How Is Retirement?

A dear friend asked me how retirement is. Here’s a sample.

You may get a little bored at first but then you figure out something. It used to be that you had to get something done today, right now! I have to work tomorrow and I won’t have time to do it later on. Well, that no longer applies.

Take changing a simple light bulb. Now that you’re retired, you can think about changing it, plan for it, and even procrastinate about it. That one task can go on for 2-3 days. Then just when you convince yourself that you don’t really need to change it, some unknown suppressed urge kicks in and you decide to change it…tomorrow. A simple light bulb can keep you busy for up to a week. If you have to go to the store to buy it, you can add up to a month to the task because you only go to the store on Social Security check day. And that, my dear friend, only comes once a month.

Mowing grass however, is totally different. Before you retire, you mow the grass during the week after you get home from work or you mow on the weekend. Just before you retire, you decide that you’re going to mow once a week and you’ll do it on Friday. That way you can go visit your non-retired friends on the weekend. (Newsflash: they’re mowing grass on the weekend.)

During the first couple of retirement months you know what day it is you know what time it is, you know how many days until your next appointment. And you mow the grass on Friday because that’s what you decided to do.

But ever so slowly, insidiously, every day morphs into Saturday. You lose track of days of the week, dates, even time. It’s kind of Biblical. It’s dark and then it’s light. You call the dark “night” and the light “day”. You don’t know what day of the week it is. Even more cool, you don’t care. The grass gets mowed when the grass gets mowed. If the neighbors don’t like it, they can either (A) mow it themselves or (B) pound sand.

Going grocery shopping is an event. It’s an all day event. The one day of the month you can remember is Social Security check day. Those of us who retired from the military already know about this. We get a military retirement check at the end of the month while we’re still working at a regular job. So Social Security check day is nothing really new. It’s just a second check. But it has a major impact on our income and we must spend it wisely. And grocery shopping is a real necessity.

Sometime before check day arrives, you make a list of the things you need. You think about it, write stuff down, search the pantry, and check the trash bag, toilet paper and the paper towel levels. “Oh! I need light bulbs!” You write it all down. Then you check it. This can take a week or more. But you don’t know how long it takes because you don’t care, it’s always Saturday.

On Social Security check day you decide that you don’t want to go to the store because all the other old people will be there. They’re too slow and you might get upset and your blood pressure may get too high and you’re getting low on nitroglycerine and other heart meds. And your doctor’s appointment is not for… “Oh $&!^…that’s today!”

So you go to the doctor’s office. That SOB tells you that you’re too fat and you need to lose weight or you’re going to die a slow horrible death of ear lobe rot or some other malady you’ve never heard of. You lie and tell the doc you’ll do your level best to lose weight. You’re lying your fat ass off and the doc knows you’re lying but there’s always hope. But now everyone has said what they are supposed to say. So the doc writes refill scripts and off you go to the pharmacy and pick up your meds.  That’s an entire day and you are exhausted from all the driving around and sitting. You go home and fix up some double-decker bacon sandwiches and call it a day.

The next day is grocery day. You know in your heart that there are not going to be any old people there to slow you down. But you put your nitro into your pocket just in case and off you go to Wally World.

Lo and behold some SOB has brought in a whole bus load of old people. The invective just flows. It looks like a slow motion stampede. Walkers are everywhere. But you have to go in. You’re out of bacon. You ate the last of it yesterday. And life isn’t worth living if you don’t have bacon.

So you steel yourself and in you go. If you move fast enough you can get ahead of the crowd. It doesn’t work. It appears that it was a shotgun start. Old people are everywhere. Your diabetes foot kicks in and you start limping. Your heart starts to speed up; you can feel it. You pat the pocket where your nitro is and you’re instantly reassured that you won’t die from a heart attack. Your hands start searching for the shopping list. Then you realize, “*%@(* &U%~%@#!^#% — I left that ^$*%*&$  list on the table.” So now you have to do it from memory.

Up and down every aisle. Everyone is limping and shuffling, except the young people. They’re moving pretty steady. They’re pretty adept at moving around the old people – just like you used to be able to do. It kind of looks like a NASCAR race. The faster ones are passing the slow ones with a slow one occasionally getting put into the wall. No one gets hurt but sometimes something frangible hits the floor and shatters into a million pieces. The fast one moves on while the slow one searches for a youngster to clean up the mess.

You get around the whole store without having a stroke, check out and head home. It’s taken three hours. You get home, take a half an hour to get it all into the house. You put it a bunch of it up, another two hours. Ya gotta eat lunch in the middle of it or your blood sugar will drop so low you’ll go into some sort of weird half-awake woozy la-la land. Then you finish putting everything up and sit down with that still fresh list sitting on the table.

Halleluiah! You got everything on the list except…light bulbs.

That’s retirement.