From the Porch; Embracing Retirement

Every job I have had, every career path I tried, every project I took on I embraced whole heartily. Even my first job, if you discount mowing lawns, shoveling walks, raking leaves, or that paper route, I totally embraced. No, my first real job was at 15 working for the United States Government. You see I was a bag boy at the commissary on the base where my father was stationed. But I learned the best way to put groceries in bags, how to carry 3 paper bags at once without squishing the bread, and who the best tippers were. I was so good they appointed me head bag boy. Which meant the store manager only had one kid to yell at instead of six.  

Even though I am a retired photographer I did try several other career paths along the way. Like the time I tried my hand in the construction industry. Embracing my career path it only took one month of 100 degree August heat working at putting hot burning tar on a flat deck roof to tell me that the labor end of construction was not what I wanted. Still embracing the construction industry concept I determined that a foreman does less work and gets more money. That was for me. I even worked my way up to superintendent of special projects. It was a great job title with lots of responsibility and very little money for my effort. Next!

Special projects were no different. I embraced each and every one with the same gusto as I did any job or career path that I tried. When my wife asked me to paint the living room walls you would have thought that they were filming an episode of Extreme Makeover, Home Edition. I painted not only the living room; I painted the hall way, the kitchen, the office, both bedrooms, and rebuilt the cabinet doors in the kitchen, hallway, and baths. All this was done in one week, just the way Ty would have done it. I don’t know if Sharon liked the job I did or the fact that I was acting like Ty Pennington but she seemed very proud of me.

If it was my practice to embrace every job, every career path, and every special project with all my heart and soul, then why did it take me so long to embrace retirement? Isn’t retirement sort of a job or career in itself? If not a job then retirement is at the very least a continual series of special projects. Why did it take me two and a half years to embrace the retirement concept? I think that deep down inside I was a little intimidated by the concept of not doing anything at all. Let’s face it; you can only sit on the front porch and do nothing for so long.

Once I did embrace my situation I formulated a plan. I would take the things I liked doing best from my past and do that in my retirement. Since I no longer had to worry about what to charge or how much I was going to make I could make this work. I could do it because I wanted to and just for fun. I made a list of all the things I like doing that didn’t cost a bunch of money. I crossed off drinking beer, watching women, and taking naps. That left me with how much I like making people think and laugh. In the past I had done this by writing a newsletter about photography that I used as a marketing tool. I also kept and posted the minutes from a business group. Since I was no longer a member of a business group or had a web site to write and post a newsletter to, I would have to find a different way to make me feel that I was making people think and laugh.

The obvious answer was for me to start my very own blog. But how does one go about setting up a blog? I also had to come up with something to write about. The subject of photography, the subject I knew best, has a limited following. I would need to write about more than just photography. But first I needed a blog to get started. There was only one real drawback. I was going to have to use my nonexistent computer skills to write my blog, and then learn all about the internet to post my blog.

What I didn’t know was that while I was embracing my retirement there were others out there that were embracing a different concept entirely. That would be those geekie, millionaire types, who own and run the internet. These people seem to embrace the idea that if they hide and obscure each and every little bit of information that would make things easy and make sense to people like us know nothing retirees; then us know nothing retirees will spend more time using our brains to find those obscure answers. Those young know-it-all’s in their strange clothes think that if we retirees use our brains more we will live longer. The longer we live the better chance they have to sell us some new fangled software program that will only confuse us more. I read that book “Catch 22” a long time ago, you ain’t fooling me.

So if any of you really smart, nerdy, money grubbing, strange clothes wearing, rich young people ever find and read my little no nothing retiree blog, I have a warning for you. Someday, somehow, somewhere you too are going to be old. Your children’s children will be running things then and believe me when I tell you that they will be so much worse on you than you ever were on us. It will be your children’s children that will know more than you and it will be them that torment you the way you are now tormenting us. As last we retirees will have our revenge. OLD GUYS RULE!