Retirement

Wow.

Retirement.

How can I be retired? I still think of myself as around 40 years old with a noncompliant body. Actually I am several years beyond retirement age. OK, and a couple more years beyond that. I am happily married and the luckiest husband in the world. My wife and I owned a small business that consumed 60 to 70 hours a week of my time. My wife retired from her career several years ago and finally told me she didn’t want to be retired alone. Because of the demands of the business, I put off several health issues that we’ll discuss in later posts.

But back to retirement. What did retirement mean to me? I no longer had to rise 6 days a week to manage the business. I had fallen into a routine that included a very short commute, opening the business, answering phones, waiting on customers, ordering replacement inventory, managing the service area, paying bills and all the other duties that accompany any sales and service small business. I transitioned from that busy but routine existence to…what? Could I now sleep in a bit? Watch some daytime TV? Putter around the house and garden? Drive my wife crazy with suggestions about how she could be better retired? Take a leisurely walk to a pastry shop to start my day or just sit out on the deck and watch the birds and squirrels devour all that expensive bird seed and suet? Maybe travel a bit, go see the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Parks or visit our adult daughter and her Very Significant Other just one state and two hour drive away?

Nope. I couldn’t sleep past 6 AM and daytime TV is an absolute wasteland. There were a few other issues that might impact my retirement activity choices. Yeah, the first one probably will be the dreaded HONEYDO LIST. The list that my beloved wife has been working on during her several years of retirement waiting for me to join her. Her suggestions of how I could be better retired. But I also had to address those delayed health issues. Oh, and since I retired near the end of September 2020 while the world was almost locked down and trying to figure out how to deal with a pandemic outbreak of Covid-19, any plans I made just didn’t count. I (we?) decided to schedule my total left hip replacement for the day after I retired. No sense in worrying about it or putting it off any longer, just schedule it and get on with life. Thus started about an eight month journey through the healthcare system that I will describe in upcoming posts. And yes, the hip replacement went very well. A bit of warning about what you might be reading in subsequent posts for a while. I will describe some medical procedures, so if that is not your thing, my apologies and skip the Medical Journey pages.