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Finger-frost-screaming Retirement

"What are you going to do when you retire?", I asked the head librarian. 

He said he didn't know.  He didn't have any hobbies, and he had not thought much about it.

He played golf for about six months.  Then he got a job as a city building inspector.  Maybe he read lots of city inspector books, or maybe the city didn't really care. 

Another friend, equally clueless about what he might do, finally simply told everyone that he was going to become a greeter at Mal-Wart.  Pity made them leave it at that. 

Out in the garage, I have a set of golf clubs, passé now because they do not have grapefruit-sized heads, and are a reminder of how once I used to drink beer at the public course, too.  I have golfed about three times (too many) in the last fifteen years.  I keep the clubs just to provide something that cannot be stored.  They are always in the way.  I think I will haul them out to the curb. 



Like Biblical Martha--or was it Mary?--I have chosen the better part.  I have a snowblower.  There is no need for me to yearn after a condo in Florida, or a casita in Green Valley.  A snowblower would be useless in places like that.  These winter months, I am surrounded by entertainment.  When I am not actually blowing snow, I am replacing shear pins, or sledge-hammering the rotors back into shape.  Before and after the heart of the snow season, I take the blower off, or the mower, and switch them again at the other end of the cycle.



No building inspector jobs for me!  No long, sweltering walks in green-grass circles.  No racing down cart paths, running out to the ball, whacking at it, and leaping into the cart, again.  No more looking for my lost balls.  I lead a serene retired life, solitary in my conviction that there will be snow enough to entertain me until I am arctic-stiff into my eighties or nineties. 




All it takes is a bit of imagination, and delusion, and retirement becomes something dependable, endlessly open-ended, and finger-frost-screaming fine.

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