An anniversary of independence

Four years ago, on June 8, I retired.

How time flies when you’re having fun.

Am I having fun? You bet, but it’s not the carefree kind of fun.

I’m free, but not free of care.

The fun is in the independence of a daily grind dictated by someone else’s demands, someone else’s deadlines, someone else’s expectations.

My demands are my own, my deadlines are my own, my expectations are my own. My daily grind is whatever I want to make it.

Thus, my successes and failures are my own.

The fun of working retired is deciding what is worth my time and effort and what is not.

If the need to ski on a weekday winter morning is overwhelming, then so be it. If the need to surf on a weekday summer morning is there, then to the ocean it shall be.

If I need to visit my daughter in Connecticut or my son, late of New York City, now of Washington, D.C., then that’s what I’ll do.

If I can’t stand looking at the grass that I see needs mowing outside my window, I’ll hop on the lawn tractor and get to it.

There is still care about the bills that have to be paid. They don’t stop coming due each month just because of some notion of ‘retirement’.

Visa, Hyundai, Verizon and the rest of them still want their money.

So you work enough to pay the bills, work enough to send the quarterly payroll taxes check to Uncle Sam, and work enough to hopefully help family and have some fun.

I like working in my jammies first thing in the morning, having taken my cup up coffee down the hall to my office, where I also keep my guitars and my piano and my music.

I like it that, if work becomes too much of a bother, if the muse isn’t there to inspire me to write, I turn to my music. I couldn’t very well do that in the corporate life from which I retired.

I miss the people of work. I miss the camaraderie, the singular purpose of a shared vision, the interaction. I don’t miss corporate budgeting, layoffs, and frustration of being told “we can’t afford to do that.”

Here’s to the fourth anniversary of independence, to four years of care, and four years of free.