Retirement and Vacations

While on vacation in the Pacific Northwest last week, I learned something new about being retired: When you’re retired, you can’t take a vacation. A vacation is, by definition, a break in time and often place from obligations of work or school, a vacating of occupational or educational responsibilities. Most jobs offer a certain number of “vacation days” per year (paid, if you’re lucky). And for students, there is summer vacation, winter (or Christmas) vacation, and Spring Break. But for us retirees there are no obligations on our time to take a vacation from. I suppose you could say we are on perpetual vacation, but that’s just playing cute with words. The concept of retirement is a perpetual departure from work. A vacation, on the other hand, implies – or demands – a return to work or school at some point. Retirement is a step up from vacation on the ladder of work aversion. To consider it a “perpetual vacation” would be to diminish its accomplishment – a full-blown split from responsibility, earned through years of toiling in whatever mine one toils in. For us retirees, a vacation is an occasional bone thrown to laborers as a promise to what the future might be like. For us, that future is here. We don’t take vacations anymore. We take trips. Or we just lie on the couch, drinking beer and watching sports on TV. We’ve earned it.

Retrirement -- Be Prepared

For two or three years in my pre- and early-teens I was a Boy Scout. I attended Monday evening meetings regularly in the basement of Central Christian Church, I went on weekend campouts mostly in the summer but occasionally in the winter as well (snipe hunts were best in winter), I attended a National Jamboree in the Colorado Rockies (the altitude and water and stress gave me an ugly case of cold sores covering my mouth that took weeks to heal), I learned to tie knots and carve wood and paddle canoes and build campfires and a little bit of first aid. I actually achieved the rank of Life, the penultimate level in scoutdom, though more out of endurance than effort (just showing up was 90% of the accomplishment). And I had joined and endured only because of the camping and games and it’s what my friends were doing. But I realize that through that experience those many years ago I must have absorbed and retained what is at the heart of the scouting experience, as expressed in the motto – Be Prepared.

Occasionally someone who knows I’m retired will ask me how I’m doing and, especially if they’re in their 50s or early 60s, how they might look forward to their own retirement years. I guess I’ve become something of an expert on being retired if only because I am. Experience is wisdom. And whenever I’m asked, my advice always reverts back 50 years to my Boy Scout days – Be Prepared:

Laziness – Hopefully this is something that you’ve developed over years. It’s the umbrella of skills necessary for the life of retirement. If you aren’t lazy – and comfortable in your laziness – you aren’t properly ready for retirement. All else follows from it.

TV – TV is your friend, day and night. We live in an age of hundreds of stations with nothing on worth watching. Our generation has cultivated and preserved this “vast wasteland.” Embrace it, support it, even if only lying on the couch, passed out, drool seeping from the corner of your mouth, the 40” HD set illuminating the walls and droning into the night.

Beer – Or wine or gin or Scotch, whatever, though beer is less aggressive and dulls the senses more easily. You don’t want to spend the day drunk, and certainly not passed out, only morose. And because you’re retired you don’t have to drive.

Sports – This sort of unites the above three. There is some sort of sports programming on 24-hours a day (and night), even whole channels devoted to nothing but sports. You might every once in a while attend a live sporting event, though you don’t need to. And if you do there are TV monitors scattered around most sporting venues these days as well as plenty of beer stands, making the experience just like you were at home.

Reading – OK, this may sound a bit too cerebral. But I’m not talking Shakespeare, Proust, or Joyce. It’s often good to break up the routine of nothing during the day, and reading can be a good break. Especially if you’re lying on the couch, a baseball game on TV, a beer in hand, and a book about the 1961 Yankees across your lap.

Internet – It’s little known, but the Internet was originally developed for the gratification of retirees. All else is ancillary. You’ve got email, newspapers and magazines, blogs, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and all kinds of other ways to waste your remaining days. Enjoy.

