Where was I?

So, where was I? The last time we spoke a few weeks ago I was processing the fact that my baby daughter had somehow aged enough to be engaged to be married.

If that doesn’t validate the “time flies” theory, then nothing does.

Time is a funny thing to someone like me -- the working retired.

I retired from a job that I held for a time long, but I haven’t retired from work, and my time is as much a jumble of tasks and responsibilities as it ever was, perhaps more so in some ways.

I’m like a lot of aging Baby Boomers, who are filing for their Social Security benefits at a rate of 10,000 per day.

We may be getting a retirement check (whether from Social Security or some defined benefit plan from work), but we’re still working … mostly out of financial need, partly out of an emotional need to have structure and purpose.

It doesn’t suit us to do nothing.

I was talking not too long ago to Peter Francese, a widely recognized demographer who has researched and written about Baby Boomer issues.

I told him that I wasn’t the kind of guy who could just stop working altogether. He knew where I was coming from: He said he’s now 70 and has worked every day and plans to continue to work everyday at his craft.

There is still the substance of living that occupies a lot of time and energy. That doesn’t -- and shouldn’t -- change just because you’ve “retired.”

I don’t sleep in. In fact, that’s near impossible. My brain usually starts engaging at about 5 a.m. with the items on the to-do list, and the schedule of the day, and ideas for freelance work.

I haven’t visited this space in a while because other tasks, other responsibilities took priority.

Yes, there’s the matter of Elizabeth getting married next summer. She’s carrying the load of the planning, but there are ancillary tasks that have needed -- and will need -- attention. Some of our Thanksgiving traveling was related to that.

The holidays in general crowd the schedule.

For me and my wife Jane, our Christmas prep is into overdrive because we are hosting both her extended family and my extended family for Christmas dinner.

There’s not only Elizabeth’s engagement to celebrate with everyone, but there’s the pending arrival of a grandchild -- my wife Jane’s daughter Kelsey is due Jan. 1.

So we’ll host about 40 people on Christmas Day. And, oh yeah, we decided to do a kitchen make-over in time for Christmas with all new appliances.

Busy like everyone else, for sure. But a different kind of busy. A retiree, but a different kind of retiree.

I think of it as the new normal.

Head down against the coming headwind

When I run, I wear a baseball cap. And when the wind is up during a run, I have to keep my head down to keep my cap from flying off my head.

With the holiday season, I feel like I'm running into a headwind. Time to keep my head down and push my way through.

I've never been a big fan of the retail aspect of the holiday season.

These days it feels like it starts soon after Labor Day.

That's because Halloween has emerged as a Big Retail Event.

So now you have Halloween segueing into Thanksgiving, which blurs with Christmas, then ends, finally, with New Year's.

Black Friday isn't the Friday after Thanksgiving. It's every Friday at the malls.

This heightened frenzy on the retail end just seems to raise the overall holiday anxieties. A high tide raises all boats, right?

Certainly, there are parts of the holidays that I enjoy, once I've gotten my head into it.

I like being able to see family, especially my children. I like the spiritual moments when they come. Every year I wait for the Christmas Moment of spiritual fulfillment. And every year one comes along, now matter how cranky I might get during the process.

I'm turning the corner into the stiffening wind. I have my head down.

I don't want to lose my hat.

For that matter, I don't want to lose my head.

Give the peace of summer a chance

One of my pet peeves is the marketing of holidays. Each year, it seems, advertisers start to trump a particular holiday earlier and earlier in order to spur sales. Last year, for example, we hadn't even gotten to Halloween when the advertising promotions for Christmas started. Now it's back to school that's getting me riled.

I know back to school isn't a holiday, but it's a significant seasonal event like Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas; it's an event that makes us sit up and take notice. The thing about back to school is that parents of students should sit up and take notice in August, as the month starts to nudge toward Labor Day. But we were barely beyond the Fourth of July when I noticed advertising inserts in my newspaper that were keyed to back-to-school sales. This drives me nuts.

In the same way that we have a biological clock, we also have a seasonal clock tied to the things that happen during the spring, summer, winter and fall. The rhythm of the seasons is important in the transition from one equinox to the other, especially for those of us in New England where the seasons can be so extreme from one to the other. Come Labor Day we can start the transition toward fall but not before. I'll accept Thanksgiving as the transition point to the Christmas season, but I don't accept Halloween as that transition point. Nor do I accept July 4 as the transition point from summer to back to school.

This must have caught the attention of the smart people at the Wall Street Journal who on Monday wrote a story about the earlier back-to-school advertising. According to the Journal story, back to school is the retailers' second-biggest selling period behind Christmas. And this year is especially important because consumers, battered by high gas prices and a jittery economy, aren't in much of a spending mood.

The Journal estimated spending for back-to-school and college related merchandise will be flat to slightly lower this year compared to last year, which saw a slight uptick in spending in large part because of must-have electronic items such as cell phones and music players. There isn't a must-have item this year, according to the Journal story. In an effort to distinguish themselves from a discount retailer such as Wal-Mart, said to the Journal, major retail chains have created marketing campaigns to attract the attention of consumers. Kohl's, for example, is launching a back-to-school clothes and accessories line from singer Avril Lavigne.

The whole thing strikes me as back-to-school chaos. I don't have back-to-school kids who I have to worry about any more. My son David, who'll be a college senior, is low maintenance when it comes time to start classes again. But you can see the change in pace and attitude in the general population when the time comes to go back to school. There's no need to hurry that along. We need to invite less stress, not more stress into our lives and summer is the time to concentrate on less stress.

Everything is relative, of course. Summers are not as stress free as I remember them. We're buffeted by the turbulence of uncertainty about our jobs, the economy, climate change, our children's future, our future. But we should be able to use summer to ratchet down the apprehension. Summer should allow us to melt stress as quickly as ice cubes in iced tea on a 90-degree day. We should be able to sit on the ocean beach or the lake shore and read a book that takes us away from the here and now. We should be able to hike and bike, canoe and kayak, sun and surf, relax and rejuvenate under the glare of the sun, not the glare of desperate merchandisers.

They only fuel the anxiety at a time when our tank of anxiety should be allowed to run empty.