My Blog

Good morning!

 

My abject apologies for having left you without a laugh or a groan for yesterday! As my Cousin told me, I should have pulled over in the Drop-Off lane at the airport and whipped out a blog for you as Mom went on her merry way to Florida. Sorry! My muse and inspiration is now gone, happily settled in Florida, and I am left bereft. But, beware, the Blogs will continue—along a slightly different, less emotional, perhaps more terrifying, and hopefully more humorous course.

As a Baby Boomer (that’s the B.B. above), I find myself (as perhaps

you do, too) stumbling into unfamiliar territory—social media, Facebook and Twitter, web pages, Siri and Cortana, GPS devices, the latest cell phones and constantly updated computers. I think I know how Mom feels. Awash in a world in which only the Gen X’ers and Millenials—and as Hubby Flatbottom suggests, all twelve-year-olds—are fully comfortable. So there is a vast amount of material on which a desperate Baby Boomer may focus her Blogs.

And, surely, I qualify as a Country Mouse. We live in the forests of East Texas, have a small ranch with a bit of acreage, a trailer in the back yard, a satellite dish, and an old truck in the drive-way. We live outside of Crabbs Prairie, which is outside of Huntsville, which is far outside of Conroe and even farther outside of Houston. It’s country.

And when I do go into “the big city,” I feel very much like a small mouse scurrying among the stomping feet of giants.

And as a retiree, I’ve stepped off the ledge many of us were standing on, into the deep waters (or maybe, the abyss?) of retirement. Some have golden parachutes with hefty retirement accounts, others got hit by 2008 and have more modest incomes, others are left scrambling for survival on Social Security. But we’re all in it, for better or for worse. And if you aren’t there yet, you’re headed there. Like death and taxes, retirement is coming. You may as well know what the water’s like!

So what are we to do with our retirement? Some fear going off the ledge into a world of nothingness. Some leap off in joyous anticipation of finally having free time. Others suddenly find themselves drowning in so many activities it is impossible to keep up. “Oh, you’re retired—AND you

have a truck? Great! You can help move the flats for the Journey to Bethlehem! You can help with the Alumni Gala! You can come hang the piñata for the Posada! Come join us for swimming, pilates, yoga, QiGong, bridge, bunko, country dancing, reading class, writing class. Take this three-day cruise, this seven-day cruise, this seventeen-day cruise, this back-to-back-to-back cruise. Join this Board, that Board, the other Board.”

Wait! Wait! WAIT A MINUTE!  If I go on the cruise, I can’t make the meetings. If I’m on the Board I can’t make Bunko.  Can’t I just say NO? Yeah, well, that opportunity went out the window when you retired, bubba. You just thought you weren’t going to have anything to do.

I’ve considered having “NO” tattooed on my forehead, but it wouldn’t do any good. No one would believe it, or pay any attention to it, or think it meant them! There is always one more good cause, one more good deed, one more “we just need you for a few minutes.”

So, off we go. Into retirement.

December 2, 2015