The Merriam-Webster Dictionary synonyms for retirement are depressing:  pullout; pullback; recession; retreat; withdrawal. The antonyms are no less disheartening simply because they are listed as antonyms: advance; advancement. Are we still mentally alert and physically active retirees to accept this gloomy prognosis? 

I’m still in my infancy as a retiree – only three weeks into it. As a result, I’m in the process of untying the bow, taking the wrapping off the gift, and looking at the new outfit. Does it fit? Are there different ways to wear it? Do I dress it up – or down? Do I approach this part of my life any differently from the others?

I think that the answer to all of the above is yes; yes; yes, and yes.

Does it fit? If I view advancement as a synonym for retirement rather than as an antonym, it does. This phase of my life should include a heavy dose of reading, thinking, writing, and dialoguing –  a putting together of the final pieces of my life’s puzzle. A good teacher once said that there should be time for reflection at the end of each class – the synthesizing of what has been learned and can be applied. Shouldn’t the same be said of the final years of our lives? 

Are there different ways to wear it? Most decidedly. There are days in which I want and plan to be actively engaged with the world but there are others which I will use for the aforementioned reflection and planning. The important thing, I believe, is always to stay open to constructive possibilities for enhancing, for advancing, your life.  I recently fell in love and will be married in April. The possibility of joining my life with that of another was not in my plans prior to reconnecting with Jim; however, the positive things that I know that each of us can bring to the other’s life is a certainty. I cannot imagine the road ahead without him because to do so would invite the negative synonyms which the dictionary associates with retirement.

Do I dress it up or down? Most of the time I will dress it down these days and welcome that option after so many years of uncomfortable shoes and clothing but there are those special times when I may put on some bling. The thing that I feel now, however, is that the dressing up or down is an internal feeling rather than an external one brought about by expensive indulgences.

Do I approach this part of my life differently from the others? I already am. I begin each day by thinking of the positive things and people which I will make time to incorporate. The degree of choice and time to make decisions is a little overwhelming, frankly, at times; yet I find myself more selective than ever, perhaps because I know that each day is precious. Every moment is an opportunity to love, to learn, and to serve and to do those things in the unique ways that I may have been blessed to offer them.

Tonight is my retirement party. Let the fun begin!

As I clear my office computer preparing for retirement, I have come upon a piece that I wrote as my youngest child, Barrett, was finishing college. I never published it, but I find it somehow apropos to my leaving my employment. It is a rite of passage that I once reflected on and so I’d like to share it now.

It was my youngest child’s last paper of his college career – his capstone course – and he casually asked me if I would review it for him.  As in other times, I readily accepted, but this time was different.  This was a rite of passage for a mother whose last child was asking for the last time for her to participate in a process that would never come again.

The paper was good and I made only minor suggestions.  Unless he reads this essay one day, my son will never know the joy he gave me in asking for this one last piece of maternal advice on a scholastic assignment.  I ask myself why it was so important and the answer leads to the connection, the ongoing thread of parent-child communication and relating through collaboration.

It also recalls for me the same experience at a much younger age of my father’s checking my math homework every morning before he left for work.  Math was not my favorite or best subject and my father was an accountant who reveled in numbers.  I would do the homework in the evening and leave it for him on the desk where he always did paperwork in the morning before leaving for the office.  He would check each problem and put a small pencil mark beside any that were wrong.  I would make the corrections myself and take it to school.  It was my father’s and my quiet means of communicating – almost like a passed note – a love note of sorts. 

My son’s paper was e-mailed.  I tracked the suggested corrections and e-mailed it back to him – an electronic love note of sorts.  Many of our rites of passage are physical and tangible:  a graduation, a marriage, a birth, a death.  Isn’t it true, though, that the quiet, ordinary patterns of our lives – the daily activities and interactions with those we love – are also rites of passage once they no longer occur, once they are naturally outgrown.

And so I grieve in a way for those days when I quickly and casually read through one of my children’s school assignments.  Eventually I may find a quasi-replacement in doing the same with my grandchildren or with another child who touches my life, but that’s for another day.  In the meantime, I will treasure the last time I was asked, “Hey, Mom, could you read this paper for me?  Hope it doesn’t bore you to death.”  It didn’t, Bar, it didn’t.

