Yesterday was the big birthday bash for Canada, and also the final hosting of The National with Peter Mansbridge. After a long and successful career, he is retiring, and we got to see him yesterday without a tie, relaxed and happy on Parliament Hill. His familiar voice means news to me, and it will be weird hearing someone else's voice instead.
People at work are beginning to retire too, and when I think of the 15 years lying ahead of me until I can retire, it seems unbearable. A day at a time it's fine and I'm content and I like the people I work with. It's an interesting topic. I might go stir-crazy if I were home all day every day, since I'm so used to bustling about. But fifteen years when taken all in a lump seems like eternity. I will be too feeble to do anything or go anywhere by then. I won't have the eyesight or memory left to read a novel. I won't be able to bend over to weed a vegetable patch, or have the manual dexterity to thread my loom. By then my dogs will be dead and I won't be able to walk around the block anyway. I won't even be able to content myself with baking biscotti all day, because I'll have lost my teeth by then...
Oh, I know I'm being overly dramatic. Sixty-five is the new fifty and all of that. I've seen people well into their 80s still dancing and doing tai chi, and if I'm good about diet and exercise, there's no reason why I can't be one of them. But it seems like such a distance away. By the time I retire I will have been in a cubicle the size of my dining table for 44 years.
Where's that spoon? I'm tunneling out.
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