Some thoughts on retirement

The question I get, having given up my last paying job about 10 months ago, is along the lines of "How are you liking retirement?" or "What are you doing now that you're retired?"

I have no final answer to those questions as my retirement routine is still evolving. I am liking many aspects of this stage of life. I am staying busy with projects and routine chores around the house along with some writing. My greatest revelation about retirement is that I sleep better. I had been accustomed, over a 33-year career in the newspaper business, 10 years managing nonprofit agencies and three years in the military, to waking in the middle of the night in a sudden panic and then lying awake for hours worrying about some issue at the office.

I still awaken in the night occasionally, but only rarely now in a panic over work issues. I am sleeping better than I have in many years. Credit a lack of occupational worries and pressure. It has been years since I had the recurring nightmare of being in a college classroom and realizing I had not studied for or even read the material for a big exam.

Retirement has not been as productive or as enjoyable as I had hoped. The routine responsibilities still burden me — maintaining the house and yard, paying the bills, exercising regularly, making plans for family visits, etc. I have more time now to do these things, and I have to keep reminding myself that I don't have to wait until the weekend to tackle looming chores. I have the time to mow the lawn, to make medical appointments, to read, to write, to volunteer all week long. We have several bookcases full of books I have not read or want to re-read.

What I am missing is my wife's presence. She is still working, her retirement still months away. All our visions of retirement had involved the two of us doing things together — traveling, visiting family and old friends, working together on household projects. I will not feel fully retired until my companion for the past 47 years can share this time with me.

I have become closer to our dog, an old rescue we adopted about five years ago and who is showing his age. I walk him every day (weather permitting), and, as I've often said, he's the only person I have to talk to during the day.

I've taken on a few editing projects and occasionally (too infrequently) contribute some words to this blog. I've reworked novels I had initially written 10 years ago, but I've not found a publisher for any of them and, frankly, have not tried very hard to find a publisher.

As agreeable as retirement is, I am often reminded that the mortality clock is ticking, and I have, realistically, only 15-20 years (if that) remaining in this life to do all the things I have not done but wanted to do in the first 69 years. It's a sobering thought but not one that has thus far pressed me into expediency. I'll get to the bucket list items that I can, and any remainders won't matter in the end.

Each day, we will celebrate our gratitude for the life we've been granted, for the children, the grandchildren, the siblings and parents and friends who have shaped our lives. Despite all the disappointments, sorrows and tragedies we've experienced over seven decades, we are blessed beyond measure and are grateful for every moment.

Doris Betts, writer and teacher of writing

Doris Betts arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a year before I did. She came as a lecturer, a fill-in who did not have the academic credentials usually required of faculty members. But she had a couple of well-received novels under her belt, and she impressed her academic colleagues enough to not only win a spot on the faculty but also to become faculty chair and one of the most beloved professors at the university. I arrived with a very limited preparation from a small high school and unrealistic ambitions, thinking I might someday make a living as a writer, and was gone four years later.

I never knew Doris Betts during my time in Chapel Hill, despite taking every creative writing course I could, and never read her books until years later. I was privileged to hear her speak on several occasions and had the opportunity to talk with her on a couple of occasions. I've said many times that she gave the best speech on writing I have ever heard. She was the featured writer at a Barton College Friends of Hackney Library event several years ago. The twice-yearly library dinners attract a variety of authors. Some are more gifted as writers than others. Some are more gifted as speakers. I knew Betts was an exceptional writer, but her speech about why writing is important and how one goes about writing was as good as anyone will ever hear. She said she didn't outline her novels with incidents and turning points. Instead, she said she liked to bring her characters together on a page and see what happens. Her character-driven novels seldom attracted the attention of the suspenseful, who-done-it books, but her novels achieved the ultimate goal of great fiction — an examination of the human condition through characters who are as real as your neighbors and relatives.

With her death Saturday, North Carolina has lost a great writer. More important, it has lost a great teacher of writing, a great friend of writers and a great advocate of good writing. Her novel "Souls Raised from the Dead" is one of the most beguiling books you'll ever read. Betts brings together her distinct characters in trying situations and lets them work through their problems. In doing so, she gives a little explanation of what life is all about.

