I was walking down the hall this morning and the thought that occurred to me was, this is Library Day. It would be a good day to go to the library. And it hit me immediately that, “This is what a retired person says.” Man, I’m getting old.

I had just received a text from our neighbor, Anne, that the wind had blown over our recycling bin but that she, also retired, needed to get to her Tai Chi class. (Sounds like a bunch of retirees commiserating). Anyway, I went outside, retrieved all the cans and bottles and put the recycling bin upright in the snow. This time, I corkscrewed the blue bin into the snow and then gathered a mound of snow around the base so that it was finally planted against the southwesterly winds. Retired indeed. Who else has the time for this nonsense?

So, my morning is off to a good start. Two projects, one already finished and another to come this afternoon. I’ve just made my coffee but I don’t count that as a project. Yet. Perhaps when I’m 90, that will be an undertaking: to measure out the coffee beans, pour them into the grinder, grind them, pour them back out into the coffee maker, add the water and brew the whole thing. Damn, that’s a lot of steps! I mean, look how many words I had to use in that sentence. Maybe I can download an AI process on my Dell desktop to make my coffee some day in the future. Talk about an undertaking that will be. Maybe I should count that as a project, after all. Nah, I’ll wait at least until I’m 79 to even consider that as a project. By then, my computer skills will be officially designated as “defunct.”

On the other hand, I’m playing baseball again this summer for Men’s Senior League Baseball and let me tell you, that is a project. After 50+ years of “being away” from the game, now to go through all the conditioning, preparation and training to play again this summer (I played last summer for the first time in 53 years when I was 18.). Eighteen! That is a project: arm strength, stretching, hitting, running sprints. Well, running sort of fast, no one on my team or in our league sprints anymore. Our league is for men aged 60+ and you’d be surprised how in-shape and truly talented all the players are. Everyone played high school baseball or better, so the guys are all in shape for a bunch of 60+ year-olds. There aren’t as many home runs as when we all played in our teens and 20s, but we all solidly connect with the ball – but singles and doubles are now more common than triples or home runs. The strikeouts are fewer since the pitchers are not as over-powering as they were when they were young gods able to throw an 85 or 90 MPH fastball. There are still many strikeouts but the ratio of groundouts and fly balls has increased.

One of the guys on my team, Steve Ramer, made it to the minor leagues and played in the Philadelphia Phillies farm system and made it to their A league team. Unfortunately, as a young would-be major leaguer, he was forced to retire due to a severe knee and leg injury. Lesson learned: you don’t get much time to recuperate in the minor leagues when all the other guys are leaping past you as you try to recover.

Whether or not you are playing baseball, it is important, as a Senior, to go to the gym. I go Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Yes, I assign those days and I have a reason. Discipline. If I don’t commit to an exercise regimen, I will find excuses to skip a day. But with my M-W-F deal, in three years, I have not missed going to the gym for a workout except when we go to Florida for Christmas or when we traveled to Scotland last July and Portugal last April; I gave myself a break on those delightful occasions. Then I religiously went back to Planet Fitness upon returning.

I get a good two hours in each day I go: one hour weight and strength training, one hour aerobics. I’m damned proud too; I’m down to 170 pounds, from 185 pounds when I began back in February, 2022. I thank my late mom for getting me into the gym. No, she did not work out. But on our visits to her in Sarasota, Florida, I would use the gym in her Senior Living community. It was quite extensive and since I had recently retired and realized I needed to become more active, it was a blessing. So, when we returned home after our Christmas visit that year, we toured our local Planet Fitness and we’ve been going there ever since.

We’ve all heard retired people say, “I can’t believe I used to work – I’m busier now than I was when I was working and I don’t know how I found the time to work.” There’s truth to that, as all us retired people can tell you. A bit disingenuous, sure. After all, building a career combined with creating a family takes T-I-M-E. And luxuries such as sleep, the gym and Hell, playing baseball (or tennis or golf or whatever) are all that – luxuries.

But retirement means you can concentrate on ME time. And that is why it is so packed, so busy. Doing the things you once only dreamed of doing, allows you to do those things now. Like creating that garden. Travel. Or pickleball.

