Category Archives: Retirement

Art and Culture, Retirement

65 Ahead

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Winter                 First Moon of the Winter Solstice

In February I will turn 65.  And I’m happy to do it.  Not that I have much choice in the matter.  What I mean is that I like this time of life and anticipate with pleasure the next decade or two or three.

This transition has already begun to cause changes.  Once back from our cruise in late November, I realized I needed to step back from the Sierra Club and focus on home, family and my work.

Home and family have obvious content, kids and grandkids, wife, gardens, bees.  Remaining active and engaged with all of them.  Not that I haven’t but recognizing that the grandparent and long married aspects of those relationships alter past patterns and demand new ones.  Just what those are will become evident as I live into them over the next few years.

My work has three ongoing facets:  a series of novels set in the Tailte mythos, reimagining faith and translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  To this last I have added creation of commentary similar to Pharr’s for Vergil.

The portion of my life dedicated to art will also to need to change, but I have not yet paid attention to it.  At a DAM site, the Palette Restaurant, Kate and I discussed how my relationship with art could transform.

Art could become a larger part of my writing, using techniques or artists in my fiction.  Just how, undetermined right now.

Reimagining faith has as its long term hope the redefining of our relationship with nature.  One way of rethinking, or seeing anew, our current relationship with the world we live is to investigate how artists portray nature across cultures.

A third way of integrating art in a different way might involve selecting a research project focused on an artist, a movement, a period, a culture.  This might have some written work as a component or end product.

In service of all three I could begin taking art history courses.

A significant thread of all these changes is a pulling back or away from the world, shedding responsibility to others or for others and concentrating life more at home.  This feels age appropriate and is a definite inner drive for me right now.

Family, Retirement, Travel

Free Time

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Winter                    First Moon of the New Year

The grandkids are back in school today;  Jon and Jen back in their classrooms, so we’re on free time.  I want to go to the Denver Art Museum and see a Pacific Northwest exhibit they were installing last time I was there.

Due to Kate’s impending retirement this may be the last time we travel out here together for a while.  Too expensive to board all the dogs.  While we won’t be on a fixed income, it will be less plastic than during Kate’s employment years.  Unless, of course, I finally push a novel over the transom.  Then we could a little extra cash.

Limitations are part of life so I don’t find that prospect daunting, only something new to take into account.

That’s all from the Mile High City for today.

Retirement

Ummm…. Money

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Winter                         First Moon of the Winter Solstice

Inflation is at 3.39%.  How about that?  Just thought you might like to know.

Only reason I know is that we adjust the draw from our IRA every January and we have to take the inflation rate into account when we do that.  How do we take it into account?  I don’t remember, so I just e-mailed Ruth to find out her formula.

And winter.  Sorta back.  I loved the guy in the Tribune this day who identified SDA:  Seasonal Disappointment Disorder.  That’s me.  A bad case.

Still squeezing that budget to make it fit our income.  This shoe is sooo tight.  We have plenty of money, we just have too many expenses.  Ha.

I’m definitely on the downswing with posts here.  More than made up for though by posts to ancientoftrails.com.  Check’em out if you enjoy other peoples vacation photos.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Retirement, Writing

On Moving Toward Doing the Work Only I Can Do

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Winter                              First Moon of the New Year

Spent yesterday shifting to my new work schedule.  A couple of hours on Ovid, plus analyzing some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.  Edited three portions of the Tailte Mythos:  Book I and began clipping postings from Ancientrails to consult for my first essay in the Reimagining project.

Also learned that I can’t go to sustaining status at the MIA until I’ve had 8 years as a docent.  Sustaining would cut my tour requirements in half.

This means I’m going to have duck out of the Sierra Club sooner than I had planned.

No plant starts this year.  I’m going to buy already started plants and of those only those we decide to grow for particular, planned uses.  We’re going to shift our gardening now toward minimalism, toward those things we’ll preserve.  Two colonies of bees.  Emphasizing less maintenance everywhere, planting towards a time when the gardens will need even less, eventually very little care.

Life’s focus changes as our lives change and now I’ve become focused on those kind of things only I can do.  Only I can write the Tailte books.  Only I can set down my scattered thoughts about a sort 0f ur-faith, a common reverence all of us on the planet might share.  Others might/will translate Ovid, but only I will work toward a beginner’s level commentary, one similar to Pharr’s commentary on Vergil.

Not sure why now for this shift except to say that I know my time is finite.  Yes, it always has been, that’s true, but now it seems existential.  No, I’m not covering something up here, I’m not ill, in fact, I just got a set of labs that Kate says are typical of a 40 year old.

