The Art of Retiring

Katherine here.

It's been a long time.  I've been a busy girl.  I work and travel and garden and cook and knit and watch TV mindlessly and go to restaurants and read and hike and do stuff.  I've been doing so much stuff that I classified my thoughts into four posts as we drove back home from Santa Fe so I could write about all the stuff I've been doing.  I can remember three of my ideas at the moment.  I miss my steel-trap mind.

Losing one's steel-trap mind seems to be part of retirement.  I like to think that my brain is so full of shit that it makes arbitrary decisions about what to keep on file and what to delete.  My brain seems to save a lot of junk about my past that I really am ok with losing.  Important future posts on the blog don't get the kind of prioritizing I really want.  I want to be more in charge of my brain.

That's why I'm writing--I'm feeling a bit in charge of retirement even though it's getting hard to keep up with it and my ability to juggle the multiple facets of it in my brain is also dwindling.  We are doing retirement nicely I think.  A former student, I'll call him Karl because that's his name, suggested Jim write something about that.  Jim just finished his book and is in the neurotic agony stage of trying to seek a literary agent.  Not good timing.  I decided to take Karl up (hope it's not a disappointment) and explain our take-charge happy retirement life.

I'm thinking the following elements have made retirement a really cool way of life for J and I.

1.  Mobility.  Being able to walk and move is everything.  We can hike and kayak our way around the Tetons, walk from downtown Manhattan to where Nate lives in the East Village, climb up and down ruins in Belize.  We've been going to the gym for years.  It makes a difference.

2.  Friends.  We have amazing friends.  Bud and Janet have taught us so much about traveling and staying busy.  We wouldn't have passports without them pushing us.  I wouldn't be thinking about organizing travel plans years in advance without Janet.  Jim wouldn't be comfortable building decks and fixing stuff around the house with being a handyman with Bud.  Cindy taught me to knit and so much more.  Jerry and J can sit and talk politics happily on the same side of things.  Barb is my history and truth teller.  I could go on and on.  Retirement isn't the time you find your friends--I don't think so anyway.

3.  Common Interests.  Jim and I have been building layers of interests together for close to 40 years now.  We started with tennis and watching sports, and then added cooking, then bridge, then hiking, then kayaking, then fancier cooking--you get the idea.  We're working on opera now.  New goal--see an opera at the Met in NYC and one in San Francisco.  We have differences, but they seem so small.  I avoid movies that make me cry sometimes.  J does not.  He reads a lot more non-fiction than I do.  I read more fiction than he does.  He likes tomatoes more than I do, but I'm really working on it of late.

4.  Stupid Decisions.  We have poured money into the wrong things.  We need new flooring and air conditioning would be nice someday.  There's a large list of things the house could use.  We travel instead.  I watched my Dad lose all of his life when his lung disease and oxygen machine pretty much imprisoned him at home.  I've had cancer twice.  I don't know how long I have.  I'm making the fiscally stupid decision to enjoy time while I am here and while I can move.

5.  Food.  Cook your own food and go out to good places when you can.  My mom lives on trips to awful restaurants and the leftovers she brings home.  She won't cook and hates the food at the independent living place where she lives.  Living on awful leftovers is not something we do.  We buy good food and cook it up and enjoy reading recipes and the whole process involved with food.  We eat at wonderful places at home and on the road.  Food is not just fuel.

6. The Gym.    Belong to one.  Go with as much regularity as you can muster.  See number 1.

7.  The Doctor.  See the doc.  The docs catch things like cancer.  See number 1.

8.  Work.  Do something.  It doesn't have to be for money.  I work for money because I need to fund my travel plans and shopping desires.  I found a good and flexible job in my field.  This was very hard. I applied for over thirty jobs and I got one interview.  I managed to get that job.  I'd be okay doing other things--I'd really like to be a part time concierges for The Four Seasons downtown for instance.  They weren't interested though.  Jim alternates between doing handyman jobs with Bud Simmons, doing home projects, and writing.  The book he finished in the last year is wonderful.  Our friends are busy.  We are busy.  Our kids are busy.  It's hard to find time for stuff.  That's good.

9.  Family.  We were very lucky.  We have three great kids--all have wonderful spouses.  It is fun to be with them.  We will visit Nate in the spring.  We see Chris and Franny and their families regularly.  We have oodles of grandkids who are fun and their own people too.  We have family dinners at our house about twice a month.  My mom comes (our only surviving parent), sometimes my brother and wife, all the kids, Barb (she's family), and sometimes some dear neighbors too.  This is costly, but it's been a really good thing.

10. Technology.  We try to embrace and use it.  We learned how to upload part of J's book to an agency submission thing today.  We can play games on our phones and we text too much I think.  I do the bills online and we only write checks when required.  No point in not keeping up, but it's frustrating because things change so quickly.  I recently did the Mountain Lion upgrade for the Mac and the Mail part of the computer looked totally different after the process and now my Mobile Me is an iCloud.  It's hard to understand why constant upgrading is important, but we do it and we survive.  

11.  Sense of humor.  Your body fails in lots of ways that pisses you off.  Technology gets ahead of you too quickly (see number 10).  You learn your preferences all too well and edge toward inflexibility (I know I'm in trouble when my mom starts a conversation with, "You know how flexible I am Katherine and...").  You have to laugh.  No matter who is elected, no matter who quarterbacks the Broncos, no matter what weird things CDE or DPS or the feds do to teachers--it just doesn't matter.  Bill Murray had it right in Meatballs--it really just doesn't matter.  That's the best advice of all.

Thanks for listening.

P.S.  An ironic post script:  I tried to add a photo, but the computer wouldn't let me because iPhoto needed to be upgraded.  I'll do that next.