• Category Archives Retirement

  • Canadians: “Build a Damn Fence!”

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                            Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    From The Manitoba Herald

    by Clive Runnels

    Canadians: “Build a Damn Fence!”

    The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.

    Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night. “I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken.

    When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

    In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields.

    “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn’t give any milk.”

    Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves.”  A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet, though.”

    When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.

    In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the ’50s. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age” an official said.

    Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies. “I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them.” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”


    Politics Retirement Travel 📎and tagged

  • Adult Activity

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    Another meeting with Ruth Hayden, our cash flow and strategy money person.  She’s so sharp.

    Kate has done so well with earning money and putting money away that we’re going to have an ok retirement.  We’re still calculating, but things look good.

    The transition from Kate working full time to casual time, then to full retirement is something I anticipate with pleasure.  I have wanted to grow old with her and now we can get started.

    Being adult, though, for a whole morning makes me want to run screaming into the streets, doing something crazy.  Gonna have to settle for handling the comcast installer.  That’s crazy, in it’s own demented way.


    Aging Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Gadget Obsessed? Moi?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                          New (Thanksgiving) Moon

    To call me gadget obsessed might take reality a tad too far, but not much.  I saved up some money and bought a TIVO.  It took me this afternoon to get it set up and working, putting the cables in the right places, getting the codes right, creating a few channels on Pandora, wondering at the limited Netflix options when the full menu is available on my new Play Station 3, (OK, maybe it’s not quite far enough.) and deciding whether or not to ditch the cable tv subscription from Comcast, my least favorite company of the week.

    In spite of myself it looks like keeping the cable subscription is still the best way to get the most out of the TV.  I’m gonna keep checking though since new ways to watch movies and broadcast shows keep popping up.  Most of what’s on tv is low culture, but often compelling anyhow and even the stuff I like that’s not compelling entertains me. With streaming movies the content available at home on demand has increased a hundred fold.

    As a general rule, I don’t watch tv to get educated and I’m rarely disappointed.

    Even with the increased quality and options though, nothing on the tube–that phrase dates me like saying icebox–compares to the live music, open studios and visiting with friends at Art Attack last night.  Remember Alvin Toffler?  The futurist from a long time ago.  He talked about high tech, high touch and I’ve found him right on that score.  I use the internet, the facility of cable tv combined with the internet and software like WordPress and Microsoft Word to make me much more productive in the work I choose to do, but going in to the MIA and seeing my docent friends or over to Paul’s house for a Woolly meeting, a Sierra Club meeting on Franklin Avenue are equally important to me.  Without them I would be a hermit.

    A lot in the hermit’s solitude appeals to me, so I’m happy Kate and I have created a place here where we can be alone and creative, just the two of us, but I need face to face time with others, too.


    Aging Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Family Friends GeekWorld Humanities Politics Retirement 📎and tagged

  • The Constructive Task

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                   Waning Harvest Moon

    Another morning of cool, wet weather.  The beginning of October.  No.  Scratch that.  The end of October.  I recognize this fall weather actually; it comes to us courtesy of the climate that used to be Indiana’s.  This is the weather pattern of my boyhood.  Sunny, sometimes warm, sometimes not fall days, then rain drifting over into ice or snow with some cold, a January thaw that makes everything muddy and nasty, then a bit more cold and snow until March when the muddy, nasty part returns until spring.  This weather pattern had a good deal to do with my move north, since I wanted stable seasons and in particular real winters.  Now it seems the weather patterns I left have begun to follow me.

    The Liberal Spirit is on Ancientrails now, just look on the left side, all the way at the bottom under Ge-ology.  This presentation completed a six part exploration of, first, the movement West of Unitarian-Universalism, and then the nature and future of liberalism, especially as it applies to matters often called religious.  I like working in three parts because it encourages me to think longer than the usually 5-7 page presentation, to take an idea further, develop it.  Not sure what I might do next, but I do feel a need to begin what my old seminary theology professor would call the constructive task.

    Constructive theology as an abstract idea involves the coherent development of ideas, ideas about the ultimate nature of reality, human existence and the forces that work on both of them.  My notion of a Ge-ology, which continues to rattle around, make sense, but defy careful development is a significant part of where I want to go, but there’s a lot more to piece together.  The whole notion has become a more and more pressing idea for me as I work in the Sierra Club legislative arena.  It confirms what I have known now for some time.  The representative democracy which serves our nation well at a conflict reduction level, does not work well when it comes to deep, systemic change.  Its checks and balances, its partisan politics and its ephemeral nature make radical change not only unlikely, but almost impossible.  This is by design and it does well at frustrating regional ambitions or the rise of a revolutionary faction, yet those same mechanisms also frustrate radical analysis, even in those instances in which it is so obviously needed.

    Upstairs now to our business meeting, still massaging our way toward Kate’s retirement, getting comfortable with the financial side and with our new life.  Not long now.


    Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Myth and Story Politics Retirement Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • A Life in Ruins: Part II

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                    Waning Back to School Moon

    When I visited Angkor in 2005, I wrote a piece for my Pilgrimage series entitled, A Life in Ruins.  Ephesus, Delphi, Delos,Rome. Pompeii, numerous civil war battlefields and Attuthya are among the many ruins I’ve visited, trying to piece together from blocks of stone, information plaques and Blue Guides their meaning and significance. At Knossos I wondered what it felt like to be in the labyrinth of rooms that made up what entered legend as the habitation of the Minotaur.  At Delos I imagined what the birth of Apollo and Diana was like.

