Free at Last, Free at Last!

My wife, Patti, and I traveled around Italy for a month recently.  A freakin' month, dude!  I just love that.  I remember when a vacation lasted two weeks, if you were lucky.  You'd just get to the point where you stopped giving a shit about how things were going back in the real world, and you'd be on the phone confirming your return flight.  

When you first start working, you can't even get four weeks vacation; but you're getting laid enough and it doesn't really matter.  Then you get to a job where you get enough vacation time, but through the year, your kid gets a cold and you stay home for two days; or you wake up to find you left the door ajar on the car and the interior light has been on all night long and the battery is drained and you have to call AAA and, by the time they get there, the idea of going to work has lost its charm; or you have to add a day to a long weekend so you can take something that feels like a vacation, but isn't really because you spent half the days driving wherever and back. So you never really have a whole month available. Then, maybe you get lucky and you land one of those jobs where you get six or eight weeks, but you never want to take more than a couple weeks at a time because, if you're absent longer, you might come back and find someone else sitting in your office and yourself assigned to a "special project." 

Even when I was an actor with far too much time available for vacations, I never took four weeks off to go anywhere because, I knew, as all actors do, that unless you're on a series, or making a LOT of money when you DO work, you live every day waiting for the phone to ring  -- for the audition, and if you're lucky, the call-back, the second call-back, the confirmation, the call from wardrobe, etc -- with the deluded expectation and dread that, if you were on vacation, Spielberg would call your agent because he was up till all hours of the morning -- so late that it clearly impaired his judgment -- and when he saw your stunning performance in that infomercial for the all-herbal hot flashes cure, he knew you would be perfect for the lead in his next epic effort, but he'd have to see you within eight hours or it'd be a no-go.  Besides, very few actors can afford a vacation that takes them further than Anaheim.

Retirement is great.  I can't identify in any way with those people, and there are more than a few of them, who say that they can't imagine what they would do if they were retired.  My wife tells me that, when she was a teenager, there was a man who lived in her neighborhood who retired and the following morning, got up, dressed in a suit and tie and sat down in the living room and waited for . . . whatever.  Two days before I retired from my job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles, I ran into a guy in the elevator -- white-haired, certainly older than me.  I didn't know him, but I was so overjoyed at the idea of never again working for "DA MAN," that I wore the idea, all day long, like a gigantic boner, strutting around the building, starting conversations about retirement with anyone who would pay any attention, just so I could tell them I was retiring, often starting the conversation myself by asking them about their retirement plans, pretending to listen, but not really giving a shit except to the extent that, if they told me they had a lot of years to work, I felt better.  (Sorry.  That's who I was.)  And everyone of them was envious -- from the guy who had six months, to the woman who had twenty years to go.   

So, I said to this guy, "You got a lot of time left?  When do you plan to retire?"

He said, "I don't plan to retire.  If you're gonna retire, you gotta have interests?  I don't have any interests."

Normally, by this point in the conversation, I would have heard plenty and I would swing the discussion back to MY plans, but I was so stunned by the response, I actually got interested in him.  He hadn't used the word, "hobby."  He hadn't said, you gotta have hobbies."  Here was a guy devoid, not only of hobbies, but interests.  Working at that company -- his life experience -- had actually sucked the life force completely out of him.

All I could think was, "You're not interested in reading a book?  Having a lazy cup of coffee in the morning?  Talking to your wife, a friend? Taking a walk? Going to the beach? Playing with the dog?  Having a glass of wine at lunch? Cruising the internet for porn?" 

I mean, really!

I may have been witnessing a pre-suicidal last cry for help from a desperate soul and perhaps I should have called Suicide Prevention or offered a hand of hope; but frankly, I was really more interested in getting back to talking about MY retirement.

It was a great vacation.