Retirement’s on my mind this morning. It’s because I posted a news item about Kathy Barwick’s up coming performances (see left column below) and that got me to thinking about how the really smart ones among us are able, with some good planning and lots of discipline, can quite smoothly transition from the daily grind of work into a new life doing, at an extremely high level, what they’d dreamed their entire career of doing instead. Congratulations, Kathy.
For me, the transition was anything but smooth. It took me a year and a half to fully unwind from a career spent in a cut-throat, high-stress, take-no-prisoners industry. I ACTUALLY MISSED IT. Missed the adrenaline rushes, the fast pace and, truth be known, most of all the competition. So anyways, fourth Sundays being one of our vacant Welcome column days, I found myself leafing through old essays when I came upon one I wrote just after my own retirement. Here it is…
1/11/2011
Welcome from Whiskey Creek, where a light sprinkle is toying with our emotions–we need rain. What I’m doing these days is working on a transition from partially retired, (working two days per week) to completely retired (giving the whole damned thing up). It’s been hard. I’ve read, and I’m inclined to believe, that some people, folks with not the greatest self-esteem…..tend to identify strongly with their career. That is to say, I AM what I do for a living….my person, my being, is my career. So when the career goes, as in retirement, kiss the I AM goodbye. Or something like that. So it’s been tough.
Wait, don’t stop reading. There’s bluegrass content here. Hang in.
I’m transitioning from running an educational software company to making picture frames and coffee tables. (Which is something of an irony, now that I think of it, because forty-plus years ago, I was making coffee tables and picture frames when I transitioned into a serious job in education.) The story I want to tell you happens because the time of the transition is winter…..very, very cold up here in the mountains during the winter. In order to be able to work in the wood-working shop I’ve built in my barn, (really, in order just to step inside of what’s a kind of natural ice-box) requires heat from a wood-burning stove, so this fall I installed one. Feeding the stove is, even for this city boy, a pretty straightforward thing when you live on six forested acres. So a few days ago I took my truck, chainsaw, axe, etc, down into the forest to harvest some fuel for the new shop stove.
Most of the trees are live oak, but along the driveway there’s an ancient fig tree that’s needed cutting back for probably decades so I decide to start there. Lots of dead, dry limbs, not great for wood burning, but certainly burnable. After a little priming and three or four tugs on the rope, the chainsaw fires up and I slice through an eight inch fig limb. And what happens next amazes me. From the two and a half inch hole at the center of each of the now separated limbs pour out hundreds of wriggling, reddish-brown ants. They’re huge, three times the size of regular little black city ants, and they fall in clumps to the ground. I’m stunned for a second. Then I sit back on the bank and watch as the ants, some with wings and some with no wings, continue to pour out of the hollowed out limb. As they hit the ground they seem disoriented, kind of staggering in one direction and then the next. (‘I’m the one that’s shocked?’, I think, ‘what about these poor ants? Been peacefully living in this old fig tree for thirty or forty years and then, WOMP, ant world’s turned upside down.)
I sat for a while and watched the ants. I was in awe of the vast and teaming universe just moments before hidden inside the tree limb. And I was saddened, maybe even feeling a little guilty, by the frenetic scene of confusion and disorientation on the ground before me. Now in the thousands, the little creatures just stumbled about in no particular direction, with no particular place to go. And as I sat, a song came to mind, one of my favorites by the Seldom Scene, a song called Muddy Water that I sang on stage at Grass Valley more than twenty-five years ago..
Mary, grab the baby, the river’s rising
Muddy water taking back the land
The old-frame house, she can’t take-a one more beating
Ain’t no use to stay and make a stand
Well the morning light shows water in the valley
Daddy’s grave just went below the line
Things to say, you just can’t take em with ya
This flood will swallow all you’ve left behind
Won’t be back to start all over
Cause what I felt before is gone
Mary, take the child, the river’s rising
Muddy water taking back my home
The road is gone, there’s just one way to leave here
Turn my back on what I’ve left below
Shifting land, broken farms around me
Muddy water’s changing all I know
It’s hard to say just what I’m losing
Ain’t never felt so all alone
Mary, take the child, the river’s rising
Muddy water taking back my home
Won’t be back to start all over
Cause what I felt before is gone
Mary, take the child, the river’s rising
Muddy water’s changing all I know
Muddy water’s changing all I know
Well, this muddy water is taking back my home
This was the ant’s flood. Instead of the water, the chain saw had taken all they knew, and somehow they’d have to start all over….get reoriented….get a plan and start to rebuild. As I sat on the bank a light rain started to fall. My life had changed, too, almost over night. For over forty years I’d blinked awake each morning with one thought on my mind. To make a buck, build a career, take care of my family. Now, I thought as droplets of water began to run down the frames of my glasses, I’m back to coffee tables and starting all over.