Today’s the official first day of my retirement, though try as I might I can’t get myself into any kind of emotional state — elation? dejection? hope? anxiety? freedom? emptiness? bliss? dread? — that I’m supposed to be feeling. I am cooking a honey-mustard pork tenderloin, with twice-baked potatoes, purslane and tomato salad, and opening a bottle of 2006 Rex Hill Pinot Noir. And I’ll probably have a shot of my 21-year-old Balvenie single malt Scotch. But all of that is obligatory observance to what I take to be the occasion. My heart’s really not in it.
No doubt my lack of response to this “major life change” is that I’ve been experiencing any number of “lasts” over the past six months, since I made the decision to take early retirement — everything from the last time I had to lecture on correct MLA documentation to the last department meeting to the posting of grades for my last class to the department’s retirement party for us early-retirees. Those things happened last spring, though, at the end of my final contract semester. But three months have passed until now, the last day of my last contract. And over those three months, I’ve taught an online class as an adjunct, as I have for the past more than decade, and I’ve just currently begun teaching two online fall classes as emeritus adjunct, as I intend to do for at least the next several years. So this retirement is really a semi-retirement, further lessening the import of today.
But however low-key I engage this day, there’s still a quiet buzz in the back of my brain that’s saying, more as promise than observation, future than present, “This is fucking great!”
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