Long ago, in my 20’s, I read an article about when certain professions reach their maturity.  You know the material about mathematicians and scientists, early ripe, but certain other professions matured much later, writers and artists, for example, with the oldest age of maturation according to this reckoning being 50, for philosophers.

Factoring in my drinking and an early career emphasis on politics and the practical side of religion, I don’t find 65 to far out of range for me.  I feel mature in my thinking and writing skills now and I need to deploy them or my unique contribution will be lost.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, Retirement

One Last Physical

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Samain                                       Moon of the Winter Solstice

As 65 nears there is one more physical left under the old, private insurance model.  COBRA, which allows extension of private medical insurance for up to 18-24 months after loss of employment or retirement, if you can afford it, has kept the Health Partners plan in place until February 14th, when this baby boomer adds another droplet to the silver tsunami.

So, one last time under the private health care insurance model that has bankrupted and made more ill hundreds of thousands in this the wealthiest of all possible countries.

Tom Davis has seen me now for four years or so since Charlie Peterson took off for Colorado, Steamboat Springs.  Tom collects native american pottery and hopes some day to become a docent at the MIA.  He’s a good doc, a geriatrician in the mix.

Each year.  Downtown to the Medical Arts Building.  Park in the ramp, find the skyway.  Take the elevator.  Yes, nothing to eat or drink other than clear liquids since midnight.  The blood pressure cuff, measuring my major health problem.  Once by the nurse.  Then again by Tom.  Maybe yet again.

The ritual questions.  Any difficulty swallowing?  Any changes?  And on.  Probing with words while the eyes watch, looking for signs, fleeting symptoms.  Diagnostics at work, the differential tree now second nature, honed by so many patients.

Disrobing. The paper gown.  So cute. Poking, coughing.  A reflex tested.  Prostate checked.  Prescriptions refilled.  Blood work drawn.  Urine sample.

After visit summary in hand, back out through the lobby.  Others wait.  For the blood pressure cuff.  The ritual questions.  The disrobing.

Next year though it will be socialized medicine and a local HMO taking care of the visit. Medicare is not the problem, it’s the solution.

The ritual question for solving the problem:  for whom will you vote?

Aging, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, Retirement, US History

Grocers and Beware of Abstract Ideas

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Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate and I went to the grocery store together.  OF alert!  As I do most of the grocery shopping, I often notice older couples on what appears to be their big outing of the week.  Buying food.  And here we were, wandering the aisles of Festival Foods, a Kowalski burb grocery name.

It was nice to have her along and she prefers to drive the cart.  Read:  she always drives the cart.  Just like I do the car.  Gender insensitive on both our parts, I know.  Still.

We loaded up for the week, going over budget some, probably because there were two sets of eyes to be sucked in by the clever marketers behind grocery stores.  Low margin business along the walls:  veggies, fruit, meat, dairy, bread.  Higher margin grocery items in the center aisles:  soda, cereal, coffee, baking goods, oils and mustards and mayo and pickles.  Highest margin items on the endcaps of aisles and the impulse purchases parked conveniently by the checkout lanes.

Message here.  Just shop the outside walls.

Still reading Scorpions, about the Roosevelt star Supremes:  Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Robert Jackson and William O. Douglas.  The big news to me so far is the astonishing reversal of roles evident from this court to the current one.  Let me give you two examples, but first one thought to undermine them all

As the book reminded me, there is no place in the constitution that empowers the Supreme Court to decide cases in the way that it does.  Go back to Marbury vs. Madison, a hoary lesson from US History at one level of education or another.  Marshall created judicial review.

Example #1:  Judicial restraint.  Felix Frankfurter was an early, liberal, advocate of judicial restraint.  He specifically wanted the reigning conservative notion of liberty of contract, a legal idea that kept unions down and decided all cases in the interest of individual property rights, struck down and its source, a judicial interpretation of the 14th amendment stoppered.  In order to advance progressive ideas, Frankfurter said, justices should restrain themselves from intervening in matters decided by Congress and state legislatures.  Guess who’s in favor of judicial restraint now?

Example #2:  Originalism.  Hugo Black, a former radical member of the senate, known for his populist agenda, contended that justices should not make up ideas that were not in a plain reading of the Constitution.  This was aimed at the conservative invention of liberty of contract, also Frankfurter’s target.

Both Frankfurter and Black continued to expand their Constitutional philosophies as their terms extended.  Now, it is the Scalia’s and the John Roberts of the current court who advocate judicial restraint and originalism.  Beware of an abstract idea, it may not produce the result you expect.

Said he, an abstract thinker.  Me.  Beware.