Ernest Hemingway's Paris is not all 'true'

Ernest Hemingway has haunted me of late. I read a Slate article recently about his later years and suicide 50 years ago, saw Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" with its caricature of Hemingway in his 20s, and read "The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain, whose novel gives a voice to Hadley Richardson Hemingway.

When I was in college and Hemingway was not long dead, I fell in love with his stark, simple prose and read "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the '20s when he and Hadley were newlyweds and he was beginning his career as a writer. His descriptions of Paris and its international menagerie of characters, artists and writers were enthralling. Rereading the memoir as a young husband and father, I imagined myself where Hemingway had been, not in Paris, but in love with my wife and my child and working hard at writing one true sentence, and then another. I joked to my wife about calling our daughter "Bumby," the Hemingways' nickname for their son. We transplanted the romance of Paris to Washington, D.C., and then back to North Carolina, but my life was filled not with art galleries and cafes but with long hours working to support my young and expanding family. There seemed to be no time or inspiration for writing after long hours of work and no quiet cafe where I could sit like Hemingway with a pocketknife-sharpened pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

Years later, I reread "A Moveable Feast" for the third time and found it disappointingly self-indulgent, the nostalgic false memories of a writer in decline. The book had not changed, only my perception of it.

In "The Paris Wife," McLain fills in the truths behind Hadley's first husband's nostalgia. Yes, Paris in the 20s was a time and place like no other with expatriate writers and artists seemingly around every corner, with museums and galleries and quiet cafes and a monetary exchange rate that allowed Americans to live cheaply. But Hemingway was not yet an iconic literary figure, and he was, even then, plagued by emotional instability and depression that would eventually cost him his life. He drank heavily, worked at a manic pace at times, and caroused wildly. He went away without his wife often and cheated on her, subduing her considerable talent in music and literature to enhance his ego. In "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway claimed to be aiming for "true" words, and Woody Allen turned those simple sentences into buffoonish dialogue in his movie, but McLain's well-researched novel shows Hemingway's quest to be self-deluding. It is McLain who finds the "true" words to describe a crumbling marriage in Paris in the 1920s.

I still find Hemingway's simple, straightforward, stark prose beautifully sculpted, but I have a clearer, truer image of the man who wrote those words.

Ernest Hemingway, 50 years later

Maybe this 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide would be a good time for me to get back to reading the author I most admired as a teenager and young adult. I had veered away from my youthful fascination with Hemingway, the hard-driving, macho writer who could turn the simplest of sentences into lines of beauty. Far more than his illustrious contemporaries, I thought Hemingway's work was the epitome of good writing, and I devoured all of his major novels and particularly loved his memoir of Paris, "A Moveable Feast."

Only after I received a hardback copy of the memoir to replace my dog-eared paperback, did I re-read the book once more and find it wanting. The story of Ernest and Hadley and baby "Bumby" and F. Puss the cat, which had seemed so alluring the first time around, now seemed a bit juvenile and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, Hemingway's terse, simple prose style has had a greater influence than any other author's on my own writing style. Hemingway honed his writing as a newspaper reporter, and I pursued a newspaper career with that thought in mind. I frequently advised young writers with Hemingway's maxim: "Write one true sentence" and then another and another.

Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner reminded me this week of Hemingway's untimely death (at my current age) and brought back my admiration and wonder of this man who, in his day, was even bigger than his fictional characters. I faintly remember the television news announcement of Hemingway's death, initially reported as an accidental shooting. At the time, I had never read any of his work. A few years later, a television viewing of the movie "A Farewell to Arms" turned me to the novel, and I was hooked.

I've not read much of Hemingway's short stories, and a volume on my bookshelf of his short fiction is now luring me. It's an appropriate way to remember him on this 50th anniversary of his death.

Students remind me of life's calling

This week, I participated in a panel discussion before a crowd of middle-school students about jobs and careers. We panel members were supposed to impress upon the impressionable students what our jobs were like and how we came to do what we do. The discussion led to something more for me — a reflection on just how I ended up at this time and place.

