Retiring Minds

Some people love their jobs so much that they work twice as many hours as everyone else.

I am not one of those people.

I can’t justifiably complain about my job. I have one. And I make a good living.

Ever since graduating with my degree in occupational therapy, I haven’t had to worry about job security or the ability to get a new one when I become dissatisfied with an employer or workplace.

This doesn’t mean I love – or even like – my job. The job is okay. There are some aspects of it I even enjoy.

But this was never what I wanted to do with my life.

In fact, for the past 15 years, I’ve been counting down to retirement.

No, I haven’t been wishing my life away. I don’t look forward to being old. I’ve never even pretended to be older than my actual age. In fact, I’ve often passed for younger.

I might spend a few minutes from time to time thinking about what I’ll do in the future, but the rest of the time I live in the present.

This is not to say I don’t plan for the future. 

I’ve taken a course and taken some pro-active steps to establish myself in voice-over work once I retire. I don’t know whether or not it’ll pan out, but I’m making the effort.

And the beauty of it is, it doesn’t require leaving home. A computer, a good microphone and an engineer on the other end of the phone, and it can be done easily.

That, at least, is closer to the career in acting I always wanted.

There are also my books. I have a file folder full of story beginnings that I never got around to finishing. There are a few very intriguing ones on my thumb drive, as well.

If I’m able to make some extra cash doing voice-overs, I might be able to take a few courses in marketing to learn how to get my books to sell. Publishing on Amazon certainly isn’t doing it.

The hard part will be trying to stay awake through such boring classes. I can’t envisage marketing being remotely interesting.

But retirement is supposed to be about no longer working, isn’t it?

Perhaps for some. I know me well enough to know how lazy I can be. It would be easy to fall into sleeping late and spending the rest of the day playing on Facebook, reading or watching TV.

I don’t want to be that person.

And current science says that staying active, and keeping the mind strong are the keys to living a longer, more fulfilling life.

I’m all for that. The problem is, my full-time job gets in the way.

I love to travel. But that takes more money than a pension, an IRA or Social Security will cover.

I also have more things I want to learn.

I want to be able to play my violin without the cheater strips on it.

I want to spend more time playing my guitar and singing – preferably to an audience.

Learning Welsh, Irish, French, German and Russian are also on the agenda, as well as improving my Spanish and American Sign Language. And I wouldn’t mind learning British Sign Language as well. I have a smattering of all of those languages, but I sometimes substitute a Russian number for a Welsh one, or get the Welsh word for blue and the Irish word for green confused. (For the uninitiated, they’re the same word.)

I’d also love to learn to draw. I have absolutely zero talent in this area, but I’ve spoken to a few people who insist they could teach even me to draw.

That would be awesome. I could then design my own book covers!

And then there are the shelves of books at home that I still haven’t read.

Of course, in between all of this learning and earning, I’d like to spend time riding my bike, and maybe re-learn in-line skating.

If my hearing gets bad enough, perhaps I can return to kickboxing aerobics. I had to leave that because the music got too loud, and I can’t keep earplugs in my ears.

I do hope to be in better physical shape by the time I retire. If so, my fencing whites should finally fit again, and I can return to that sport.  I have no delusions that I’ll do well in it; I’ve never been athletically gifted. But I love playing with pointed sticks.

So, you see, my interests all take money, which means if the voice-over work doesn’t pan out, I may have to return to working at Burger King, unless I want to return to OT.

Last summer I did a dry run for retirement. I had the summer off.

Each evening, I made a list of what I wanted to accomplish the next day, since I had lots of cleaning and getting rid of things that have been taking up space for a while. I made sure I only had a few minor things to do each day: clean off one shelf or drawer; practice piano; complete one Irish lesson; spend a half hour riding my bike; spend a half hour playing guitar; float around the rest of the afternoon in the pool reading a book.

I tried to keep it all limited and assigned a time frame to each activity.

It looked good on paper.

And I did accomplish most of the things I wanted to get done.

But most days it was too hot to ride my bike, and my guitar is still waiting to be taken out of the case.

With few exceptions – it was summer, after all – I didn’t waste my time off.

So, there is hope for my retirement.

The thing is, I’d better live to be 100. I have too many plans for anything less.

No Regrets?

This past summer, I read a book called No Regrets. A somewhat autobiographical semi-historical narrative, unexpectedly interrupted at times with poetry-related bits, it wasn’t exactly my cuppa.

Perhaps I’m not used to such a rambling, mish-mash of prose, and poetry that didn’t always appear to be poetry.

Personally, I felt it could have used editing, particularly for grammar, punctuation errors, and run-on sentences that interrupted the flow. I’ll leave the poetry to those more gifted in that art form.