Grade Deflation

I had a student drop my class today because she was only making a solid B (85%). We’re one-fourth through the summer semester. She apparently wants to make an A in the class, probably in all of her classes as well. In emails, I’ve told her she’s doing fine and that if she wants to improve her work she should spend more time re-reading the assignments, getting help at the Writing Center, or finding a tutor to help her with her reading and writing. It’s a literature class with quite a bit of reading and writing. And she’s Asian, which means her problems with both reading and writing English (mostly American English, with its allusions, metaphors, etc.) make it that much more difficult for her. I’ve told her, as I’ve told others (full disclosure), that few students in my literature classes receive an A, usually no more than two or three students out of 20-25 a semester. A number of students receive a B, with a few getting C’s, and a very few D’s (the C’s and D’s are mostly from assignments regularly turned in late or off-topic). There’s no quota, but there are standards. And that’s the way it usually works out.

It’s always troubling when I have students who want and expect to receive A’s. And all too often their expectations are based on the assumption that if they just do the work, and work hard, that the A will follow. Their conception of grading is one criterion: effort = A. This is particularly true of Asian students. I’m not sure why this is, but it is. Perhaps they have an inflated sense of grade-point average, that they need a 4.0 to be the best, or maybe there’s a cultural expectation. And maybe they do get A’s in other courses, math and science, disciplines that don’t require an understanding of reading and writing in English. I would be thrilled if I would receive a C in a German literature class (I had four semesters of undergraduate German and one semester of graduate German) and pleasantly shocked if I were to get a B. But I don’t know that I would have been all that grade conscious in the first place. I took courses because they were required or because I wanted to. I did my best, when I wanted to, received the grades I got, and accepted them. And I certainly didn’t end up with a 4.0.

But students are different today (a statement that could probably be made in any generation about something or other (“Those kids today!”)). And I find it sad that the question now is too often not “How can I improve my learning?,” but rather “Why didn’t I get an A?” My student who dropped today didn’t like my answer to the question – basically, “You’re doing well, and if you want to do better you should get some help with your reading and writing at the Writing Center or with a tutor.” – and she bailed. She wanted an A because she wanted an A. She didn’t want to earn it. She’s just like too many other students who I see paying not for an education but for a diploma, a degree, a GPA. The student is the consumer, and the customer is always right. The commodification of education. And I retired just in time.

Fortunate Travel

I don’t know how we’ve been so fortunate to do so much traveling over the past 20 years or so. It can’t be karma. I doubt it’s genes. Part of it’s money, yes (we somehow make more than we should, but so far we haven’t been caught). But much of our travel has been wrapped around our jobs, one or the other of us attending conferences or trade shows or whatever on the company dole and the other tagging along for just the cost of airfare and food. And a few times we’ve travelled just on our own because we wanted to and could get a good deal. About 12 or 15 years ago we decided that we should travel while we could, while we had the money and health and still-living brain cells. But as I look back over our travel of the past two decades, I’m both surprised and thankful:

Domestic

We have of course travelled often in states adjoining Iowa: Minnesota (Minneapolis, Duluth, Grand Marais, several times), Illinois (Chicago, once or twice a year), Missouri (St. Louis, Kansas City), and Kansas (Wichita).

Beyond the upper Midwest: Indiana (Indianapolis), Ohio (Columbus, Dayton, Oxford), Tennessee (Memphis, Nashville), New York (Rochester, New York City), Massachusetts (Boston/Cambridge), Washington D.C. (numerous times to visit our granddaughters), North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham), Georgia (Atlanta), Florida (Clearwater Beach), Louisiana (New Orleans), Texas (Austin), New Mexico (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos), Arizona (Phoenix), Colorado  (Boulder), Utah (Salt Lake City, Park City), California (San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland), Oregon (Portland), Washington (Olympia Peninsula), Alaska (Anchorage, Seward, Homer).

Foreign

And then there’s the fortunate foreign travel: Canada (Victoria, Vancouver (not far foreign)), Belize (San Ignacio, Caye Caulker), England (London), Ireland (Dublin), France (Paris, Burgundy, Alsace-Lorraine), Germany (Berlin), Czech Republic (Prague), Italy (Rome, Florence, Amalfi Coast), Spain (Barcelona), India (Mumbai, Goa).

