Well, this is embarrassing.
After all that hoopla — the tributes, the party, the cards and gifts celebrating my retirement in May (I was never sure if people were sad that I was leaving, or happy about it), here I am again. Writing this column.
What, you may ask, am I doing back?
If I had a dollar for every person I know who has retired and then returned to work a short while later I’d be about $7 ahead. Retiring and then unretiring is kind of a thing.
It’s not that we failed at retirement. It’s not that it was boring or we found ourselves unmoored and with nothing to do. Or, perhaps if you’re married, your spouse kicked you out of the house.
Retirement, I have found in the two and a half months since I’ve been retired, is just as underrated as people told me. Actually, I love being retired and I’m not unretiring. I’m just sort of picking and choosing what I want to do. That’s the beauty of retirement.
I had — still have — plenty of things to do. Besides defrosting the freezer and sorting through my sock drawer, I have grandchildren to visit, a garden to tend, honey bees to fret over, and old friends to get back in touch with.
But those things, which I will probably be doing the rest of my life, aren’t entirely as challenging to my brain as writing this column.
I thought about that before I retired. As a retiree-to-be, you get lots of advice, from friends and others, about how to keep in shape mentally and physically after you retire. People who are happiest and who live the longest and healthiest, they say, are the ones who stay engaged, who stay curious and keep learning, and who remain active.
So I wondered what I could do to keep my brain as alert and agile as it needed to be when I was a full-time writer. Mental games, the experts recommended — and they weren’t talking about gaslighting or playing one-upmanship.
They were talking about things like Wordle or Sudoku or crossword puzzles.
I have never been good at any of these games, especially crossword puzzles. My mother used to devour them. She’d sit at the kitchen table in the morning, coffee mug in hand and holler out: “What’s a five-letter word for ‘available’?”
“I dunno, Mom,” I’d yell back. “I skipped that class in school.”
She’d study and study and finally call out: “Ready!”
“Ready, what?” I’d answer back and then try to go on ignoring her until she asked me the next question. I think those experiences scarred me for life. At least they soured me on mind games. My mother, however, remained mentally alert until she died.
So, after some consideration, a little time off and a vacation with my daughter and granddaughter to Europe (you’ll hear more about that later), I decided to reboot this column.
Fortunately, the Tribune took me back. It’s like that line in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
So, even though the picture accompanying this column may look different from the one that used to run, it’s still me. I’m still the same old person — just not as sweet as I used to be.
Hedberg may be contacted at khedberg@lmtribune.com.
