Retirement Purgatory

This summer is quickly drawing to an end, more quickly it seems than in the past. I just posted today the schedule for next week’s (the last) assignments in my nonfiction class. The following week is the break between semesters. And then the beginning of the fall semester is the week after that. There’s nothing unusual in this transition from any late summer for the past more than ten years. But this summer has been quite odd, a purgatory in which I’m caught between full-time teaching and full-time retirement. When asked how I’m doing with retirement, I’ve typically said that it doesn’t feel like retirement because I’m doing this summer just what I’ve been doing for a number of years now, teaching one online class as an adjunct while enjoying the summer respite from a full load. But that hasn’t been exactly true, especially as the end of the summer nears. What in the past has been a respite from a full-time load, this summer is the beginning of full-time break. I will still, as an emeritus adjunct faculty, be teaching two online literature classes (both of which I’ve taught regularly for a decade), but that obviously is going to be much less demanding than a five-class-a-semester schedule, most on campus, along with office hours, committee and department meetings, professional development, etc. So as I’ve moved through this summer, I’ve been gradually progressing from the feeling of a summer no different than the past to one of impending retirement. Three months ago, retirement was sometime, somewhere, indefinitely over the horizon; now, it’s walking down the street, smiling, arms outstretched, ready to embrace me.