My parents are semi-retired. They visit their grown children when they can, and try to combine these trips with very specialized iteneraries. For instance, they made a tour of exhibitions of the work of their favorite artist, Charles Burchfield
(The title of this particular piece is “Sun Emerging,” but, like most of Burchfield’s work, it ought to be called “Damn!” or “Wowza!” or “Help!”)
And a few years ago, they visited Lost Cove, Tennessee, of Walker Percy fame. We also got a postcard from a full-scale reproduction of Moses’ tabernacle, which the Mennonites built in Lancaster, PA, for some reason.
My parents take pictures at various glitzy tourist traps:
and their photo albums on Facebook have titles like: “Fungus”; “Lichen”; “More lichen. We like lichen.” My mother’s description of one outing with my father was as follows:
What he didn’t mention was that I was scared for him because his sense of balance was off since the spinal cord tumor, car accidents, and several surgeries, and I didn’t think the narrow edges of cliffs and stone bridges with no handrails were a good place for him to be. I even had to bargain with him to get him to agree to use one of the tree branches I found for a walking stick. At age 66! You can’t tell a man anything. I kept thinking, between Hail Marys, “I’ll have to arrange to have his body shipped back home, and then drive back from Tennessee all by myself–and the car key was locked in the trunk!
Ahh, west and wewaxation at wast. I don’t know if this is how they pictured their retirement (or even whether they expected to have one at all).
My husband and I are anticipating something more like this
for our own retirement. There is also some talk of living in either a yurt or something made of adobe, but I forget why. I think we also somehow plan to live in Greece or the outskirts of Rome, and one of us is going to have to learn how to play the guitar finally, or at least the harmonica. It will sound good to us, despite our age and palsy, because we will be pretty drunk.
So tell me: what are your retirement plans? If you could do anything at all, I mean? Or, if you are already retired, is it working out the way you hoped?
