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.

Road Trip

Despite being of age I missed out on much of what the 1970's offered its 20-somethings.  Not that there's anything amiss about studying chemistry in college, proceeding to medical school and residency, or getting married, the achievements that shaped me favorably forever.  But some experiences of the times did not happen and do not recapture easily.  Too little prosperity at the time, too much now, or at least too many obligations.

In that era, people used to go on wild spring breaks to Daytona Beach, but it would be unthinkable to spend my father's money that way.  My own kids mostly agree.  I could have done a medical school elective in Alaska or the Nebraska prairie but didn't, opting instead for six weeks of anesthesiology in Philadelphia on a grant that funded my fiance's engagement ring.  And people backpacked in European hostels, did a semester in Israel, or found somebody with a VW Bus redone with a psychedelic exterior to journey coast to coast via roads other than the Interstate.  I never did any of those things, not then, not now.  Made it to Israel as a tourist for my 25th anniversary and to Europe for my 40th, no serious money limitations but no extravagance either.  And the itinerary was a lot more secure and a lot less flexible than for my contemporaries to headed off to whatever they might find as 20-somethings.

One my home from Europe a few months back, the jet's entertainment module offered a feature on those 1970's travels that other people took.  As well as things turned out for me personally, missing out on that borders on a regret.  Now that I am retired, I theoretically could.  In fact, my father, a relative newlywed and newly retired person of about my age did exactly that, taking his time with my stepmother to traverse the country from Florida to Los Angeles over six weeks.  My own life still has fixed obligations, though.  A cat that needs care, but at least in theory could travel.  We take university courses.  My wife participates in musical activities.  Six weeks on the road cannot happen.  Ten days on the road, just myself if need be, could, limited by my own willingness to proceed.  But as a 60-something, and a highly accomplished one, my life has become a series of predetermined destinations to pursue, which no doubt accounts for what has been accomplished.  The GPS is set to take me someplace and I know when I have arrived.  Driving in a direction but without an end point to mark arrival doesn't really register in minds like mine. 

The video on the plane tempted me, though.  I should make an effort to see what roads are there without setting the GPS first.