When I was their age, I told the students, I wanted to be an astronomer. Enthralled by the excitement of what was called The Space Age with its frequent breathless rocket launches, I read every astronomy book the county library had to offer, and I memorized minutiae about the planets, stars and galaxies. It was only when I discovered that astronomy had more to do with math than with peering through a telescope's eyepiece that I became disenchanted with that vocation. Soon after, I discovered, as I told the students, the magic of assembling words together, and I set my sights on being a writer.

Then came the admission: "I still think of myself as a writer." I had the good fortune of being paid to write every day for more than 30 years, but newspapers are going through a wrenching transformation with no certainty what the final outcome will be. The career path of writing for a newspaper or other news medium holds no promise these days. This blog and some unpublished fiction are my only outlets for exercising my writing muscles, with the exception of a few routine letters and speeches.

But if I do, indeed, still think of myself as a writer, I should take that appellation more seriously. When you work for a newspaper, I've told aspiring writers over the years, you have to write every day, or else you'll soon be out of a job. Writers need to write daily, just as athletes need to exercise and practice daily. That's not an easy thing when your time is being absorbed by so many other appointments, interests or obligations. "Life is what happens when you're busy doing other things," another writer (John Lennon) said. If I still do think of myself as a writer, I must set aside priority time to do the work that calling demands.

Hello, Paycheck, it's been a long time!

There are few things in life more affirming than the first paycheck from a new job, especially after a year of job hunting. Payday is always everyone's favorite day of the week or month, but it's a joy that you get used to and that loses its luster in repetition. Go for several months without that repetition, and notice how much more lustrous a payday seems, even though the size of the paycheck might not be the same as the one you once earned.

Two weeks into a new job, I'm still trying to find the day-to-day routine. After spending more than 30 years hurtling headlong toward a daily deadline, I find the less hurried, less anxious pace an extraordinary change. After I was laid off, I adjusted to a largely self-determined routine with the luxury of time to write. This blog received up to an hour of attention each morning, then I could turn to spinning fictional tales, which were personally rewarding, even if not marketable.

I miss the time I had for writing, the characters and the plots, but getting a paycheck is rewarding in its own profoundly affirming way.

One full year out of work

It's been a year. One year ago today was my last day at The Wilson Daily Times. I never thought I'd be unemployed for three months, much less for a year. But here I am. I've survived it all — the shock, the loss of confidence, the frustration, the bouts of depression, the anxieties, the doubts about the present and the future, the feelings of hopelessness. I've also experienced the emotional support of friends and family, the recognition of strangers who had seen my mugshot in the paper and were sorry I was gone, the reassurances of loved ones and former colleagues, and the near-miraculous juxtaposition of frugality and good fortune that has allowed my wife and me to get through the past 12 months without dipping far into our savings. I told my wife recently that it's a miracle that her income and my unemployment have covered our expenses. "It's like the loaves and fishes," she said, and I agreed.

I started this blog to feed my habit of writing about things that go on around me. It's been a useful and sometimes cathartic release valve. I've also spent a lot of time writing fiction, about 200,000 words or more in various forms over the past year. Now if I could only find a literary agent or publisher ...

At least one of the co-workers who was laid off along with me has found a job. Many others haven't. This job market is tough!

People have asked, plaintively, how I'm doing. What they want to know but cannot ask is whether we're eating regularly and paying the bills. "I'm fine," I tell them, and that's true. I've become accustomed to the new routine. I'm a full-time houseboy and yard man, a part-time writer, part-time volunteer in five different nonprofit organizations, a cook and grocery shopper, a home-maintenance handyman, a dog walker, a regular applicant to jobs posted in various places, and — most of the time — a man who is transcendentally grateful for family, friends, home and life itself. Being laid off is a terrible experience, I think anyone would tell you, but life is good.

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I have avoided this decision for the past year but today I felt compelled to eliminate anonymous comments to this blog. A few people, hiding behind anonymity, felt entitled to insult people or make vile comments they'd never say face-to-face. From now on, readers will have to register to leave a comment. Registration is simple, so don't be discouraged. I hope the result of this change will be not a loss of exchange of opinions but a more civil discussion.