I’ve now been retired for a year. I recall that the batch email I wrote to my clients – and to a handful of authors – announcing my decision was a lot of fun to draft. Gad, I’d been looking forward to it. Yes, I would finish all the half-dozen projects I’d already started that were still active. I included a selfie of me at my monitor (with an open MSW file reading “That’s all, folks!”) for the clients who didn’t know what I looked like, which was most of them. And I told everyone how much I enjoyed the forty years I’d spent doing what I do, which was largely true. I was lucky for a long time that way. My retirement income is safe and more than enough. The retirement watch I bought for myself in Madrid (a Tissot mechanical pocket watch) still runs almost perfectly. A week in Madrid, a week in Paris – that was my retirement party. Then home to see what else I’ve got.
These days, it’s mornings at my desk, working on this blog, reviewing my own mscripts (four of them), and exploring the chapbook I’d kept for three decades while handling whatever mscripts came my way. Interesting ideas, bizarre facts, sentences and quotations and turns of phrase that struck me as memorable while I was editing academic materials. There are 1,541 pages of that. It was like being paid to stay in grad school, no kidding. Afternoons I read, and that’s been the biggest change, reading for pleasure. I’d always enjoyed reading and it didn’t much matter what. Nowadays I get to do it strictly for pleasure, and I’d almost forgotten how much I missed that. Getting paid to read, with little control over what you’re assigned, isn’t the same thing at all.
“Elbows up”
Canada is a blessed country, and I can’t not remind my readers – one time only, this week, with all that is happening – how lucky we have been up here. We’ve been an independent nation for 158 years and we’ve always gone our own way. No, we’re not Americans. When you hear Canadians say that, we aren’t being glib – it’s shorthand for all the ways we remember we are different, when we think about it (which all of us have been doing, lately). It’s easy to list specific ways – universal health care, gun control, openness to immigrants, are the three that come first to mind. But more to the point, Canadians are people who want those things, and others, and who have a system of government that has made it possible to develop a society that works for everyone. In the present day, with all the turmoil south of the border, we’re all remembering how unique our country is, and how special our society is, and how much it is worth protecting. It isn’t our nature to brag, we don’t pretend to be special in any world-historical way, we aren’t hyper-patriotic. But we know who we are, when you remind us to look, and we will defend what we’ve built, when others make us do that.