Conversation with My Wife (170)
Counting our blessings
DEB: I like retirement!
This was sparked by nothing in particular, as I found after a brief questioning. We were just sitting in our back porch, enjoying one of the new cooler days that meteorological autumn brings in, all the windows open so we could hear our backyard waterfalls.
DEB: We get to watch all our birds, and see our flowers open up, and the way the sun highlights different areas. We know what happens back here at nine o’clock in the morning now, with the breakfast rush at the bird feeder—we used to only see that one day in seven! And not always then!
DEB: The weather has been wonderful, the backyard has been wonderful, being with you has been wonderful — thank you!
ME: I didn’t really do anything.
DEB: Just the fact that you’re a part of my day makes it perfect!
We got very lucky with our retirement timing. Things went badly at our old workplaces after we left, not because of our departures (we’ve both changed jobs enough times we know how to do decent turnovers, thank you) but basically the Trump Pandemic, for which “no one was prepared.”¹
It hasn’t been perfectly perfect, of course. We had to cancel our 20th anniversary Alaska cruise in May 2020, and while we got full refunds, we don’t know if May 2021 will be clear at this rate. My father’s funeral (now memorial service) in Illinois has been postponed indefinitely, and we weren’t able to assist my sister in clearing out and selling my parents’ home (we offered to drive out, but we were relieved when she turned us down). Even just local overnight trips are scary, so we haven’t done any. And of course we can’t even get into good old Canada currently. So much for far-flung travel in our golden years!
DEB: Okay, it’s not exactly what we had in mind on retirement, but we have our wonderful home, our staycation porch and backyard, and we really like each other! Think of all those folks who can’t handle being cooped up with their family. Like [relative]!² And I have time to crochet now, taking it at my own pace, which is a good thing—³
ME: I think you’ve been doing great. And you get to spend time with Mikaela⁴ that you’d have been at work before.
DEB: And I am NOT at work or working late or working weekends or whatever, so when someone in the family needs to talk or vent or whatever they can call me. Or I can fill in or help out or whatever. I like being available for family!
Deb is now matriarch of her side of the family. She takes her duties and responsibilities seriously. Even when it involves things like declaring that no, despite having planned it since 2019, we will NOT be having the 2020 family picnic in August. Not with a bunch of family units coming together from four states, and young ones and older ones in the vulnerable category—that last would be me, I should mention—and not enough testing and let’s shoot for next year, okay?
DEB: I like retirement!
ME: Me too, honey!
¹Both our old employers had “pandemic plans,” which were required after the H1N1 pandemic in 2009–2010. I even helped put together the IT side of the plan for the insurance company I worked for. Our planning group basically decided that if the next pandemic was really bad, we’d be out of business; if it was just a worse flu season than normal, we’d deal with it at the time; and if it was somewhere in between, we’d… um… deal with it at the time and hope nobody really important to the company died. (Nailed it!) Also, in 2010 there were no cheap methods for working remotely—we did so in IT, for weekend network maintenance and such, but our methods were too complex for the regular workers without investing in a lot of training and equipment — and the company refused to pay for technology we might not use. And to be fair, anything we’d have bought ten years ago would be almost useless now.
At Deb’s university, pandemic planning had been turned over to someone who was the perpetual “special projects” person. If you don’t know the term from American business and academia, “special projects” are given to people who can’t be fired or demoted or are on the verge of leaving anyway, so the special projects are seldom all that special. When they needed it, the pandemic action plan had names in it from two university presidents ago, with sticky notes about things needing to be updated. Soon.
²Her husband is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who is not good at taking his medications. He listens for the code words she plants in conversations, and keep an eye on the neighbors who spy on him. Yes, we’ve offered to help her get away, but she’s afraid he’ll figure out we’ve “taken” her, or worse, take it out on their kids (now grown, but living nearby).
³There have been, um, errors in some crochet projects. Requiring unraveling and restarting. On the other hand, she whipped together a set of booties for our impending second grandniece in a couple afternoons with no errors.
⁴Grandniece. Shortly to be senior grandniece, since we have two pregnant nieces with daughters on the way.
Copyright © 2020 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved, and if you rip this off I swear I will come after you and… aw, who am I trying to kid, I’m too comfortable right here.
