1. Great Sagas Told.
When our five children were very young I would come home to my stay-at-home wife and the conversations would be strange. Her conversation would be interjected with gurgles and one syllable words. Her inflection would rise and fall like a roller coaster. Her eyes, unblinkingly, would follow me everywhere as if darting them away would be hazardous. That what happens to stay-at-home moms whose conversation all day is limited to a two year-old vocabulary. We even got new names for previously familiar things. Doll baby became Dobby. All meals became “lesseat.” Nodding turned any noun even “lesseat” into a question. Language was simple. This was hard for someone who loves to paint great word pictures. Ever since Nathan told David that great word picture in the Old Testiment and recounted by Sunday School teachers that Nathan was painting a vivid picture to make his point to the king, I had been fascinated that even small but complex points could be made if you could get your audience to common familiar ground. Arguments could be won from your opponents mouth if they deduced it for themselves from your illustration and voiced it before you spilled the truth in plain words. Over the years life had allowed me to live through some of the funniest, most unusual moments and I developed them like a master sage so that mere conversations could translate the most mundane into gems of delight and wisdom. I shared generously with fellow employees, co-workers and those in my charge. I’m sure that some thought me wise, some thought me weird, but few found me boring. This however changes upon retirement. When you spend all of your time in the presence of a spouse you have been married to for 41 years there are no tales she does not know, no matter how creatively changed up. She too, lived through those. Worse, when she has no ear for lengthy illustration: “Cut to the chase! Get to your point!” I miss the great opportunities to oriate. The bard has lost his tongue. He is so still. Is he dead? Far worse than death: he is retired.

2. The Battles
I became a great warrior. When you are thrust daily into the battlefield it is conquer or die. I may not have won every battle but I never lost a war. Some of my conquests have become stuff of legend. I’m sure even now, somewhere, a former charge of mine is recounting in great delight how they were present when “…that happened! I swear it!” They finish with a smile, proudly remembering their role in it. The audience is either awestruck or completely unbelieving. I feel grateful to having been successful in some of those wins over what seemed like impossible odds. And while many times during the battle I moaned, or cried, or cursed, or swore I would quit and never come back, inside I secretly must have loved it. Because everyday I showed back up on the battlefield. Even scars became badges, and more often than not, impetus for some great illustration or cautionary tale. Many, many day after a long and weary battle I would drag into the house, lie down on the couch and stare at the ceiling. One of my children would caution another with the words of their mother: “Leave daddy alone. He’s playing coma, again.” Battles get easier when you become a great warrior. The rewards too. I read once, and recorded these words from a motivational speaker, Phillip Updegraff, “Thank God for the difficulties on your job: the hard work, the difficult people you must deal with on a daily basis, the impossible expectations. These things count for more than half of your salary. Because if someone could be found that would do these things for half of what you make, they would.” And here is a testimony that the warrior loves his craft: he misses it when it ends. Unlike Alexander the Great on that final day when I left work for the last time, never to pick up the sword again, I did not weep bitterly. But: I sure felt like it.

3. The Hunts
I became a sharpshooter in the Marine Corp. Since I left the Marines at the end of the Vietnam War I have rarely picked up a gun. I have never, sadly for a West Virginian, shot an animal. My sons have kept our freezers filled, however. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been a great hunter for the last forty years. In an era before Google or Wicipedia, there was no fact, address, picture or audio file sequestered away from me, hiding in the country. The reference hotline to a number of local, state and federal libraries were on speed-dial on my work phone. I had elicited favors from many in the field of information: universities, newspapers, state and federal government. I also hunted paradoxes. I hunted down parts, pieces and programs as well. Sometimes inventing something new from parts of existing older equipment: this is the necessity of those living on the outter edge of the technology of their profession. I have also hunted the vast domain of imagination pulling out of that realm into our own great pieces of printed art and words propelling me to the forefront of my profession in this region. My trophies made me sought after by all those competing against my employer. My work still hangs on walls everywhere, is filed away in libraries, museums, the drawers, file cabinets and even hope chests of thousands. (I Googled me once and found my name in a reference of the Supreme Court). But while trophies are nice, that’s not why men are drawn to the hunt. The work, the preparation, the venturing into virgin territory, the sight, smell and memory of those moments where in the place that no man has gone boldly before you suddenly see, give chase too, and drag back into this world a prize that amazes and inspires many that see it. But you, and only you, know that the chase was more satisfying than the trophy. When you get to that place where all hunts are small game and your name is not mentioned among the big game hunters in the jungles, and your great hunts are told among others with this lead: “Once upon a time…” Then, you know your days as a hunter have passed. These days even my grandchildren can find anything on Yahoo. Sadly, most will never know that it’s not what you can find that makes for great trophies. The secret is what you DO with what you know is what changes the world.