It’s not the longest list – we have friends whose would be about twice as long – but we like it, we’ve taken advantage of what we can. And we’re hopeful of more. It’s something of an old saw, but whenever we come back from a trip – here in the US or overseas – we never fail to comment on how much more of the country (the Northeast, the South, Hawaii) or the world (Mexico, South America, Africa, the Far East, Australia) we have yet to see. If one spent one’s whole life doing nothing but traveling I don’t know if you could cover the earth, or even all of the earth that you would want to visit. I don’t think I could. A lifetime isn’t long enough to take in the whole of the world. But we hope that we’ve still got another decade or so where we can at least add to our list and take in what we can of it while we can.

AARP Wants Me To Die

AARP wants me to die. First, they want me to renew my membership with a “special offer” of five years for only $49 – “Less than 82 cents each month!” Then they want me to die. Or to be more charitable, they’re betting that I’m going to die before the five years are up. At least that’s the way I read the offer: If I buy in for five years, it’s only a deal if I live for the full five years. If I die after, say, three years (and certainly if I die after one or two years), they get an extra two (or three or four) years of membership dues (yes, discounted, but still) that I wouldn’t have otherwise bought. I don’t know if it’s sucker bet or not. I’m not expecting to die in the next five years. But who is?

I joined AARP when I turned 50, 13 years ago, only for the discounts on hotels, museums, restaurants, and so forth. I didn’t particularly like the idea of joining a club for codgers. But I did like the discounts. And I suppose that’s the reason I’ll probably take this new bet and double-down on the next five years.

Movies Today

As I watch all the previews for movies on TV these days, I’m beginning to think I may not be able to see another movie ever again. Or at least not another movie in the theater. A couple of years ago I vowed not to see any movie that featured explosions in its advertising. That increasingly became a lot of movies. Recently I’ve added CGI monsters or violent car crashes or fantasy weirdness in general. I just want to watch movies about real people in real places dealing with real situations, something I might be able to relate to. I have no use for cartoons writ large on the movie screen. But that is apparently what we’re being given and I understand I’m not in the demographic for what passes for entertainment these days. The only comfort I take away is that I’m saving some amount of money in my retirement by not plopping down $10 for that crap. -- Hey! You kids get off my lawn!

Spring Break

Today’s the first day of Spring Break. I was reminded of this this morning when I went to post next week’s schedules in my two online classes and found there were no schedules to post because we have next week off. Spring Break has no meaning for me anymore. When I was teaching full-time and on campus I would always use the week to get away, for a fishing trip in Arkansas, a visit to Berlin and Prague, or just a long weekend in Chicago or New York or San Francisco. “Break” meant a physical break, an escape, getting away. But now that I’m retired (or semi-retired to the internet) there’s nothing to get away from. Or rather, I can now get away whenever I want. We went to Chicago last month. Next month we’re going to Italy. We are going to Chicago next weekend, though not because it’s Spring Break for me but because it’s Spring Break for my sister, who still teaches full-time and is coming to Chicago for her get-away this year.

Odd perhaps, but for me Spring Break wasn’t much of a vacation for me as a student. I never went to – or particularly wanted to go to (or for that matter could ever afford to go to) –Padre Island, South Beach, or Cancun. As an undergraduate, I would usually just drive home for the week, perhaps catching up on some backed-up schoolwork, more likely just lounging around watching TV or going to movie matinees. As a graduate student, the week was a hard study week, spent mostly in the library (this was before computers and the internet), catching up on reading, preparing for papers and tests that were to come.

It was only when I became faculty that I could afford – both financially and demands of work – to get away for Spring Break. And for all of the 22 years that I taught full-time, I can’t recall one when I didn’t use the time to travel, even if only for a long weekend a day’s drive away. But that was then. I don’t need the break now. Indeed, it comes – as it did today – as something of a surprise. And I plan to spend the week just going about my days as I’ve been going about my days the past two years – reading, walking, writing. Maybe I can get into the garden. Or out on a trout stream. Or maybe take a bike ride. But I don’t need an official break to do any of those things most any week. In that sense, every week is Spring Break for me now.