But the theme of the book started me wondering: Can you live a life with no regrets?

I suppose, if you have a Pollyanna outlook, or you’re lucky enough not to commit any egregious mistakes along the way, it’s possible.

But I’m not that person.

Yes, there are aspects of my life for which I’m satisfied or even duly proud.

But I do have regrets.

True, mistakes are meant to be a learning experience. But when the same situation occurs over and over, what is the lesson to be learned?

For example, you meet someone who seems pretty nice, but after dating for a while – or sometimes only once – you discover what a jerk the person really is. It wasn’t something you could tell without a few dates. Sometimes the relationship might be very hurtful.

Okay, one such relationship would be a lesson to be more careful and discerning about people. Probably shouldn’t have dated that one.

But when it happens multiple times, you have to wonder why life is beating you up this way. How are you supposed to know nice-seeming people are really creeps when they give no sign?

This is particularly distressing when you meet nice people in-between, who actually are nice people, but simply aren’t for you.

I’ve often heard others say, “If I could live my life over…” This is usually followed by, “knowing what I know now.”

But no.

Realistically, some of the things I know now were not knowable when I was a child.

I wish I could re-do my entire school life, from first through 12^th grades. Not knowing what I know now, but being encouraged to work harder and do better. Since my grades were usually fine, I didn’t get much encouragement. Besides, I was just a girl.

It would have been nice to have been given reasons to do well, a bigger picture – like winning the medal in a particular subject, or preparing the way for an academic scholarship later.

Expecting me to do my best just because I should, when I didn’t see it getting me anywhere, didn’t work.

A word of encouragement, a smile, an expression of my parents being pleased when I did well would have gone a long way. Never mind the present-day habit of paying children for good grades.

Instead, when I earned a B, I was asked why it wasn’t an A. Or when the next grade was an A, I was asked, “Why didn’t you do that last time?”

I’ve been told this negative reinforcement is a particularly Irish attitude. I don’t know if there’s a rule among people of Irish heritage that it is wrong to ever praise a child for good work, but that was my parents’ philosophy.

While it’s true that my ADD and mild dyslexia got in the way of some things, “knowing what I know now” probably would have kept me from developing my own unique compensations. I might never have learned to think outside the box.

I suppose it would have been nice to have extra time to complete standardized tests. But most of the time, I didn’t need it. I did better on those tests than the ones my teachers dreamed up.

Social life was always more difficult for me than academics.

If I had it to do over, I would wish my mother hadn’t been so focused on instilling empathy – “How would you feel if someone said that to you?” (ignoring that someone had) – and had, instead, instilled a sense of justice and standing up for myself, something I’ve never been good at doing.

I wish someone had clued me in on what people didn’t like about me so I could fix it, instead of still having no clue how to make friends. It would have saved me from hanging around people I didn’t particularly like simply because they let me.

I wish I’d worked harder in school and gone to a better university. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent 30+ years in a profession I didn’t like and wasn’t suited for.

I wish I were kinder. I try, but it gets difficult when people are pushing my buttons.

I wish I knew how to be more loving – or at least how to be more comfortable expressing it, other than on paper.

I wish my feelings didn’t get hurt as easily as they do.

I wish I had more patience. Some people think I’m very patient; I know better.

I wish I didn’t talk so much. I know people don’t want to hear what I have to say most of the time. Sometimes it feels like an alien has taken over and controls my mouth.

I wish I didn’t have so much anger inside me. People easily say, “Just let it go,” but can never offer a way to do that.

No regrets? I don’t think regrets are a bad thing. They show you where you need improvement.

Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about becoming your best possible self.

If you regret nothing, you never see the potential for improvement.

Yes, I wish I hadn’t had certain experiences and relationships or made certain decisions. Would that have made me a different person? Possibly. But I’m not convinced that would be a bad thing.

Things They Did Not Teach Us in School

I love to watch the expression on the faces of the students I work with when I tell them that I was never taught to print.

When they hear that I learned cursive in first grade, they generally want to know, “What about kindergarten?”

Then I tell them that my school didn’t have kindergarten, and my mother saw no reason to send me to public school to play dress-up, play in the playground and the sandbox, and take naps. I had all of those things at home; no reason to catch other people’s germs.

Nowadays, kindergarten has replaced first grade in the learning department, and what my peers did in kindergarten, children now do in pre-school.

I only missed out on the socialization part, and I’m not sure I ever quite caught up.

But those are not the only differences in schools of today versus “in my day.”

I still think I had the advantage, learning cursive and never having been formally taught to print. Our teachers assumed we were all intelligent enough to figure out how to print. It isn’t that hard.

I did.  Well, with the exception of the letters that I reversed until mid-high school. Even those, I figured out ways to fix.