4. The Great Feasts
I live in retirement in a small house on a beautiful river in the quiet and isolated mountains of West Virginia more than sixty miles from where I worked in the Capitol city for more than forty years. The epitome of most men’s dreams. Hey! They might say, if retirement doesn’t give you the funds to eat well, you can fish all day or hunt from the front porch! Dream indeed. I’m with the Iraelites whom after forty years of eating Manna, God’s bread from heaven complained to Moses that they missed the leeks (onions) and meats back in Egypt. Problem is: Egypt is sixty some of miles from here. Back when I needed to drive there every day I also had the income and thus the incentive to do it. I passed literally hundreds of grocery stores, convenience marts and restaurants going in and coming home. There was no fast food chain in the country that I did not pass at least one on my journey (and was often only blocks from a number of the same chain along my trip). And while I also happened to be primary breadwinner at my house I was also the chief cook. (Some of my grandchildren have never seen my wife cook. “Mawmaw, you can’t cook!”). As a versatile and often adventurous cook I had the world as my pantry. On a sixty mile journey home there is no ingredient: fresh, canned or archane that I could not purchase (and had the income to buy it). And on those days that I was too weary for the joy of cooking, any meal I fancied was available for purchase! (Thanks to Shoney’s my family could even eat fresh strawberry pie out of season in the middle of the winter at the house!)
Feasts were not uncommon. I discovered in a thirty-minute lunch I could eat chicken McNuggets, a small Wendy’s chilli, a Rally Double Fish sandwich, a Taco Bell chalupa and still have time to swing by Dairy Queen for a milkshake to nurse the rest of the afternoon at work. My frame for forty years bespoke both my love of food and my talent for preparing it. My retirement came nearly the same time as my diabetes so my frame is smaller these days so that my lifeline is longer. That doesn’t mean I don’t still love food. It’s just harder to get. Paydays don’t come every Friday now. They come once a month at the beginning of the month and nowhere near the girth of previous paydays. More often than not that means once or twice to a grocery store in a single month. Perhaps a treat to a restaurant once a month. If you only go once, what do you choose? Can you choose? You are left longing for things you can’t get! (Remember you are sixty miles from most everything!) My wife does not understand why I groan when I see an Arby’s commercial on television. “You just ate supper!” (probably Mac and cheese) she’ll say, “You can’t be hungry.” Moses! Bring on the leeks!

5. Master and Commander
As I have mentioned already I was pretty much a champion, bard, warrior, hunter and sought after master-of-my-craft. If I was not master and commander of my own destiny where I was at I had options to choose that road somewhere else. I knew I was a pretty important cog in the machine. But until recently, until reflection, I did not realize how important. Since 1979 I worked only three places. Each a step up in my career. In 1982 at the first of these places I ended up in the hospital for a week. It was later that I discovered that my employer had to hire three temp people to get through the week and had to do much of the work himself. He never told me this. One of the temp workers decades later would tell me. In 1994, at the second workplace, I took a four day leave when my father died and I left for northwestern Ohio. Upon my return, my employer told me I could never take a day off again. I supervised two individuals while doing a third of the work myself and during the time I was gone the whole department “was in crisis” I was told. (Actually it was a matter of another person interjecting himself into my department and trying to compel his authority on the unwilling). At my last place of employment the owner (who had been my boss at place #2) purchased the business “only on the condition that you come with me as my pre-press manager”. He did not buy the business from the retiring printshop owner till I consented. My first year I worked 16 hours a day six days a week in the busiest commercial printshop in the state. I was committed for a first year to this ridiculous schedule, but my employer gave me a single day off after the stress got to me and he noticed. I got a call that night. All hell broke loose on my only day off and I would be needed back early tomorrow and now, workload doubled. Forty years are filed with incidents like these. My paycheck and benefits and perks often reflected my importance on a day to day basis. Family and friends could never buy my argument: “I have to work today. It won’t get done if I am not there.” I worked the day after I nearly broke my knee in 1997. I worked the day after I broke my leg in two places in 2007. I worked the day of (and day after) my Bell’s Palsy stroke). I did not stay home for flu or fevers. The work was important. I was important. Retirement however, means you lose your importance. I miss being important. Socially, retirement is like death. Your kids know where your headstone is, even if they never visit it. They can always assume you are in your place if they should suddenly want to visit. After all, what have you got to do? Nothing important. Besides, visiting is not really necessary. We all have more important things to do! That is, all but the dead and the retired.