The right time to bail

Every day starts with a plan. Question asked: What's most important to be accomplished in the morning, while my hands work best for typing & such....

Today, place Mother's Day order, do this (what you're reading now), send another e-note. Later today, call American Express and see if my card's OK, because a friend of mine who's supplying my website has had a problem applying charges, so I gotta see if it's stuck at their end or his. Have some more food, what I had for "breakfast" may not have been enough.

Southern California, weatherwise, is wack. It was a cold winter. Then a too-hot spring. It seems to be winter again. Today. Weather Channel app says it'll be warm again, RSN (real soon now), but really really really it will, soon. Really.

Really. We'll see what happens when said warmth arrives. IF said warmth arrives.

Thoughts on "retire"... a word I have both familiarity with and apparently an objection to... when I use it about myself, that is.

When I went to the educator's conference in Texas, I had a name tag that said "RETIRED." In large, easy to read type. Well, I knew I was "the composer," of a piece performed by an outstanding All-state choir, but I never really settled with "retired." Because I felt like that verb was used in a very transitive sense... I felt at the time that I had been retired. Or perhaps, just to get you to feel it better, I got retired AT. Yeah, I definitely went along with it, in no small part to make the administrator's lives easier, said administrators having their own issues with my dissonances with The Enterprise, and Who Said What and Who Did What are officially off the table for today's discussion.

But I had always envisioned retirement as a triumph. Like a graduation; I did my work, I got a robe and a diploma to show off. I do so love academic robes/

Especially when they're purple.

But "retirement" to me was at the bottom line, as far as I had always imagined it, my choice. Whatever it is that I've been doing for however long, I got to decide when I was done. And it was a time of honor, of being honored, just like a graduation. Many of my mentors have retired this way; a couple of them tell me that every once and a while, they get called by their former workplace to bail them out somehow. One of said mentors-become-friends got an "emeritus" title, he's Director of Music Emeritus.

I think, I am pretty sure, and definitely hope, that I'm over my "separation" from my former workplace. But I received no title, no thanks, no congratulations.

Because my once-colleagues are all aging, the institution looks like it's gonna have a rather sizable crop of retirees comin' up on it; I suppose I really do wonder how the institution is gonna handle being in effect, forcibly remade, because All These Important People will be leaving.

Mostly, I expect, by their own choice. But we'll find out.

But let's look at said by-choice retirement... Besides merely having had enough and I'm done, thank you very much, what else is involved? Not being able to do things because the body doesn't last forever and things fail and you just need to deal with it.

Well, that's the MS Experience, ain't it? Things fail. You just gotta deal. Or, as Greg Universe told his son Steven, "Sometimes you gotta bail."

Which was definitely the situation in my final workplace days. Nobody gave me a title, nobody ever asked me for help in any way. even to answer a question.

Which, at the end of the day, was OK too. I had been, after all, retired... gentlest way to put it, I suppose. But from what little I hear nowadays, I got out of there just in time; things have Definitely changed and it's just fine for me to be uninvolved. At all. Nowadays, I sit on my veranda looking at the back yard, I lie down, I listen to cartoons and sometimes even watch them. I type things like this, which takes wicked longer than it used to. I make tea. Lots of matcha, but sometimes dark oolong, or Big Red Robe (a new addition).

And at the end of the day, that's ... OK.

Because sometimes it's definitely the right time to bail.