Retire - Recharge - Rewrite
I’m staring at a blank page I would like to fill for the first time in about four years. Today is my 71st birthday and seven days ago I retired after 30 years at one company and 57 years of hard labor overall. This has been a significant week in many ways, but the most important thing is to fill this space.
I used to tell myself I would work for other people until I retired and then I would work for myself on what I like to do, which I told myself was write in some form or fashion. I hit approved retirement age about five years ago, but when I looked inside, I didn’t see the Great American Novel in my bones.
My wife, Jan, retired about then and after three weeks of cleaning and organizing the house top to bottom she came to me and said, “You know, I like Chicos…” I agreed she did as I had bought plenty of gift cards for her over the years at that store. “What would you think if I went to work there?” I tried to be supportive but pointed out she had been a senior vice president in health care and had never worked retail. I had been a general manager of computer and electronics stores, so I knew retail could be a grind.
Despite my cautionary advice, she went to work at Chicos about 20 hours a week and has loved it. An HR VP is the “Rules Lady” and doesn’t really get to be too close to anyone. Chicos has given her not only a way to fill time but girlfriends as a bonus. They call and text back and forth and have a great time “just selling pants” as she says.
However, I reasoned I didn’t really want to get a job to fill in my time. I liked my job as there was ample opportunity to solve customer problems that satisfied my creativity jones. The only thing I didn’t like was the hour commute each way. So, my company allowed me to just come in on Mondays even before the pandemic. After the pandemic cleared, I went in only quarterly to lunch with my boss. It was a great day gig.
The work from home option made it easy to just keep working at my main job. I even added an extra year to my retirement timetable to offset the 2021 market drop in my 401k. Plus, I hadn’t made much headway in documenting the processes I had created to support customers, so I had a sense of incompletion.
I’m now retired at last and not presently staring at a blank page anymore thanks to the saving words above. I will still be teaching adjunct at Union University to fill some time and of course there is golf to be played and guitar to continue learning. When you live in the Nashville area there is always someone who makes you want to break your fingers or simply say meekly you play “at” the guitar.
I think I’m going to revive a website I ran for several years to hold the written meanderings of my miscellaneous mind. It’s called “A Country For Old Men” and can be found: www.a-country-for-old-men.com. I originally started the website because I was teaching web design at Union but quit teaching that course in 2020 and it’s no coincidence my last entry was in the same year. I have musings dating from 2014-2020 out there and timeliness was never one of the prerequisites. I prefer to write timelessly and so that can be as daunting as a blank page.
Jan has recognized my uncertainty as to what to write about so for Christmas she signed me up for a website called StoryWorth.com. They send me a topic each week to help jump start the creative juices. I’m already a week behind, but think I’m going to bite down on this week’s challenge, “What is one of your earliest childhood memories?” I think I’ll make that response the second offering to "A Country For Old Men".
The other writing format I’m going to try to rekindle is songwriting. I moved to Nashville in 1981 at the encouragement of a publisher, but I think I’ll save that story for another day. Jan is helping with that effort also as she put in my Christmas stocking a deck of “Songwriter Cards”. Even though I’m saving the story, I’ll lend this effort a lyric from a song I wrote in about 1985 called “Deserted Dreams”.
Pieces of my life and times
Wrapped in memory’s cellophane
I’ve spent a lifetime
And gotten back loose change.
I wrote that song several years before I ever met Jan. The song doesn’t reflect my present reality in any way although I have some regrets as everyone does. I’ve got a lot of memories poked into 71 years that sometimes are hard to access quickly. I'm lucky the memories have left me a rich man in so many ways and hopefully I can write something that will enrich the life of any readers I encounter.
