I retired 10 years ago. As my college roommate Tony Cole said, “This is the job I was cut out for.” I don’t have a boss. I don’t have tasks to do. I’m retired, jubilado as they say in Spanish. It’s great. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do or at least that's the idea.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to keep up with my own life, do the shopping, take care of my daughter, meet my obligations as a parent. Life is complicated and the daily tasks fill in and spill over the space once taken by a job. But did I say, there are no bosses.
Just as retirement was getting close I had a heart attack in 2010. After that I began to let go of some of my previous ideas. I gave up the daydream of going to law school and becoming a public defender or going to college and getting a degree in science or math. Taking it easy seemed an attractive alternative after that.
I spent the last seven years of my working life as a Park Ranger trying to keep up with people half my age. It was a gift, working so hard to learn a new job. It made me feel vital, not like old bankers I had known daydreaming of the day they would drive away in their new RV. And then there was the surprise baby at age 63. Fatherhood was going to take some time.
So November 2nd, 2011 I turned sixty-five and on November 5th I retired. That day I took off my badge and turned in my gun. The first thing I felt was relief. I no longer had to wear a gun every day and be a target for anyone out there. I had sworn to protect the public. I had done my duty and now I was not required to put myself in harm’s way. It was exciting and satisfying when I did it, but I didn’t have to do that anymore. I was proud to have been a police officer but I was done.
That unexpected sense of relief was there but at the same time I had just jumped off a cliff into a world I didn’t know. I’ve done that a few times, leaving solid ground and hoping I would land safely. My plan was to enjoy the flight. I would take the first three months as vacation. In AA I had heard the cliché, “When one door closes another door opens,” and the speaker added, “but these hallways are a bitch.” I was going to enjoy the hallway and let the next door open, not force it.
Two months into retirement I started a blog and that quickly became my long postponed memoir/biography. Some twenty years before a friend had quoted his father’s biography. I was impressed a published author. "No," my friend said, "he just wrote it for us, my brother and me."
Like most English majors I have always been a wannabe writer. My friend Richard’s remark gave me permission to write an autobiography. I didn’t have to worry about publishing it. I could just write it for my family. My target audience were my great great grandchildren, a written record of who their great grandfather was.
My grandfather in the summer before he died told me Lashley stories. It connected me back to my great great grandfather Thomas Lashley and the American Civil War. It was a thread that took me back 140 years. I barely remembered the details of everything he told me, but it was wonderful. I could tell my grandchildren I had spent time with my grandfather learning the family history. What if Thomas Lashley, born 1817, had left a journal?
And so I began my blog, Stories I Tell Myself. Writing is communication and without someone reading it, it’s only half done. Captive readers are few and easily worn out. For me there’s the internet. My readers are mostly anonymous. It's just out there. It’s there to be found if anyone wants to look for it. It surprises me when my blog gets any “hits” at all. A high school classmate, I didn’t know very well in high school, claims to have read the whole thing. But people I don't know read it too, And my grandson Caius said he read it in one night after I told him about it. Every month it gets 30 hits or so. It’s Bulgarian tractor programs plowing for data but a few I imagine are actual readers.
And so that’s what I did. I got up in the morning, made coffee, did the things that needed doing and sat down and wrote. Every week or so I posted another piece for Stories I Tell Myself. I lived the writer’s life. I worked on a daily basis, I forged ahead. Each day when I wrote I accomplished something. It made going out and enjoying myself in the afternoon easier to do. At the end of two years I had finished it, my entire life up to retirement. Or at least I had a first draft.
It was inconsistent, lacked cohesion, but it was there. I had done it. I have to say, the next task seemed so daunting I gave myself a break, stopped writing for my blog. Every so often I’d write something, an opinion piece, but even that was rare. After enjoying it so much, I just stopped. Writing is hard work. I knew I needed to finish it. The next step is to stitch it together, to polish it, make it cohesive. I took a break but since then the urge to finish it has never been enough to go back to it.
Eight years later I realized I've been retired almost 10 years, a big chunk of my life and I needed to record that. And that's what this is, the next chapter. Of course, it's still part of the first draft and I still want to stitch the whole piece together, polish it, make it a finished work. The urge is still there.
