Some years back, it looked like my retirement years were going to be the best time in my life. They almost turned out that way. The only problem was, I lived too long. If you live too long, all of your best-laid plans finally fall apart.
It’s not like I didn’t try to make them the best. I spent, oh, maybe five or six years before I retired (at 56), thinking hard night after night before I fell asleep, about how I was going to spend my time when I retired. After all, I might have thirty-some years to fill. Obviously, it was a topic worth thinking hard about.
I had always been a woodworker. I had build additions onto the house , furniture, a workshop and a playhouse in the backyard, musical instruments, and so on. So I knew it would have something to do with woodworking. Also, I was going to have to sell whatever objects I made lest they stack up in piles about the house.
I envisioned something small and square and intricate. That took me about three years to think of that. After three more years, I had settled on making wooden jigsaw puzzles — but puzzles like no one had ever seen before.
I would specialize in hand sawed, hand painted (usually using an airbrush) sometimes multi-layered puzzles of my own designs. And I’d sell them at the Saturday Market in Eugene, Oregon (later in Portland’s Thursday Market). Here are some of the puzzle designs that I came up with through the years.
And here’s a close-up of one of my puzzles, a five-layer puzzle with a hand-carved stylized beetle in the center. On the various layers, twelve of the puzzle pieces are cut to spell out the words “beetle” and “monkey.” You might see the letter E of the word “beetle” in the upper left. You might also see a monkey piece in the lower right.
It worked! At least for the fifteen years or so years after retirement, I kept my mind and hands occupied with making jigsaw puzzles.
Ultimately, I made probably five or six hundred puzzles out of a repertoire of about seventy of my own designs, selling them from fifty bucks each to three hundred or so. With retirement money and social security, I didn’t really need the money, but it turned out to be a nice little side hustle.
My big mistake was this: I couldn’t envision living into my eighties. I remember when I was a kid, back about 1950, thinking, “Wow, if I’m still alive in the year 2,000, I’ll be 62 years old, a doddering old fool. Sixty-two is ancient when you’re twelve.
And when I was in my fifties, eighty-some seemed terribly old — and so far away that my foresight was too dim to carry me out that far.
I finally burned out in making puzzles when I was in my late seventies. I hadn’t figured on that. Old age takes the pleasure out of many things, including making wooden jigsaw puzzles.
But just about the time when I was losing interest in making puzzles, I discovered Ricochet, which described itself as a website for “right-of-center” readers and writers. Why, that was me! I soon discovered that for a mere five bucks a month, I could write posts of my own and people could read and respond. And I could do the same. Perhaps the conservative argle-bargle of the site would keep me interested. (I’m sorry. I just like that word.)
I had a lot of ideas that had been lying willy nilly in my brain since I retired as a professor, and those ideas needed to get out and about.
I’m a hard-core conservative but I’m not very political, if that makes any sense. But general interest posts with a conservative slant — or even no slant at all — didn’t seem to bar me from writing posts for Ricochet. At least that’s what Arahant, my mentor during those early days, told me.
But that was almost five years ago, and like woodworking before it, this too began to pall. I’ve written 207 posts and over 4,000 responses. At the end of year four, I had run out of ideas. Since then I’ve been coasting on autobiographically oriented posts. It’s now coming up on five years and I’m dry.
That’s not the only problem. I could pull out a quote to bounce off or sign up for a group theme, as I do occasionally but I’ve now burned out on writing itself.
I know, I know, there are gaffers out there who swim the English Channel or go back to school when they’re eighty. But I’m not one of those gaffers.
So what do I do now? I pad about the house and go on two walks a day with Marie the Bounteous and Bob the Dog. But that still leaves me with about twenty hours left in the day. I didn’t plan on this. I’ve outlived my retirement. I haven’t outlived my money; I’ve outlived my ability to stay interested in the world.
What if I live to a hundred? Perish the thought.
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