A while back, I had what was a fairly typical day in my new back-in-Ohio-where-I-grew-up day. I wrote about it and am sharing it here as the longer answer to how I like my retirement life.

A Typical Retirement Day

It began with coffee with Lisa, one of the first people I met when I moved into Homestead Village. She loves books and recently started a new position with a library close to where we live. I am over the moon excited to be friends with someone who works in a library! We often have coffee together, usually in the Homestead Village library, so that Brandi can join us and keep watch at the glass door overlooking the main hallway, where people come and go. He’s on full alert for Sandy, the office manager. If they see each other, he knows she’ll be back in a flash with treats for him.

The Great Furniture Swap

Though the next item is not a typical daily occurrence, it has been a regular activity as I’ve bought, sold, and swapped out furniture in the new apartment. The first loveseat was good, but I really wanted one that reclined. The space available can only accommodate a loveseat. Finding one with reclining seats, but no middle armrest, took from December to July. When my daughter, Karen, found one on an online marketplace, we jumped at the chance.

After coffee with Lisa, I headed out to the next town east of here – Pataskala. I love saying that name. There, I found exactly what I wanted —a leather double-reclining loveseat in excellent condition. The family selling it had about a week to empty the house, as they were moving the house was due to close soon. I assured her I wanted it, but needed to sell the other one first to make room for it.

A Plan Comes Together

Back on the online marketplace, Karen found a couple who wanted the other loveseat, if we could deliver it to them. Well, that involved my brother’s truck. Being approximately thirty years old, it required some coaxing to start. That required moving it a few feet from where it was parked, front end in, under a set of shelves in the garage. Thanks to my father, who insisted I learn how to drive a stick shift, I sat in the driver’s seat while Karen and Uncle Bruce, as everyone except me calls him, pushed it out a few feet.

Bruce is quite the wine-making master. While the truck battery charged, we adjourned to his family room to sample his latest wine-making efforts. Very good. With a charged truck at the ready, we maneuvered the old couch out of my apartment into the truck. A cross-town adventure relocated it to a couple who live about two blocks from where I used to live years ago. The next day, we went to Pataskala to claim the new-to-me leather loveseat.

It Takes a Team

The back comes off the loveseat, but not easily. It took quite an effort from the man selling the loveseat and Karen on the floor trying to loosen the bolts to release the seats, while the woman of the house shone her phone’s flashlight on their efforts. Uncle Bruce, granddaughter Erin, and I stood around supervising.

By mid-evening, the loveseat was relocated, reassembled, and reclining beautifully in my apartment. My role was doling out cash for gas and dinner as compensation for the effort. I love the new seat. It works well for naps, reading, computer work, and TV watching.

Making New Friends

The great loveseat transfer took more than one day to complete. However, on the day I first visited the leather one, I returned home in time to meet a couple of women from our church at the apartment of the Syrian refugee family our congregation is assisting in their efforts to resettle in Columbus. They had arrived the night before.

Until they boarded a flight in Amman, Jordan, to head to Ohio, they were living in a refugee camp in Jordan. They’d been there a full decade, virtually the entire lives of their children. I wrote more about that in Pilgrims, Refugees and Immigrants. What I noted in my journal was this: “We met at the family’s new apartment. Their little girl is adorable. Their son is polite and friendly. The parents are delightful. Bless them as they adapt, and perhaps someday return home.”

Two weeks later, the church formed a tutoring team to bring the parents up to speed in English so they could start ESL classes. They are motivated, but are starting from scratch – learning the English language ABCs and reading from left to right. When people ask, “Why don’t they speak English?” I want to ask them (but don’t – what would be the point?) – “How many foreign languages do you speak?” I love this country, but sometimes we are so arrogant and clueless.

But Wait, There’s More

We showed the adults how to use the stove and oven, as well as how to adjust the apartment’s temperature. I went through a picture book with their daughter. Their son was outside kicking a soccer ball around with a boy about his age. [Update: The son is now on a community soccer team.]

Next up, I spent time with my daughter to distract her dogs if they started barking while she was occupied running her first solo appointment for a new online job. The job involves helping people select the photos they want from their professional photographer’s session.

