I can't count how many times over the last twenty years I wondered how we would make it to today. Today is a huge milestone in our lives. Sure, we had a big ceremony with all the appropriate pomp and circumstance two months ago, but today was the day that mattered. Today everything became real, official. Today is the first day of retirement for Mister Smith-Park. From here on out, into the knowable future, his full time job will be to grow his beard and walk his dogs. It has been a long time coming to reach this point. In twenty years, that man worked so many hours in the day every day, so many days in a row without breaks, to equal thirty or more years in anyone else's professional experience, outside of this all-encompassing life we chose. He spent months away from his family and home, so often that if we added it up, we would most likely find that he was gone twice as much as he was with us. I challenge anyone to try that and not be burned out at the end. He certainly has been. He is a veritable pile of ashes compared to the goofy young man he was when he started. He was a skinny kid with John Denver's face and Kermit the Frog's speech patterns back then. Now, he's got a salt and pepper beard and he carries his broad shoulders like he's looking to kick someone's ass even when he's just walking from the car to a restaurant, or so our old friends have told us.
These last twenty years have worn me out too. When we left Boulder, I had just started a costume design business, after losing two jobs in publishing, a few years apart. The business had just started building momentum, with a local ballet troupe hiring us to outfit them for a performance of Carnival of the Animals, but we dissolved it and divided up the assets when I moved away. Every time we moved, I had to reinvent myself. I spent several years as a librarian (without that particular masters degree), I did a short, stressful stint as a property manager, and I worked at a couple different education centers (as a counselor once and then a test examiner). I finally went back to school for my masters, but since then I haven't been able to land much in the way of gainful employment (other than that year at the second ed center). I've hated starting over everywhere we went, but I didn't have a lot of choice. I often received the message, implicitly or explicitly, that my primary value was economic, and if I wasn't doing something for money, I wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit. So during times of desperation, I spent hours on my feet working retail (because one DOES NOT sit in retail, I was told condescendingly), feeling disrespected at every turn, coming home in agony from the strain on my feet, but feeling like I had no choice, even when we didn't technically need the money. In fact, that made it worse--because we could survive on one income, it was easy to treat me like I didn't deserve employment equal to my education and talent. As of now, it will be incumbent on me to make up the shortfall between what the man's retirement covers and what we need when we move home, and I'm looking forward to it, on one condition. I want the promise that we will stay in one place long enough for me to have an actual career for once. If I have to start over yet again, then I demand that this time will be the last time. I have a couple ideas for what I think I want to do. More on that as it develops.
I suppose it's too late for me to go back for a second glass of the champagne we had to celebrate today's milestone. It might have been nice, but I have to get up early to make food for the Kentucky Derby viewing. I didn't plan on using this as a retirement party, but I think it might be nice to let it do double duty, seeing as how one of us just crossed the finish line.
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