The Economic Beast

As I sit here on the cusp between semi-retirement and full-fledged geezerhood (assuming I still receive some pittance of a pension, social security, and/or Medicare, and am not living under a bridge over a creek, chewing on watercress and duck droppings), I can’t at all understand why governments and financial institutions can’t just come out and say what is perfectly obvious: No one knows anything about how the economy (U.S. or world) works and thus have no way of affecting it, one way or the other. Consider these quotes from a current Time magazine article:

“The fact is, even the world's savviest investors don't seem to know how to play the latest bout of market gloom.”

“The Federal Reserve's promise to keep interest rates low until mid-2013 – a move meant to coax consumers and businesses to lend and spend – failed to juice markets. That sent confused investors into a tug-of-war between those who think global growth will tank and those who see stocks as a bargain.”

“The bottom line? We are entering an age of austerity, and no one – not the Fed, not China, not a unified Europe – seems able to save us from that fact.”

The economy (or maybe it should be Economy) is an entity in and of itself, beyond human control, a beast from a 1950s sci-fi movie that stomps around the globe at will, crushing throngs of fleeing, screaming people, flicking off the fiscal missiles of the Fed or Treasury like pesky gnats. Don’t believe any politician who says they can do anything about it. They can’t, and that’s the fact. The best to do is find a politician who will admit to this reality and just say, “Weather the storm and see how many of us are left alive at the end.” Or just run screaming through the streets. Good luck.

THE END?

Dreams of Teaching

They aren’t nightmares exactly, but after a year of retirement from classroom teaching I’m still having dreams of work, some involve teaching (not being prepared for a class or forgetting until the last week of the semester that I’m even teaching a class (this may not be so much a dream as a memory)) but most tend to involve committee work or department meetings (usually with a component of “What the fuck am I doing here? I’m retired.”). I’ve never been a believer of dreams being some sort of portal to the soul or psyche or subliminal desires or whatever. But I have to admit that these series of dreams – with no apparent connection to my waking dreams – do have me somewhat concerned, if only because I’d rather be dreaming about fishing for bonefish in the Caribbean, driving a Maserati through the Pyrenees, or having sex with . . . well, we’ll just have to wait to see about that one. The point is I’m not able to control my dreams. If life were fair, after retirement, we’d be able to control our dreams, much as we’re able to control our TVs remotely – click, click, click. That seems a reasonable, not to mention affordable, reward for having survived 60-plus years of dreams and aspirations, false promises and dashed hopes. It’s a cruel irony that in our dotage we have to relive our classroom traumas and administrative miseries in our nightly slumber. Anne Sexton wrote that “In a dream you are never eighty.” But Anne Sexton committed suicide when she was 45. What does she know about 80? Or even 60? She didn’t wait around for the dreams.

Reading and Reading Again

About 30 years ago I divested myself of the bulk of the library I’d been lugging around from apartment to apartment since my undergraduate days, mostly literature books, a dozen boxes full, that I scattered among three used bookstores. I kept only those books that I definitely wanted to read again or thought I might have reason to make reference to. That ended up being a manageable four boxes, or two or three bookshelves worth. I’ve added to that since, probably tripling the shelf space, but I still only keep books that I want to read again or make reference to sometime in the future. But at the library this morning it struck me that that future is now. For the past year, since my retirement, I’ve been regularly going to the library, checking out one or two books each week, most often from the new releases section (there has yet to be a week where something didn’t strike my interest, be it a history of baseball, a collection of American humor, or a biography of George Washington). I probably could keep this regime up indefinitely. But what about all those books in my study that I’ve been meaning to reread “later”? At this point, when would later be? The obvious revision in my reading schedule is to begin either alternating reading new books with previously read books or simultaneously reading the new and the previous. I sidestepped that choice this morning in the library by checking out Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, an older work that isn’t in my study and that I don’t recall having read before.

College as Gaming?

There has been much discussion and books written lately about the topic of “Is College Worth It?” Now the commercial TV world has weighed in with this:

The answer is apparently, Who cares? As if I needed another justification for early retirement.