 Z, for example. I reversed that. But I discovered that if I wrote Zorro (a popular TV show of my childhood) on the bottom line of the letter, if all of the letters came before the Z when I tried to read it, it was backwards.

Now teachers teach the children who reverse b and d to make two fists with their thumbs up. The one that comes first (the left) is the b, while the one on the right is the d.

I had my own way. Make the bed.

Huh?

Well, you need a headboard and a foot board. Then put the pillows (the half circles that make up the rest of the two letters letters) in the middle. Then let e jump on it (since monkeys aren’t allowed to jump on the bed.)

Okay, it’s a bit out there. There I go, thinking outside the box again.

But having learned to write, there were other subjects to master. While I know when to use fewer and when to use less – something many do not – and which to/two/too to use, as well as when and how to use lie and lay, there were other things I did not learn in school.

For example, when my husband, Blue Scream of Jeff, told me he learned about the Vietnam War in school, I thought he was joking. Yes, he’s younger than I am by about a decade, but still! We did not learn that in school.

We lived through it.

When I was a senior in high school, they had finally finished arguing about what shape the table should be – I thought at the time round was a no-brainer – and had started the Paris Peace Talks. We sometimes watched that on television in Social Studies class.

Years later, after failing to get a job in my field of study from college, I fell into teaching fifth grade quite by accident. While the school was still as white as mine had been, some color had been introduced to the history books.

“In my day,” African Americans – who were called, by the nun who taught me, Negroes and Nigresses – were not introduced into American culture until we studied slavery. Yes, it was mentioned in passing that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned plantations, and therefore slaves – although Sally Hemmings was never mentioned in Catholic school! – the idea that there were free blacks in any of the northern states was something we were not told.

Imagine my surprise as a teacher when, preparing my class notes on the Boston Massacre, I discovered that the first person killed in the skirmish was a man of color, one Crispus Attucks! And he wasn’t the only black man who fought against the British! It was a revelation.

While I learned all sorts of things about Russia, India and China in World Cultures I and II, I never learned word one about the French Revolution. The first time I ever heard of Trafalgar was when I bought a Bee Gees album of that name (With Barry Gibb dressed as Lord Nelson after his having been shot).

We were taught about the French and Indian War – a war not between the French and the Indians – but no one ever mentioned that was a portion of the 7-Year’s War in Europe.

Likewise, we were taught nothing of Spanish, Italian or Scandinavian history, other than where history had to do with the popes or Christopher Columbus.

Moving on to Geography, we were taught countries of modern Europe, Asia and Africa – well the African countries with the names they had back “in my day.” But while Egypt has remained Egypt throughout history, I was never able to locate places like Persia, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire in relation to places we have now, like Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, etc.

I only know Zimbabwe in Africa used to be what I knew as Rhodesia because it became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia while I was studying in the UK, and their news was full of that fact.

And what ever happened to Sparta? That was my favorite place in ancient Greece! I loved the story about the Spartan boy who stole the fox. You still have Athens, Thermopile and lots of other places, but just try to book a vacation to Sparta (or for that matter, Troy, to see the Trojan Horse.)

I suppose some years had too much jammed into them. Fourth grade was almost entirely the Middle Ages – which is probably why fourth grade was my favorite. Sixth grade had Greek, Roman and Ancient Egyptian history – which is probably why I absolutely hated sixth grade.

Seventh grade had Westward expansion and the Civil War, and Eighth grade covered the Reconstruction era, World War I (for about 5 minutes one afternoon), the great Depression (for a depressingly long time), World War II (forever, but without mentioning much of importance like the D-Day invasion or Iwo Jima), and the Korean War (which was only mentioned as having been a war).

While I believe in general I received an excellent education in my first 12 years of school, much of history was sketchy at best.

We learned about the wave of Irish immigration, followed by the Italian immigration, and then war and things, but we were never taught any reasons why those immigrants left their homes to come to our shores.

Even our shameful treatment of Native Americans was well hidden with excuses such as the idea that they were savages, most of whom refused to accept Catholic Christianity. No mention was ever made of small-pox-infected blankets being given to these people, or the fact that the US government violated every treaty it ever made with the Native Americans.

What I learned of the Potato Famine or Native American history came from my love of reading, well after I had finished my schooling.

All I know about the French Revolution came from reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

I suppose I could have been a history major in college, although I can’t see that as a good route to a career, especially since most of the history I did learn didn’t much interest me.

I loved the Middle Ages, but my parents refused my request to stay two extra terms at Penn State to earn a minor in Medieval History on top of my dual bachelor’s degrees.

Who knows where it could have led? I could have really been something at the Renaissance Faires!