Summer is a good time to think about composing a future life in the key of retirement. Now that I've finished a summer of retirement, I can accurately say that my composition is definitely unfinished.
That's not to say it was bad; it had some good parts and it was discordant at times with me trying to find my emotional cadence after suddenly not working after 33 years of working every day. It just feels undone.
I often say that I'm glad my retirement started in early June, because it has given me the summer to re-think my thoughts away from the things I was doing at work to the things I wanted to do from home. Pre-retirement to-do lists were different from the retirement to-do lists.
First off, I had to define retirement ... is semi-retirement appropriate? That assumes that half the time is spent retired, as in not working, and the other half is spent working, as in working for some kind of recompense. That didn't happen, so I'm not sure semi-retirement works as an accurate description.
Full retirement -- as in not doing anything -- doesn't really qualify because I was working at stuff. Let's call it a quasi-retirement ... quasi, as in having a resemblance to, as in close but no cigar.
I retired from the newspaper company where I had worked for 30 years, promising myself I would use the summer to re-engineer myself as a professional, that I would think of how to use what I learned as a newspaperman and recreate myself in some other way.
Here's the good, bad and ugly of what I ended up doing:
-- I bought a surf board and wet suit and learned how to surf. I'm not very good. After a lot of trial and mostly error I could stand up and get a pretty good ride on some of the milder waves that the Atlantic has to offer;
-- I created Broad Cove Media as a business platform from which to operate a newspaper operations consulting business and publish web-based content. I didn't do any consulting during the summer. I write weekly, as I always have, for Boomer Angst, and I created Eats@Home as publishing avenue for one of my favorite pastimes-- cooking and eating;
-- I planted an herb and vegetable garden, courtesy of the herb and vegetable plants wife Jane bought for me as a birthday present in June. The herbs did very well. The peppers and eggplant ... not so much. The tomatoes are doing pretty well. If the garden produced anything it was in spite of me, not because of my abilities as a gardener;
-- I do a little volunteer work for the Great Bay Coast Watch program, which is run out of the University of New Hampshire and which looks after the health and well-being of the Great Bay Estuary here in southern New Hampshire;
-- I'm writing for Examiner.com as its Baby Boomer Examiner. This is a national news, information and entertainment web site, and it uses experts -- so-called national examiners -- as contributors. I contribute almost daily content related to issues of interest to Baby Boomers. That's been great because it gets me writing every day, something I haven't done since my newspaper reporting days some 20-odd years ago;
I'm busy and I'm productive in the sense that there's something to do every day.
Oh, and there's the golf. It can't be a quasi-retirement without the golf, can it? I play golf each week with former colleagues from the newspaper and there's a weekly pot to be won based on scoring. I've earned $76, which means I've earned more money playing golf in retirement than anything else I've done this summer.
I guess if Beethoven and Schubert can have their unfinished symphonies, I can have one too.
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