Maybe that wasn’t the most typical day, but there have been many like it. I love being retired in Ohio.

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Mary Brewster’s Love Life and Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures: available wherever books are sold. Bookshop.org/Mayflower; Mary Brewster
Amazon.com/Mary Brewster’s Love Life
Amazon.com/Mayflower-Chronicles
BarnesandNoble.com/w/mayflower-chronicles
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Autographed copies are available on my website.

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We’re deep into the season of graduations. Proud parents and grandparents gather in stadiums or large indoor venues – or around a screen on an electronic device to watch daughters and sons, or grandkids, or cousins or siblings proudly walk across some stage to grab what is possibly an empty folder with a pledge of diploma to follow. Excited graduates toss hats high in the air. Excited families frantically search through the crowd after the ceremony to find their one special graduate. With cap back on head, the newly graduated poses patiently for “just one more.” It is a wonderful day in any family’s life.

One chapter of life has come to a close. A door opens to a future one. Some graduate with that path clearly marked and a map in hand to travel it. Others must wait. The next step is hidden behind a fog of great unknowing. They must take tentative steps into a transition that may last a few more weeks or perhaps months and even years.

The next step may lead them deeper and deeper into places they had never imagined themselves going. What lies ahead? A new job? A new place to call home? A new best friend? Perhaps even someone to partner with for the rest of life? The not having the details all worked out makes for some tense times.

The End is a New Beginning

Graduations were once called commencements. Graduations focus on the completion of a long, hard series of mandatory tasks completed. We should make a big deal out of graduations. They are important markers in life. There should be cake and caps, photos and friends and family gathered to celebrate.

But ‘commencement’ seems a more appropriate term for that day is the beginning of adventures unknown, traveled by paths not previously taken, toward a destination not clearly defined. Commencements mark not the end of learning, but the beginning of learning new lessons life will teach. Some of the lessons will be humiliating, embarrassing, discouraging, and leave the student feeling like a failure. Failure often proves to be a painful but productive lesson in what not to do again.

Trying in All the Wrong Places

Or, failure might mean that you’ve been trying to succeed in the wrong place or in the wrong way. I recently heard a radio talk show host respond to a question for a listener. The listener indicated interest in the course the radio host was promoting, but didn’t think he’d be successful because his high school years had been disastrous. He’d concluded he didn’t have the mental capacity to succeed in this course either.

The radio host (I never taught his name) referred to a quote by Albert Einstein. “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

The radio host then spent several minutes emphasizing how school education is geared to learn in only one way. The methods used in most schools work well for some, are manageable for others, and a miserable misfit for others.

Define Success

When a student doesn’t succeed according to standardized test scores and grade point averages, it might be because the student was in an environment focused on teaching him/her how to climb when what that student needed was swimming lessons. Maybe he didn’t do well in math class because he were focused on the new kid who seemed terrified being in a room of strangers and too busy calculating that kid’s fate to focus on calculus. Or maybe she was consistently late because she was the school good Samaritan who stopped to help other students pick up a pile of loose papers or find the right hallway to the next class. Maybe when the student scolded for daydreaming was thinking about the script for a new movie so there wasn’t any room left to absorb whatever the teacher was presenting that day.

Some people sail through school with ease and then struggle for the rest of their lives to make and maintain close friends. Some are the center of the social scene but can’t seem to hold down a job long enough to accumulate sufficient income to support themselves.

More Than One Path to the Finish Line

Learning is not a one-size fits all experience. Whether you graduated in record time or approached the Guinness book of world records for most years spent trying; whether you graduated at the top of your class or finished next to last, you did it. You completed a major milestone and deserve all the pomp and circumstance you can find.

Especially all the students who managed to complete the requirements for a degree through a pandemic. The class of 2021 and the class of 2020 form a unique group of graduates who persevered through a pandemic to reach Commencement Day. They are the first to claim such an accomplishment in literally a century. That alone makes each and everyone of them successful.

Congratulations. Well done. Carry on. We need your contributions to the many challenges before us today.

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