My high school friend Kevin just sent pictures of him downhill skiing up in New England. Mike regularly sends pictures of mountain climbs and rigorous hikes through the Sierra Nevadas or scaling heights in Yosemite. My other high school friends all are active too whether it’s the gym or just a vigorous walk. I’ll have to ask them some time if they have a Library Day or if they consider making a pot of coffee a project or not. I think “Not” on the latter.

The irony is that although we all have more free time now, getting my high school friends together for a reunion – now THAT is a project. First, the distances to traverse. Once, we were all from Long Island. Now, we are spread far and wide, from California to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Florida and the few who remain on Long Island. So, finding a common time and location is always a challenge as I am sure it is for other “old friends” who have moved apart due to relocations and family needs.

I’m a good example. I was hired by a company in Lancaster, PA in 1994 and they generously moved me and my family from Glen Cove, Long Island. Then, four years later, I was hired by a Fortune 500 company and they also generously moved us to their headquarters in the Lehigh Valley, PA where we currently live. Now, our kids, in their 30s, are dug in here where all their friends are and where their jobs are that they each love. So, there’s no third relo for my wife and I back to Long Island. But someday, I would love to move to a house on a large lake or above a fast river. I used to dream of an ocean home but with all the Category 5 hurricanes, that dream turned into a nightmare for me long ago. I have no interest in losing a home full of memories or of rebuilding. Yeah, when you get into your 60s and 70s, you get smarter. Or more scared. I prefer wiser.

Outside of an occasional visit to the library and my gym routine, I do not have any days assigned to getting things done. Even in the summer, when the lawn needs mowing, I mow. No routine day to mow. Great, because that means I often stretch it out from each week to when it needs mowing, perhaps ten days or two weeks if we are in a drought. And that mowing does help. Helps me, not just the lawn. We have a steep front yard and back yard, so mowing our half acre piece of land takes some work. I refuse to get a self-propelled lawn mower since pushing the mower across and up the hills takes some effort. And that is good to keep all the blood vessels circulating to help maintain my health.

So, no career workloads means we seniors can assign more effort to cooking. More time to cook up a slow stew instead of the quick pasta meals we used to dash in from work to feed to the kids when they were in school. My high school friend Karen just texted us about how she tinkered with Alton Brown’s corned beef recipe and about a beef barley soup she made. No Campbell’s for Karen. And Kitzel (and Karen, too) are always texting us all photos of amazing cakes and confections they have made from scratch. My sister Claudia and her husband Bob share some of their faves too including a Beef Wellington that sounds delicious. Bobby and Linda, down in Florida, are too busy to send recipe pictures as they seem to be in a never-ending journey from Punta Gorda to upstate NY and then AZ to visit with their son and daughter and their recent grandchildren that keeps them on the go.

There are many other friends from high school but these are the ones on our text string, so I know their diets, their travels, their interests a little better.

But the library! I do need to return a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine and get the current issue. I always check out Consumer Reports and the library’s Used Book Room. You’d be surprised how many quality books, novels and non-fiction, are at your library that were donated for sale to the Used Book Room and never even read or perhaps, opened and closed, once. You can always tell when someone has received a book as a birthday or holiday gift by how fresh the spine is. In that case they peaked inside, decided “No,” and donated the book as quickly as they could. I have a book list of about forty quality novels (not Best Sellers) and thirty or so biographies and other non-fiction. And then, I might take out a DVD when my wife and I get tired of all the streaming choices from Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

All this from walking down the hall and thinking this would be a good day to go to the library. It is a good day for that. But now, I have an even bigger project. I need to go to my computer and type all this into Microsoft Word, then cut and paste it into this blog’s platform, find an appropriate photo and write a caption, select a category, write all the SEO (which is laborious), then post it, then wait and check it, edit it to hopefully make sure this is interesting and error-free. That takes some work.

But that is the work I now love. Writing a piece and putting it out there because my recycling bin got blown down by the wind? Priceless. It ain’t Shakespeare but that’s alright. I’m free to write whatever I want and if that isn’t the definition of freedom, I don’t know what is.

At least until my friends text me and ask, “What were you thinking? This article is scattered, it goes all over the place!”

Exactly.

Chris Ebel
1/28/25

Photo by Vierdrie on Freeimages.com