September 6, 2010, would be my mother’s 96th birthday. Recently I posted a comment on Facebook in response to my cousin’s urging her children to explore unknown books. I recalled that every summer my mother would take me to the library and that on each visit I would choose 12 books about which I knew nothing. I made an effort to delve into genres that I normally wouldn’t choose, such as histories of other countries and cultures.

I learned much from those summer readings but, as my cousin Cerelle pointed out, it also said much about my mother. “It puts a whole new perspective on your mom (my Aunt Peggy),” she said. Although I can’t speak for Cerelle, the message that those times conveys for me is that my mother cared enough about my education and development to be sure that I spent my summers productively and even more importantly, that I had the freedom to select what interested me.

For me that was a significant revelation and recollection because I spent most of my adolescent and even adult years feeling that I had somehow been forced into a mold by my mother that I furiously resisted. In some ways, I still believe that to be true. There was a certain look and lifestyle that she wanted for me that I simply couldn’t embrace.

It was the look and lifestyle that she had wanted for herself. The mother/child relationship by nature is complex. We are from both of our parents but we have that most intimate of relationships with our mothers. They are not only our sustaining life force while we are in their wombs but we come to know their every heartbeat, every laugh, every breath. Never again are we so physically close to another human being, not even to a lover. It would seem, then, that the tension between a sense of deference to the woman who cared for us and the necessary independence from that same person is essential for becoming an adult. Perhaps my philosophizing  about the relationship is primarily to reassure me that it was okay to fight with my mother, to have negative feelings about her, to not want to see or even to talk to her sometimes.

My mother, Peggy, as I responded to Cerelle, was a complex woman, a beautiful woman. She was the child of divorce at a time when divorce was quite uncommon. She bore the scars of a painful childhood and adolescence, one that doubtless forced her into early marriage and parenthood.

There were times when the burden of those years seemed to fade from her face and body as she laughed and walked with a light step. Those were the good times before the darker years of addiction and uneven temperament, the times when it was difficult to be her child, the times when the separation from her was not just an act of nature but also most desirable.

Peggy was a bright woman who never had the opportunity to realize the education that I received, the education that she wanted. There are times when I think about whether I am now living the life that she would want for me. I really don’t know the answer to that question because she died in 2001, but on most days at this stage of my life, I have the joy of seeking out those people, things, and ideas that make me happy and fulfilled. And I thank my mother, Peggy, for having given me the freedom to dream fantasies and to fashion ideas, some of which undoubtedly had their roots in those summer readings.

Thank you, Mama.

There are those who think of summer as the season in which we accomplish the least. I, however, consider it the one in which we learn the most – possibly because the emphasis isn’t on production but, rather, absorption.

This summer has been such for me. I can count at least three such summers. The first was in 1967 when I studied in Mexico and then went to Washington, D.C. to visit my boyfriend who later became my husband. He was working as a congressional intern that summer and I was a student studying Mexican art history and learning a bit of Spanish while living with a Mexican family in Guadalajara. The visit to D.C. was short but exciting. How often does a 22-year old get to have dinner with a congressman and his wife? Although that summer was great fun and memorable, its more lasting impact was that I later came to view it as my last summer of innocence.

By 1969, I had married my boyfriend who had become a Naval officer. That summer he received orders to Viet Nam on river patrol boats. His service began on Christmas of that year and in the summer of 1970, I visited him in Hawaii for five days of “r and r” (rest and recreation). The summer of innocence quickly disappeared as he shared stories of the war in a tone devoid of emotion, a tone that I didn’t recognize or understand, especially from this most sensitive of people. He had acculturated to war, and I don’t say this in a judgmental way; he was engaged in a daily fight for survival of himself and his men, and objective detachment was part of the requirement to do so. I, however, didn’t understand as I tried to grasp his uneasy comfort in disclosing the horror. Perhaps it is only now that I have some sense of what his voice told me.

Many summers have passed between those two so close together yet so different.  I’m not sure why the third one happened only now but I suspect that it has something to do with readiness or with divine intervention. I just watched “The Lives of Others,” an extraordinary German film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2006. In an interview, director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck talks about the gradual change that occurs in the movie’s main character. Von Donnersmarck comments that real change normally doesn’t happen overnight except through divine intervention. I believe that my change has percolated for many years but became ripe this summer with the assistance of two major events.

