Tales of Retirement
By Brad Morley
High School English Teacher
Retired 2012
In a delightful coincidence of events, my first Saturday in August started with a toasted tomato sandwich. On the night before, we were finally able to have a good friend from university days over to dinner after many years of not seeing him. His name is Laz and he’s a lawyer. More often than not, talk of or with Laz over the thirty-five years since graduation conjured memories of the toasted tomato sandwiches he would make for a select few of us in residence at U of T. Always in the fall, always after he’d been home to the farming country near Delhi, Ontario, and always with freshly picked tomatoes he’d brought back. Good bread toasted, a generous swipe of mayo, two or three thick slices of the red beefsteak variety, a few good dashes of black pepper, and there before us a simple feast of absolute delight. Such is the power of friendship and food that to this day these sandwiches remain one of my happiest memories of what was a quite wonderful period in my life.
And so, with last night’s dinner, wine, conversation, and laughter still resonating, I headed out—coffee in hand—for my morning stroll through our flower and vegetable patches. Somewhat hidden under a broad expanse of coneflower leaves, the first of my “Early Girl” tomatoes hung, reddened and ruined, having fallen prey to the hungry groundhog which has tormented me and a few select plants off and on over the past several weeks. I picked it anyway and discovered two thirds of her was in perfect order.
I decided that my first toasted tomato sandwich of the season was the best way to put this fruit to good use and to get the last laugh, for now at least, on my gnawing pest. I also took added delight in the seasonal coincidence of dinner with Laz, memories of residence life, and the immediacy of what looks to be a long and fruitful harvest, large rodents notwithstanding.
Rodents notwithstanding
The dominant themes of retirement life for me can be summed up with this little anecdote of Laz and the early tomatoes: remembering the past can make the present even richer, old connections may well be restored, what appears disappointing at first can lead to better things, careful cultivation today can result in rewards worth waiting for, and (at the risk of even more cliché) the simplest pleasures can involve enjoyable multi-layered experiences.
Now, I am not foolish enough to believe my garden-dinner-sandwich metaphor provides the sum of all retirement’s parts. I could, for instance, bring in my poor Asian lilies’ struggles with the voracious red lily beetle, my grapevine’s battle with the sluggish but persistent Japanese beetle, and my frustration over the viburnum beetles’ devastation of the enormous snowball bush by our driveway. But I won’t—other than to say that the pleasures provided by all that is in our front and back gardens far outweigh the relatively minor aggravations created by a few pests.
Retirement – both less and more
Similarly, the debilitating vertigo that played havoc for eight months with the first year of my wife and I being retired together, the abscessed molar and resulting double root canal I endured, the oh-so-slow-to-heal strained hamstring that kiboshed my running program for ten months—these things and more have made retirement less than it could have been. But set in the scale against our three October weeks in Italy; our moving to a new house in an old town (or is that an old house-1895-in a new town, Guelph?); the hours and hours of rewarding reading; our new lunchtime ritual of working out the Globe and Mail’s cryptic crossword, an exercise which in itself is a metaphor worth exploring; and so on; the suffering and frustration retired life has thrown at me is scant concern in relation to the pleasure and wonder that the changes afforded by retirement have wrought.
Acknowledging luck
Not everyone will be as lucky as I, once working life wanes and retirement . . . . What is the best word for this space? Looms? Beckons? The more neutral Awaits? Which one occurs most fitting to you? For me, even though I really enjoyed my 32 years teaching, retirement has been, on the whole, brilliant. But I have a good pension which makes for an easier time than many will experience. I have a partner and good friends with whom I quite enjoy spending time. No doubt, I have had luck on my side. But perhaps I have been luckiest in having inherited from my mother an ability to enjoy and even to marvel at so many of the simplest things: purple coneflowers in the sun, chipmunks cavorting in the grass, the two-thirds good bits of an otherwise ruined tomato.
Can’t afford the luxury of not being hopeful
It is almost impossible to avoid metaphor and cliché when writing about retirement, what it’s like, how best to prepare for it, and how best to live it. While it is very important to have the nuts and bolts of certain preparatory things fitted well in place before retirement begins, one should also keep an open mind, express a willingness to accept the unpredictable and embrace the possible.
An old friend told me years ago that he lives his life by the metaphor of hidden treasure turning up everywhere and in all things. Another friend, preparing for a year away from work, responded to my comment about his year off by saying he was planning a year on. This subtle shift in language underscored a significant difference in his way of seeing the future from my way.
A few days ago, a Detroit resident being interviewed on radio about the recent problems caused by the city shutting off the water supply to many of its poorest citizens had a wonderful response to the reporter’s question about the future for this resident and her family of five children: “I can’t afford the luxury of not being hopeful,” she said. I had to repeat this to myself a couple of times to more fully understand it, and then I was struck by her wisdom and insight. What a constructive attitude, I thought. What a sensible way to look at things. I’d wager she’d know what to do with retirement were she ever to be granted that benefit. She’d know what to do with that damned groundhog and those damaged tomatoes.