    Given that history, amazing is an understatement when I discovered my actual life had become a site with ruins, not one, but many.  In my hometown of Alexandria the first factory in which I2010-10-02_0396 worked, Johns-Manville has nothing left but concrete coated pillars and a loading dock.  I worked as a receiving clerk the summer I was there, so I knew exactly what went on there when the trains loaded with coak and limestone rolled onto the factory grounds.

    That was the first, but far from the last.  The old High School, my middle school, gone.  Tomlinson, my first elementary school. Gone.  Most of the businesses of my youth, abandoned shells.  This is only in Alex.  In Anderson the mighty General Motors Guide  Lamp and Delco Remy, employers once of 25,000, gone.  Parking lots and concrete factory pads covering thousands of square feet and fenced in with tall chain link are all that remains.

    If we had a magic button we could push, one that would light up the home’s lost among those 25,000, we would have a better estimate of the lives ruined along with these structures.  These are the missing elements at Ephesus, Rome, Delos.  What about the lives of the priests, the grounds keepers, the cooks, the sailors?  Like members of my class and their parents forces beyond their control eliminated the places where they earned their livings.  Places made sacred by the holy work of labor.  So much desecration.

    These factories, these shops, these shuttered houses, these abandoned people are the friends and family with which I spent the weekend, real people, not statistics.  Never did I think that the mighty flood of cars bearing workers on Highway 9, no absurdly named Highway of Vice Presidents, would dry up.  Never did I think that the vibrant small town of my youth with its mens store, its womens store, two variety stores, two pharmacies, a bakery, two theatres, bars and banks and service stations would fade away only to be replaced by dollar stores and wholesale outlets.

    So this weekend, an affair of the heart most of all, a reconnecting with those who lived then, only underscores the pain.  I will never visit a new ruin again with the same detached attitude.  Real people lived there;  real people suffered.


    Aging Friends Humanities Memories Retirement Travel US History 📎and tagged

  • Delighted

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

    In the company of old men.  A surprising event occurred tonight among the Woolly Mammoths.  We had an evening of delight.  Warren raised this interesting topic and as it went round the room in our usual whoever wants to talk jump in and do so style, a congruence began to emerge.  Each of us reported more awareness of delights or miracles (see below) in our lives.  They ranged from grandchildren, whose every action delights us, to fly fishing and feeling the water around the legs, working on the Mississippi for twelve hours a day, dogs thumping and jumping when we come home, poetry, not having to perform anymore, just playing the music, sex, bees and honey and the Landscape Arboretum.  As we each offered up those things that delight us, it became apparent that most of us (all of us?) have entered a phase of life where external success has become a muted to extinguished need and instead we find ourselves driven by the inner life, by receptivity and acceptance.

    Though it was, in one sense, comforting and even encouraging to hear this more relaxed, old folks with their feet up on the cracker barrel sort of ambiance, it seemed a bit too happy, a bit distanced from pain.  Just as this thought crossed my mind the conversation shifted to cremation, to place, in part spurred by one of us who talked about visits to West Virginia, to the hill top church where his grandfather had served his first and his last pastorate, a place where he’s buried and other members of the family, too.  This physical location, this place on a hill top in West Virginia, felt rooted, felt his, helped him feel grounded.

    The cremation conversation moved along wondering about rootedness, about sense of place, about visits, though occasional, to parents burial plots.  Where will those who want to remember us go?  I mentioned green cemeteries and natural burial.  We will probably revisit this discussion.  It has an interesting relationship to something that intrigues me, something University of Wisconsin Madison geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, called Topophilia.  All of this dovetails into a taoist perspective, or at least a taoist perspective as I understand it.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Retirement Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Eternal Tru Luv

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                               Waning Artemis Moon

    Kate’s at work.  Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice.  I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain.  The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip.  Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.

    Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together.  We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season.  We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.

    Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them.  And that the experience is reciprocal.

    Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.


    Aging Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Shame, Guilt, Fear

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

    While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

    It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

    Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

    What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

    All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

    A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

    We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

    Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

    We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.


    Aging Family Holidays Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Eatin’ At Pappy’s

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                       Waxing Artemis Moon

    After the early work, breakfast at Pappy’s Cafe, a new fine dining experience in Andover.  I’m using the Apple Valley criteria for a fine dining restaurant, silver and real plates, but, no cloth napkins.  Close anyhow.  Pappy’s reminds me of those little places you pull into while on the road.  You know, the one in the middle of a now largely empty business district in a town with only a main street and two blocks worth of business space.

    The food is good, hearty downhome fare.  We went to Pappy’s first a Friday or so ago for the the all you can eat fish fry.  Just like Wisconsin without the beer and schnapps.

    The only disheartening part about Pappy’s is the general clientele.  It’s like he put out a sign that read, BMI 30+?  All you can eat!  I looked at the folks there bulging, slow to get up, slow getting down, busy at shoveling in pancakes or all you can eat fried fish and all I could see was a visit to the ER with chest pain, ruined backs and bum knees, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

    (William Howard Taft would have loved Pappy’s.)

    The stomach on this body is not what it used to be, not at all, and I understand the struggle to control spread.  It’s tough.  Still, when I see several kids who are large, I begin to wonder about our culture overall.  In fact, I asked Kate if she saw kids with high blood pressure?  Yes.  Due to weight?  Often.  Do you take blood pressure when you see kids?  Yes, from age 3 on.  It used to be the guideline was age 12, now we try to find it when we can still control it with diet.  OMG.

    We also talked about this peri-retirement experience we’ve had while Kate recovers from her hip surgery.

    She likes it.  “I can spend more time with you, we can just go somewhere.  I can plan projects, get more done.  I don’t feel like I have to get myself ready for work.  I didn’t have to do charts this morning for example.”


    Aging Family Health Retirement 📎and tagged