Unlike some people, I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t have a singular talent or focus. My best subject was English, and I was decent writer, so I went with the only thing I was any good at and majored in journalism. That led to a surprisingly lucrative career in corporate communications.

But like so many others, I tried to define myself through work. And even in retirement, I’ve struggled with it. Perhaps it’s like this for everyone. Maybe you were a nurse or an engineer, you think, well, that’s what I did. That’s who I am. But if I’m not doing it anymore, who am I now?

I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I was a communications professional by trade, and writing was one of my competencies. My skills served me well, but it didn’t seem like enough. Part of me always thought or hoped there was a brilliant writer in there somewhere waiting to be released from the tyranny of having to earn a living.

It has been four years now since I retired, and my secret genius is nowhere to be found. At first, I was like, bitch, show your face! But I don’t know. Lately, I’ve been thinking, good riddance. Why should I hang onto a dream I fabricated as a child because it’s the only thing I could come up with at the time?

Retirement is different for everyone, but it can be a journey toward freeing ourselves from expectations and accepting we don’t have to be more than we are. Shedding layers and perhaps defining our self-image.

When I was working, we were supposed to have an elevator speech – a quick but memorable sound bite to introduce ourselves and convince someone we were all that and a bag of chips.

I never came up with a good elevator speech, but I’ve been working on the new and improved retirement version. Here goes:

Most days I’m a decent human being with a multitude of interests who enjoys life and sometimes writes.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

 

Writers are counseled to avoid mixing metaphors. But becoming a grand-dad is to step into a swamp of cross-winds. Here are some of the similes, aphorisms and clichés that have helped me re-connect with my progeny-once-removed after months of Covid isolation.

• I’ve come to realize that my grandkids are not water barrels anxiously waiting for the steady drip of my trickle-down wisdom. I’ve learned to put a sock in ‘When I was a kid…’ stories. The occasional, well placed, ‘back in the day’ chronicle goes a long way. But I can’t expect them to waste a goodly portion of their ‘four score and ten’ reviewing my tales of yore. It’s not like I’m one of their mesmerizing ‘screens’ after all.

• I’m learning to be the wallpaper of their lives, to simply be a familiar place to feel safe, secure and unchallenged. It’s a long way from the years of micromanaging our brood of hatchlings—their parents.

• ‘Watch one. Do one. Teach one,’ is a maxim that surgeons follow in acquiring new skills. There’s real joy in showing how to cast a lure, throw a football, pound a nail. But it’s always better to invite interest than to impose participation: “You want to be part of this project? Here’s how you do it. You try it.’ It’s even more fun to catch them showing it to another.

• Don’t steal their thunder. When you ask grandchildren their career plans, it’s important to not launch into your own trajectory…especially if they are tracking the same field. Don’t be a legend in your own mind burying them with your accomplishments, your history. They are Adam and Eve. It’s their world to discover.

• Live-in tech support is readily available for the asking. Seeking help is a way to affirm grandchildren competence and control of their environment.

• A good joke is a joy forever. Told right, at the right time, a joke can be a learning/bonding moment across the generation gap. A bad joke—an opportunity to practice tolerance. Grasping an edgy joke—an initiation to the world of adult humor. In general, jokes are a reminder to keep a sidelong glance on life, always looking for other meanings, the play of words, staying alert for the surprise of the unexpected.

• Yabba-Dabba-Do. Tell on yourself. Kids watch sitcoms and cartoons endlessly laughing at other’s foibles. Our own tales, embarrassing moments, allow us to crash and burn and get back up, to not take ourselves too seriously.

• 1-2-3-4 Who are we for? I used to like to play sports. Now I’m more like a cheerleader on the sidelines of their lives, an affirmer long on support, short on shove toward sports, academics and everything else.

• Pan for gold. It’s so gratifying to spot talent and interest in grandchildren and then to put them in the way of developing it. Too much enthusiasm can make it our project not theirs. A light touch allows them to own it.

Ultimately, we’re like a favorite Christmas ornament, dragged out of the box once a year, a cherished link to happy memories to be hung in our place in the family tree. We just have to remember that we go back into the box for long stretches of time.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

 

The summer of 1971, freshman orientation, was when we first met. June 2021 we are meeting again – half a century later.

During the isolation of pandemic, the tools of modern technology allowed us to reconnect by phone, email, and Facebook between her farm in Pennsylvania just west of Philadelphia, where my daughter lives, and my home in western North Carolina. As we reawaken and move about in the world again, I set out on a road trip to see them both. First stop is my daughter, where we spend several days rejoicing in our usual groove. Then I pack my bags to head home, with the planned stopover at Cathy’s farm.

Do you think we’ll have enough to talk about? I ask my daughter. You can always come back here if it’s uncomfortable, she replies. I enter Cathy’s address in Waze, hug my daughter close, and head out. I take the Pottstown exit off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and wind through a scenic landscape until the disembodied voice tells me I’ve reached my destination. I turn left onto a long, thin gravel drive bordered by trees. I pass a pond, then a pasture where three donkeys and a horse twitch their tails at me. I see chickens pecking at the ground, a vegetable garden. Then, the farmhouse set on a small rise. My wheels crunch the gravel as I approach the back of the house, where the driveway ends. I get out, not sure which door to go to. She comes out the side door and we hug. Her hair is silver now; her face, like mine, lined with years of living. She shows me the house and the grounds, including where the ashes of her second husband are buried, and introduces me to her animals. We go to dinner, where we share stories of what happened to the people we knew back then. Like the young man I dated who became a priest and then died from melanoma in his late forties.

