Take Two

Exactly two years ago tomorrow I retired from teaching and moved to a new home, all within just a few hours.

It's a sad day when you leave the old school in tears, drive to the house you've lived in for a decade and a half, pack up the cat, and drive 150 miles to a world unknown. Sad is hardly a word to describe it. The sense of loss was acute and exquisite.

What one expects and what one gets are seldom, if ever the same. I expected, leisure, learning, and a comfortable if somewhat penurious life lived in harmony with those around me. What I got was ennui, boredom, melancholia, discord, grinding poverty, and rapidly declining health due to my own weakness and character defects.

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
--Hamlet, Act I, scene 2

So tomorrow, the second anniversary of the arrival of that holy grail everyone looks forward to, when you don't have to get up at five, I'll get up at five, go get the Sunday paper, and start actively looking for work, which has now become a necessity for a number of reasons.

And at 5:01, I'll take my medicine "like a man" as people used to say, and begin restoring both body and soul. I'll either do it or literally die trying.

Things never turn out the way we expect them to.

If it weren't for the unexpected and the unwanted challenge, our lives would be unbearably predictable. It's really better this way. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it in a not-so-famous Unitarian hymn, as long as we have the strength to carry on, we get The Life that Maketh All Things New.