The first was a trip to Rome in June where I experienced both the past splendor and current glory of a fascinating civilization and culture. I breathed in as much of Rome as I could in five wonderful days, and the impact will be with me for the rest of my life.

The other event was the one that I wrote about in my previous blog on enduring friendships. There is continuity in friendships, especially those that have a common purpose at their initiation and that transform themselves in accordance with the friends’ individual growth and ongoing acceptance of one another over time. My Oregon reunions were confirmation of such friendships.

I must return, however, to “The Lives of Others” and its messages because they relate to friendship as well, even when the intent is not recognized for many years. The movie occurs in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The major character, a Stasi agent, becomes transformed at least in part by peering into the world of artists upon whom he is spying. He begins reading poetry by Brecht and listening to Beethoven. The writer whom the agent is watching comments that Lenin is quoted as having said that he must stop listening to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, op. 57, the Appassionata,  if he is to continue the revolution, for no one hearing that music, really hearing it, can do harm to others.

Coming full circle, then, I understand why this third summer has been the most spectacular of all. It involved the confirmation and continuation of long-time friendships and an exposure to the history and magnificent art of western civilization. The young girl who experienced those earlier summers hadn’t grown the roots yet to fully embrace the depth of the lessons they brought. This summer, however, a chord was struck deep inside my soul, one for which I had been longing and for which I was prepared.

This summer and its fruits will be with me for a very long time.

Thirty-four years ago, 12 couples embarked upon a more than two-year journey of service and discovery to a faraway land under the auspices of the Peace Corps. During that time, we improved and/or learned Spanish for the first time. We learned to adapt to unfamiliar ways of doing things, to eat new food and to encourage the people with whom we were working to incorporate new foods into their diets in the interest of better health, and, best of all, we developed friendships and relationships and respect for these people.

When the service was over, none of us was the same. A few of the marriages ended early but most survived. I have no doubt but that one of the reasons for this was the bonding and skills we learned while in the Peace Corps with our mates.

Most returned to the United States but almost all integrated our love for the language and the people into our work back home, either as volunteers or as professionals.

Thirteen of the original group remet last week for our first reunion. Life has been both kind and cruel, it would seem. One of us is a paraplegic as a result of a cycling accident with a drunk driver, but he is a person who, along with his wife, has used his adaptation skills to the maximum. My husband died young but coped with his terrible illness with dignity. Others work in international development and training. Some are bilingual teachers or work with minorities in educational and social service initiatives.  One is a sculptor who serves the homeless. All – and I do mean all – are good people, the kind of people you are proud have been and still are a part of your life.

On the last day of my trip, I met Jim, a college friend, at the airport for lunch. I had not seen him in more than 40 years. Once again, the years melted away as we shared the highlights of those intervening years with one another. He had forayed into areas that probably neither of us ever guessed that he would back in college: landscaping and Zen Buddhism. My impression is that he is a content person at his core.

All of those years ago when we PC Volunteers first met one another, we lived in relatively close quarters. We grew tired and frustrated at times with one another. After all, we were living in very unfamiliar circumstances and had our training sessions in abandoned chicken coops. We lived with families who couldn’t speak English and in many cases didn’t have indoor plumbing. We were achievers; we were competitive.

My friend, Jim, and I weren ‘t competitors. We were allies in fun and what probably could be termed mischievous irresponsibility. We were well aware of one another’s vulnerabilities but relished in them. After all, who worries about tomorrow when there’s joy to be had today? Our warts were not a problem; they were an opportunity.

All of these years later, the blemishes are overlooked as we embrace our differences and the divergent paths that our lives took.  They are part of our way of looking at and dealing with the world. They are who we are.

This is one of the beauties of old friends. You don’t try to camouflage the imperfections in an E-Harmony photo. It wouldn’t do any good. Everyone knows about them. You are accepted for who you are and you are loved for who you are.

Meeting new friends is great but there’s something about those tried and true relationships that can’t be matched. Here’s to old friends!

As with so many things in my life, my children – in this case, my daughter Kelsey – have enlightened me. Although I love to write and have toyed with the idea of a blog, I haven’t taken action until now.

So here goes with yet another of life’s adventures. Hope those who appear in the entries here will enjoy it.