Don’t Say Retirement
Don’t use the word, instead say you’re writing a book, about anything. People might then ask what it’s about, the same way you were asked what colleges you’ve applied to. Remember those days? Me neither. Still, you need to present a plausible answer, even if you have writer’s block, which you don’t. Or at least not yet.
The naked truth is that it doesn’t matter what you say, because the person who’s asking the question isn’t listening. Instead, they are thinking ‘what the hell am I going to do when I retire?’ Or maybe they have been thinking, ‘I’m never going to retire, because when I do, it’s over, turn out the lights because Elvis has left the building.’
None of this will deter friends and family from asking the natural follow-up question, which is what the hell you’re doing with all of your time, as if someone just doubled the number of hours in a day to forty eight. When they ask, laugh and say you’ve never been busier. This will make everyone envious and want to be you, which feels good for about a minute until you realize how crowded the house will get if all of a sudden everyone wants to live your life, in your house, with all your stuff. I don’t know about you, but it seems the older we get the more we like our space, to ourselves. Tell them you’re hoarder, and you’ve been collecting everything you find on the streets during Allston Christmas when all the college kids return for fall semester and summer rentals clear out. Mattresses, TV’s, shoes. Yes, tell them about the basement filled with all the mini fridges you plan to sell on Facebook’s Marketplace.
If for some miraculous reason the topic still hasn’t changed from your life’s next chapter, answer the question with a question. ‘Did you too secretly play with Barbie as a kid?’ or ‘who does the shopping and cooking in your house?’ At first, this will seem like a complete non-sequitur, but after a bit, when they realize they are talking to someone who’s slightly unmoored due to all this time on your hands, they will sympathize. They will quickly see this as the ADHD you’ve kept under wraps all these years, now unleashed and rearing its distracted head, allowing anything that pops into your mind to burst out, words strewn around like spilled popcorn even the dog has learned to ignore. Yes Lola, your fourteen year-old Wheaten who, like you, has a lot of time on her hands and no trouble filling them by sleeping twenty hours a day.
There is one last strategy to handle the predicament you find yourself in when leaving the job you’ve had for the last thirty years — tell them you’re moving to Florida and taking up golf. This will be met with complete and utter silence because you live in Brookline, because you suck at golf, and because nobody moves from Brookline to Florida to play golf, except Tom Brady, who doesn’t count, because if you were the GOAT, you too could do anything you want, including ignoring your wife when she pleaded for you to retire, and you didn’t listen. Don’t do that either.
