The Work of Retirement

My wife and I first toured a part of Europe for our 41st anniversary, delayed by about a year.  I had just retired, planned the cruise in my final working months.  Lovely time, welcome vacation, time to be with my wife after a career that often left me too tired after a trying day at work and a tedious commute home each night.  Retirement is to do the things that you didn't get to do when work obligations dominated.  For a lot of people, that meant high grade travel.  For us timed when it most needed to be.  The Cruise of the Adriatic, real vacation, favorable intro to retirement possibilities.  

Now five years later.  Anniversary #46, second trip to Europe, this one without the ship but a single city so we do not have to move with our luggage on a tour bus every few days.  And we get more far more time in Paris than any cruise, river or sea, would afford its passengers at any port stop.

From early retirement to now settled retirement, seeing the world previously unavailable to us didn't happen.  Airplanes took us to visit the kids in distant cities, partaking of the sights in their areas while there.  My car enabled a few overnight trips, only one requiring a hotel stay to divide the driving to more than one day.  And my wife and I could be with each other as much as we want now.  But after 46 years, I go to My Space early morning and after supper, while she has her activities from high level choral singing, to a weekly Torah portion column that needs completion every Thursday, to a fondness for movies and a TV channel that I avoid on the big screen.  We meet up at supper and at bedtime.  Unlike work, we have no nudge to do anything different, including the grand travel.

As we prepare for our tour of Paris and environs, the perspective over these five years has shifted dramatically.  The cruise was a respite from work.  The upcoming tour is not a respite as much as the work of retirement itself.  While the foreign environment will likely be energizing, so will the relative novelty of being with each other from breakfast to the sightseeing itself to whatever activities we choose to do together after supper.  There is some agenda taken by the tour company, but other parts of the time away that become joint choices, where to eat, what else to see when Paris displays itself as the City of Lights. 

All this a clear demarcation from our daily routines, which really are not part of retirement's agenda, to some arduous travel which is.  Planning, airport, customs, hotel, tour appointments, return.  The Work of Retirement.  But like most directed efforts, it has its own enrichment.