I want to mine Kaag’s bibliography for some of the works he describes so intriguingly. This book reignited my usually dormant love of philosophy (along with psychology, one of my majors in college), completely transformed my obviously uninformed opinion of the contributions of philosophers born in the United States, and rekindled my respect for (and knowledge about) William James – already a longstanding hero of mine. Kaag’s willingness to discard the academic’s habit of aloofness and describe his personal foibles, doubts, and vulnerabilities is unusual. This book is an excellent (and short!) introduction to philosophy in general and to American philosophers in particular (their personalities as well as the major thrusts of their most important works), and it’s a beautifully rendered adventure story as well: in rural New England, Kaag stumbles upon the abandoned library of an important philosopher, and his discovery changes his life. This was one of those rare books I wish had been longer, I enjoyed it so much, and learned so much from it.
Basing a book about the Italian mindset on what one learns by using Italy’s trains doesn’t sound like a promising conceit, but Parks makes it work wonderfully. A combination memoir, travel guide, and history lesson, Parks’s weaving of the history of Italian railways with its political and cultural history is as entertaining as it is skillful. Parks is a Brit who’s made Italy his home for over 30 years; I have already read a few of his other nonfiction books and now will be sure to read them all.
This slim (138-page) volume of reminiscences written by two gay men who for a time lived in Italy- and whose short reflections are augmented by snippets of writings penned by previous Italophiles (Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Marguerite Yourcenar, etc.) was easy to finish in a single sitting. I liked better Leavitt’s Florence: A Delicate Case (2002), but reading this earlier book was something I’m glad to have stumbled over before an upcoming return visit to Tuscany.
This is the third of Burroughs’ memoirs that I’ve read. He is an outrageously talented writer – so good it was difficult to put this book away between readings. Every time I’d decided I wish I could marry this man, within five minutes I’d be horrified by yet another recounting of how neurotic and paranoid he can be. Burroughs certainly reels you in with his pyrotechnical wordsmanship, with his excruciatingly hilarious asides, and his amazing ability to recall in vivid detail his wildly fluctuating mental states. What a privilege to be brought along for the ride on the roller-coaster of the last decade or so of this amazingly articulate (if often exasperating) writer’s life.
I’ve been meaning to read this since finishing, nine years ago, the other two collections of Mitchell’s gardening columns for the Washington Post. How unfortunate for us amateur gardeners that Mitchell, who died in 1993, is not still alive and writing! And how lucky were the subscribers of the Post who got to enjoy his weekly gardening columns for twenty years! No other garden writer comes close to Mitchell’s unpretentious, slyly cantankerous attitudes toward the humble glories and sorrows of the urban gardener. As hilarious as he was opinionated, he never condescends. I will next read the only book of his I haven’t read already – Any Day – and in years to come will surely re-read portions of Mitchell’s other collections. Mitchell was a national treasure – and the only author who’ve I’ve not minded disparaging my hero Thomas Jefferson (albeit in Jefferson’s capacity as a gardener).
A now-seventeen-year-old survey of the world of books based on dozens of interviews with writers, librarians, library administrators, booksellers, and book collectors. Full of fascinating information and chock-full of anecdotes, Basbanes succeeds in making this particular world interesting for people who may know nothing about the intricacies of book collecting in all the forms that activity takes. He covers lots of bases (all the world’s most famous libraries, for example), and his narrative style is conversational and rambling in the best way. I was particularly impressed by Brisbane’s ability to accurately describe the nuances of the controversies raging in Book World at the time (and that are still important almost 20 years later). This book made me proud to have become a librarian, and I will want to read all of Brisbane’s other book-related books, both past and future.
I read probably one-third of this book. Boyles’ obviously impressive research and his sometimes sardonic commentary, the level of detail Boyles goes into to describe the behind-the-scenes wranglings among the people who produced (and advertised) this famous reference work was too daunting for me. The dipping into the intervening chapters that I did do was full of surprises, the almost stand-alone essays that constitute Boyles’ Prologue and his final chapter (“Postscript”) are masterpieces of analysis as well as examples of sustained engaging writing.
Davies’ always-modest, disarmingly sensible, and frequently witty writing on any subject is always a pleasure, and what he wrote about his reading is no exception – despite the fact that I don’t happen to share some of Davies’ particular enthusiasms (such as reading 18th Century plays). Davies’ daughter edited this anthology of articles and speeches, and her introductory notes were also interesting. Every time I read something by this under-rated Canadian author, I get a little closer to taking up one of Davies’ novels, one of which (Fifth Business) has been on my Books Cal Wants to Read list for years now.
Although I own 170 books on home decorating, my browsings through them haven’t been recorded in “The Constant Reader.” Except this one. As with most of my decor books, I found this one on sale in a thrift store, but this one is more than a collection of delicious photos and minimal (and often absurdly breathless) prose. Instead, its author’s text gives a lot of interesting insights into why Victorians embellished their homes they way they did, and why some of us find at least some aspects of their domestic style so compelling. It’s nice to – finally – better understand why I am drawn to Victorian architecture and interior design, and what gave rise to them. This book explains these things more clearly and succinctly than any other book I’ve discovered.
One of my traveling companions on my trip to Italy this year was reading this during the trip, and he gave me his copy when he finished it. The author’s style is personal and engrossing, and the book is filled with fascinating anecdotes featuring archeologists, historians, novelists, and artists. A book I have added to my library and will enthusiastically lend to others who, like most people, find themselves drawn to the magic spell most ruins seem to radiate.
