Becalmed
In a seafaring sense, being becalmed is a bad thing. Remaining motionless due to a lack of wind is something every sailor dreads since it leaves him at the mercy of the currents and tides with no ability to set his course and make progress. In retirement the objective (at least for me) is to adjust to a state of being becalmed and liking it. Even if we are not working at all, we all still have busy times in retirement. I would generally categorize those as falling into four buckets. There are, first and foremost, health related activities and chores. The chores may be a daily walk or getting out in the garden for routine maintenance or may get as aggressive as golf or tennis. I ride my motorcycles and find that that is, indeed, a form of energy-consuming exercise. But increasingly, you probably have doctors visits and various and sundry procedures that must be organized, adjusted and eventually attended, along with the understandable follow-up attached thereto. If you’re lucky (like me for the moment) this does not take up too much time, but after a certain age, doctors like to see you more often and while I have ratcheted up from once per every three months to once per every four months, there is still some time consumption involved with that.
After health activities, there are household projects. As my readers know, that has consumed a good deal of my time in the past year and has involved varying degrees of personal time involvement. When I got the roof replaced, other than scheduling and constantly asking when they would finish (think The Agony and the Ecstasy and the Pope Julius II and Michelangelo interactions in 1512), that involved very little of my time. The deck renovation was the exact opposite, though the artistry delays and intransigence were not dissimilar. The basalt stone fountain is now operating perfectly with its new pump. The games area has survived another visit and utilization by the nephew’s kids (the purpose for which it was built, after all). The irrigation system has been expanded and adjusted to keep all my plantings watered appropriately. With few exceptions, I’ve finished all the plantings and landscaping projects I am likely to undertake in 2021. The utility area on the side and behind the garage has had its stone surface expanded. So, I am down to only a few projects that will involve some direction, but no hands-on work by me during our summer absence, and will give Brad a proper retainer of ongoing work while we are away.
The third bucket is travel. This is an obligation as a parent and grandparent for sure, but also as a friend who wants to stay in touch with now distant friends. Both Kim and I have had the red flag moment of the Pandemic to seriously think about travel and our absolute desire and need for it. I think its safe to say that we have learned that we can lead a full and rewarding life without as much travel as our prior Run for Your Life program entailed. However, as soon as someone suggested a reboot of the motorcycle ride from Barcelona to Porto through the Pyrenees and traversing the Camino de Santiago, we jumped onboard. There was an interesting juxtaposition of the sedentary thoughts that we don’t need that added exposure and the sense that watching our aging-out friends makes us want to do a few more foreign rides before we hang up the spurs. The rides across Africa or the Silk Road as well as the Pan American Highway and/or Patagonia are less necessary and actually getting relatively unappealing (other than to watch videos of others doing it). But travel, whether short of long, by road or by the dreaded air travel, is time consuming in the planning and the execution.
The last definitional time-consuming retirement bucket is family. I would say that if I were rank-ordering them, this fall behind only health on the priority list. I left it for last because it is also the most complicated one. Unlike projects or travel, there is only a small amount of family that is elective in nature. Most of it is quite mandatory and actually causes more time consumption if attempting to avoid engagement in it. Generally, in most families, a husband and wife are not 100% on the same page in terms of family priorities and sense of obligation. I like to think that Kim and I are more enlightened than most and more accommodative of each other’s needs and wants in regard to family. There are times when that feels right and times when I’m not sure that’s working as well as it should (mostly on my part I am sure). But the family bucket also gets complicated by the full array of other retirement buckets as well. Family health is time consuming. Family projects (whether ours or theirs) can come into play since collective decision-making amongst families can be a complex web of issues ranging from specific expertise (my sister is an architect, my brother-in-law is a contractor, my nephew is a garage door artist, etc., etc.). And of course family travel has always been a challenge, maybe more so for us since we tend to initiate and subsidize large-scale collective travelganzas. We have taken the two-headed crew to trips to Italy twice, Morocco, Normandy, Mexico twice, Hearst Castle and Ireland. We had planned to go to Krakow last year and that remains on ice through this year with an indeterminate future.
Next year we are starting to plan a family gathering at the Lodge at Red River Ranch in Utah. We are already feeling a tinge of what I will call family complications. There should be less difficulty with organizing and coordinating domestic travel (especially in the West since ALL of our siblings live in the West) than international travel, but that is only one small part of the overall equation. The rest can include economic constraints, work schedule constraints, school schedule constraints, and otherwise use of scarce time-off resource constraints. Remember that the pernicious part of family is that as it extends out it also networks out towards all the related in-law branches to which we are not actually directly connected. In other words, there may be other family members like us out there trying to do what we are trying to do and competing for that same scare time-off resource. It can all be a bitch and can frustrate one to the point of wanting to pull the plug on the whole thing and sit back in the calm of one’s own little cocoon at home and not bother, but where would the fun be in that?
So, you see, we are back from a week-long motorcycle ride to Utah where I was the Tourmaster as usual and Kim booked the meals. I organized the economics (which we aptly call Marinomics).and both take the expense risk and bill the members. That is a lot of work and gets recognized and appreciated as such by the membership (which still doesn’t stop some from being royal pains in the ass). And we are two weeks away from a five week family and friends East Coast extravaganza roadtrip. There are five hotel nights and one night at a friend’s going out as well as hooking up with Gary & Oswaldo in St. Louis for a caravan to Ithaca. Then there are three weeks at Homeward Bound in Ithaca where we have a little bedroom juggling for friends and family and a three-day trip to Brooklyn for a relaxing Father’s Day. The ride home involves six hotel nights booked for us, Gary & Oswaldo and our pal Candice who will accompany us from Ithaca to Casa Moonstruck.
We have two weeks here on our hilltop to relax and prepare for the next road trip. We are becalmed. The weather is perfect. It’s good to be home. We had a weekend family gathering with Kim’s clan and have a 70th birthday party planned for my sister’s husband Bennett. We also have two other parties for the workmen that built the deck and our soon-to-be-moving neighbor. Both will include some family members from Kim’s side and my side. Nonetheless, it still all seems becalmed compared to travel, especially family travel. The bottom line on being becalmed is that, as they say, I don’t know how I ever had time for work with all this becalmed sea before us.