Back to the Road, Again

I have this fantasy every August when another school year begins. Instead of attending two or three days of meetings lengthened by breakout sessions, and then starting classes, introducing syllabi I’m still finishing, and planning how to establish a certain pace of activity and workload for my students, I imagine I’m taking a road trip inland. Packing one suitcase with some clothes, some books, and a few notebooks, I make my way in the still moderate weather of early fall out of town with no destination or time table.

The most vivid part of this is the breakfasts I will have the leisure to enjoy on the way. I imagine morning in a small town somewhere near Vail, Colorado, reading the local paper, if there is one, trying the local omelet or pancakes, and drinking several cups of coffee. Slowly, I’m going east.

I suppose my fantasy has been done before. It seems like the premise of one too many Jack Reacher novels, though mine is not a male fantasy of revenge and conspiracy theory. Mine is about the possibility of an alternative universe. It’s about rest and not much else. Typical of fantasy, it is passive and lacking in activity, lacking in the push and pull of daily dialectic. It’s probably closer to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, except that I’ve never acted on it. It’s just always been something that comes to me every year as I pull into the parking lot suddenly filling up for day long, back-to-school faculty development sessions that seem less and less vital and more repetitious every year.

Except that this year, it’s going to be different. After this school year ends, I’m retiring. In August, it looks like I will be able to take the road trip I’ve always wondered about.

Do I Know?

Do I know what I’m doing? Not fully. To be honest, when I decided to let my employer know of my intentions a month ago, it suddenly felt like I was jumping off a cliff. Free fall. Dangling man. I wanted to take the forms back and continue to rethink it. I would admit that in signing the papers, I was engaging in a fantasy. Fantasy always is missing one side of the dialectic that keeps us tense and involved. My road trip? It never has other people in it. It’s the product of a deeply introverted man who spends nine months in a classroom.

This week, I’ve decided that things will be okay. I’ve decided that a better metaphor for retirement than leaping from a cliff might be moving down a river and taking a stream that branches off in a new direction. I’m still in the water with many of the same currents that carried me before, but now the pace is different, and there are new meadows and cottages. (I hope that my retiree friends will affirm this.)

There are many things about my current state—for example, about not being forty or even fifty anymore—that seem challenging. My fiftieth high school reunion is supposed to happen sometime this year. I have less time and resources than I did twenty years ago. And I admit that the challenges of AI for writing teachers like me have weighed heavily on my mind and plans over the last two years.

Richard

About ten years ago, I met a 92 year old man named Richard in the park where I walked most mornings. He walked as fast as I did. He was looking for a writers group because he had written a book about his retirement as a second life, and he wanted help with it.

Over the next few years, I got to know Richard’s story. He was an engineer, and after his retirement, he and his wife went into the mission field. They went over seas. They spent time in Kenya. They flew in small planes.

Talking about it in the park and then reading about it in our writing group, I learned about his philosophy and began to feel, in a mystical sort of way, that I was supposed to hear about it. I hadn’t thought much about retirement before this. Richard’s idea was this: Retirement is not sitting on the front porch sipping lemonade all day. It’s not keeping up with the daily TV guide. It’s a second life, a new chance to do some things and maybe even be some things.

I know I want to keep busy. I have three immediate writing projects to finish. One is the second novel I had started writing when my son took his life almost seven years ago. I’m ready to return to it.

I’m also as amateur as they come in music, so I’m thinking of messing around with that. It would be fun to have time to play with a few others.

Maybe to start, I’ll also make that trip east in September. I’ll go looking for the perfect breakfast. To stay in the dialectic run of things, I’m going to invite my wife. We’ll see what it leads to.

Thank you, friends, for reading. I’ll keep you posted.

All in History’s dialectic…

Thornapple River, 1967

We drift by a dock reaching out toward us

from a lawn thick and un-mowed and a cottage

with windows shut and, overturned on saw horses,

a rowboat, and growing around it weeds, barbeque

on the porch. As the sun comes up over the trees,

no motor boats pass, no temporary waves to aim our

canoe into, water an alien atmosphere we nod above.

Our lines satellite the drop-off for fish, and now

we know the difference between the live bending

pull of a bluegill on the line and the snag pulling

us down, into the water. Dad taught us, and

now watching for the bait to hook, I untwist again my dream

I have taken back with me to town every time we load the

canoe back up and tie it to our Dodge. At night, I lie awake

imagining I’m paddling past these docks, and the river

flows around the next bend and, if followed long enough,

will get to Lake Michigan, and then eventually to other 

lakes and eventually the St. Lawrence and out toward

the ocean, and starting early enough in the morning

like we do, getting there before winter is not a stretch.