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Garden, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Travel, Weather +Climate

Mi Casa

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Samain                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

Much as I enjoyed the travel, the close time with Kate, the ocean, new cultures and places, I find this computer and my own keyboard, my reference shelf and my library, mementos from past trips, family, collected art like slipping into a pair of comfortable bedroom slippers.  At its best travel allows for renewal, challenge, broadening, but an unexpected and forgotten pleasure, perhaps never noticed before, is this lifting up of home.

Home as reality and as metaphor carries a special valence for all of us, one way or the other.  I moved so often for the first 40+ years of my life I never had the time, the digging into a place where I could really feel home.  Here in Andover, although the burb itself is nada as place, the home Kate and I have created nourishes both of us.  We have space for our mutual creative work, space for mutual work outside and in, leisure space and fitness space.

Over the years, as is the case with most family homes, our sons have developed memories here, now grandchildren and in-laws, too.  Animals, both present and past, inhabit the hallways and the woods.  Storms past, challenges met and overcome, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, birthdays, honey harvests.  All here.

Home.  This trip made me appreciate it more than I ever have.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holidays, Retirement

Socialized Medicine, Here I Come

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Samain                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

The end of the day.  Sunday.  Used to go to sleep on Sunday night with Monday whirring away, chattering and buzzing, cutting a channel through my attempts to sleep.  Now I go to sleep on Sunday night.  That’s all.

Granddaughter Ruth has the makings of a cook.  Maybe.  Her recipe for cooking a turkey:  put it in the oven at 10 degrees, cook it for half an hour.  Put it on a big plate and put green beans and potatoes beside it.  Sounds like my first attempts at cooking a turkey.

Speaking of retirement.  Didn’t somebody bring that up?  I go to sign up for Medicare tomorrow.  I have my Medicare card already and now have to choose a plan.  Kathryn Giegler will help me as she did Kate.  This is a rite of passage, analogous to getting a driver’s license or that first Social Security check.

When I went on a quest tonight to solve a computer problem, I ended up in Best Buy where Christmas music played over the loudspeakers.  I found myself cheered by it, rather than annoyed.  It felt familiar, comfortable, mine.  This surprised me.  A Grinch I’m not, but I’ve often found the commercial side of the holiday season a large, unwelcome mosquito that won’t quit buzzing into my awareness no matter how often I try to swat it away.

Instead I found myself thinking of roasting chestnuts, singing carols, making a roaring fire and having hot chocolate.  Geez.

Aging, Family, Great Wheel, Retirement

Changes

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

May I present Autumn?  It comes to us in russets and golds, grays and rain, with some chill and occasional warmth.  Autumn continues our seasonal review, following the spectacular summer with its heat and its emphasis on differing shades of green, a color wheel of blooms and food.

Autumn, like our earlier season, Spring, is a time of change, the gradual transition from the heat and bombast of the growing season to the bleak outer landscapes of the fallow months.

Autumn also marks the beginning of the academic year, a moment of new beginnings, a springtime of the inner world.  This part of the season has its own holiday, Michaelmas, the holy day for the Archangel Michael, and the traditional opening of the English academic year.

In my life change has blown in with the cold rain.  Mark will leave us sometime in the next few days, before the end of October.  The growing season has wound down with only potatoes, beans, leeks and chard left in the garden.  A long vacation grows closer by the day, less than a month away.

There is, too, a growing sense that a major life change may be imminent.  Just what it will be is unclear, though it feels like retirement may be in the cards, joining Kate in her journey beyond the world of work.  How would that manifest in my life, long ago cast off from the port marked Employment?

Leaving behind the era of productive engagement with the world feels premature for me, but a new freedom may emerge.  It may longer be necessary to lash myself to the mast while sailing between the Charybdis of success and the Scylla of ambition.

Mystery.  The once hidden ocean of mystery lies beyond the current horizon.  And I’ve already set sail.

Aging, Retirement, Travel, Weather +Climate

A Jumbled Up Day

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

Finalized the Rio plans today.  Gonna stay in Ipanema, within a block of the beach.  Chose away from the ocean since we will have spent 39 days on it.  Plenty.  Our Brazil visas are classy, nice pictures, gold striping and good for ten years.  A bargain for $180 each.

Dentist today.  Regular cleaning.  My current dentist, Mahler, retires in two weeks.  Two years or so ago his partner, then my dentist, Moghk, retired.  The older you live the more the health professionals you’ve counted on begin to leave practice.  A bit unsettling. My internist of 20 years moved to Colorado three years ago.

The cloud gray skies around noon today appealed to me.  More of the coming inside, writing and research weather that I love.

We’ll miss much of it this year, but we have chosen to cruise during the peak hurricane season.  That’s why the prices were so good.  I’ve begun paying attention to NOAA.