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SINCE BEFORE KINDERGARTEN
By beanerywriters(11,675)
When I moved out to the country a number of years ago, there was a small shopping center located in a town several miles from where I lived. In that center was a five and ten¾the old fashioned kind that sold a bit of everything and in which the merchandise was either piled high on counters or hanging on racks. Toward the back of the store there was a lunch counter and every few days or so, when I had time, I would stop in for a cup of coffee and a doughnut.
One morning when I stopped in, an older man was seated at the counter. I sat beside him and we fell into conversation. I learned that he lived nearby and had been retired for quite a few years. I had recently heard of a friend of a relative of mine who had retired after some thirty years of employment. He had begun his life of leisure but within six months he had had a heart attack and died. This unfortunate occurrence had brought on a conversation with some family members that recounted many other friends and acquaintances that had met similar fates. All their working life they had looked forward to retirement and then shortly after reaching that goal had either died or been stricken with a serious illness that incapacitated them.
I was curious as to how the gentleman next to me, who had already passed a number of apparently successful years of retirement, was faring and I asked him how he was finding it. He told me that he was keeping busy and enjoying himself.
“You really like being retired, then?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you,” he answered, “I haven’t had this much fun since the day I was shipped off to kindergarten!”
The man told me that he had found many things to interest him. He was involved in woodwork and gardening and had recently acquired a metal detector which he used in investigating the grounds of the many farms in the surrounding area. The farmers knew him and gladly gave him permission to roam their acreage and in return he offered them anything he found. His prize finding thus far had been the rusted remains of a pistol from the era of the 1880s.
I never saw the man again after that morning but my conversation with him stayed on my mind through the years. How was it, I wondered, that so many people have problems in their retirement years while this man had looked upon those years as renewed freedom and had found so many simple interests to make them valuable? The older I have become the more I believe I understand. I do not know the details of the man’s life but I am willing to believe that in his years of employment he found a similar sort of joy. His retirement was not, for him, a means toward making a new life for himself but rather a means of expanding his enjoyment of the life he was already living.
Many people live by planning for their retirement years. It is a future goal for which they long over a period of thirty or forty years in employment that they find disagreeable. Once retirement arrives, they find it is not the Utopia they expected. Often that disappointment is more than they wish to endure for long. Such people spend their lives living for the future. I believe the man I met at the lunch counter of the five and ten lived a different philosophy. He lived for the present. That was his secret.
As I have grown older, I have found no better way to live my life that to attempt to emulate the philosophy of that man I talked to so many years ago in the lunchroom of the five and ten. I have found many things to interest me throughout my life and since I have reached the years of retirement I have found many more things to take my interest. I, too, have not had so much fun since I was shipped off to kindergarten.
---written by Joe F. Stierheim | |
This Blog Post has been read 1 times.
Posted to ProBlogs.com on Monday, January 01, 2007
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