The next morning, she shows me a cookbook I gave her for her birthday in March 1972: To one romantic and practical girl from another I inscribed. Who knew we would be standing in her kitchen all these years later reading those words together. In the post-pandemic world, I’ve resolved to nurture relationships and focus on writing. As I head home, I know I’ve made a good start.

Lee Stevens is writing and reconnecting in Hendersonville, NC.

 

The socks were grey. They had been white, you could see that. Today I saw that they were sports socks, those tube things that are so hard to pull up over freshly showered feet, unless you use a bit of talc.

I’d seen these socks every weekday for I don’t know how long. A couple of months at least, maybe more, I don’t know. I wish I could tell you that I saw them get greyer and the soles get blacker. Can’t, though. I did see them, but only out of the corner of my eye. Just like I looked at the person in them. Until today.

Those once white socks, likely put on without the luxury of a shower let alone a sprinkling of talc, sticking out of a pile of blankets, were just part of the unlovely scenery on my commute to work each day. Litter, sleeping bags, McDonald’s cups, faces, hands – it was one rolling vista of none of my business.

Today the grey socks and the feet inside them were splayed wide as if the owner were sunbathing on a beach. Today people were standing around them. People like me. One of us was greedily telling anyone who slowed down long enough to look, that she was dead. I had never even wondered if there was a he or a she in those socks.

I looked at her home. Plastic bags, some bearing the names of long bankrupt supermarkets, were filled with her life and lined up against the wall. Her thermos flask was standing close by, a packet of cigarettes balanced on the top. No lighter. Her shoes were under her head.

Sirens – time to continue on to work. It really was none of my business. She’d be gone by the time I pass later this afternoon. She’d just be a story to tell by the weekend. Then I saw the Ikea catalogue tucked under her dead arm.

Helen Kreeger lives in Israel

 

 

But how will we be able to tell which generation to blame? That was my first thought when I saw that a group of demographers and social scientists was asking the Pew Research Center to stop promoting the use of generation labels (e.g.Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, etc.).

It’s been all too easy to blame baby boomers for a whole host of societal ills, but if you stop to think about it, that means you’re blaming your 75 year-old brother along with a 63 year-old sister. You would expect twelve years age difference would have significant impact in their respective outlooks and behavior.

This name game supposedly started with the “Lost Generation” appellation in the late 19^th century. But then it mushroomed into the Greatest Generation, the Beat Generation, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, Snowflake Generation, etc. The labels seem like fun, but when journalists and marketing firms start making generalizations about your generation, the party the fun is not so much.

Demographers say the classifications are not real, and you would have to acknowledge that at this moment in time there is one hell of a lot of disparity in what baby boomers are thinking and how they are behaving. Just take the last election or the current political party divide as one example of how useless it is to try to categorize baby boomers.

Maybe one day we can drop all the labels and just try to get along.

Nah! It will never happen. Everyone from journalists to armchair philosophers thinks they have a God given right to pigeonhole one generation after another, so good luck with ending that practice. Guess it’s up to us as individuals to try and stop labeling each other and just try to listen to each other.

Nah! That’s not going to happen either. You can just continue on with your stereotypes, and I’ll go on with mine.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

I woke up the other morning thinking, “I should get a job.” I used to like people. Maybe I could learn to like them again.

Yes! I could quit using cannabis, pass a drug test and get back in the workstream. I’ve read there’s a shortage of employees. Except I haven’t read anything about trying to lure back the 50 and 60-somethings they drove out in favor of snappy young talent. So, there’s that.

Oh, and then dealing with all those problematic young people. They are in charge now, and I liked it better the other way around.

I suppose I’d be the new troublemaker, asking for all sorts of special accommodations. You know I can’t sit in a regular chair for hours on end. And such ridiculous expectations. Forty hours a week, seriously? I could maybe squeeze in some Spider Solitaire, but when would I have time to swim, cook, walk, play golf, take naps, stretch or work on my art?

Clearly, a desk job is out of the question. Not good for my health.

Then I thought, I could be a budtender! I could get some training online and apply for a job at a dispensary. I imagined myself, silver hair flowing, adorned in turquoise jewelry, imparting sage cannabis wisdom.

Except being a budtender is a fancy name for working retail. Horrible hours and crummy pay. Sometimes they want you to work at night! What about dinner????? Not to mention whiny customers, and that’s kind of a deal-breaker for me. Any filters I may have had in the past are gone. It’s like retirement truth serum. Now I just say what I think, and I assure you, it won’t be good for sales.

The truth is, I love retirement. Time and freedom is a hard-earned gift, and I have no interest in going backward. My guess is the job idea is more about the ongoing isolation of COVID. Maybe a subconscious yearning for pre-pandemic life?

Except it will be post-pandemic life. Something new, different, maybe better in some ways. I mean, why not? An uncertain future, for sure, but with any luck we’ll still be here to explore it.

I’m ready.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.