I’m coming up on one year since I retired from a 34 -year teaching career, and it has flown by at warp speed.

I didn’t think it would.

I wasn’t aware of many things as I planned my retirement. At this time last year, I was still meeting with my financial adviser and getting rid of teaching supplies that I thought I’d never part with.  I had started carting a few mementos home with me, and I had finally put together scrapbooks of photos that I had stashed in a cabinet.  

In my mind, I saw myself sitting on my patio soon, puttering around the garage and yard, keeping my cars clean as a whistle, cooking meals and keeping the laundry done, and so on. Sure, I planned on doing some part-time work, but I still saw myself doing a lot of slow-moving things.

When I found out how expensive insurance was going to be after I stopped teaching, I heard the record scratch sound you hear on TV when something calm and peaceful ends. I now knew it might be necessary that I would need to find more than a part-time job as a part-time job would just about pay for insurance costs.

I had a little bit of a pity party, prayed a lot, and moved on with a brave face.

I know. “Boo hoo,” says people who are older and not retired yet. Sorry.

I am now blessed to have a part-time job in which I have days off during the week, in addition to a few side gigs (including this column). It isn’t the same as the tranquil picture I had in my head, but I’m adjusting. 

Plus, I don’t grade papers anymore. There’s that.

Part of the image in my head was sitting on the couch or standing in the kitchen, folding laundry or working on a project while I watched television on those days off. Television has largely been an appointment-type thing for many years, and now I’d be able to watch any time I wanted to on my days off.  

But I realized something the other day: daytime television is boring. I kid you not, on a local news/variety show, I watched someone put paint into a Ziploc bag along with a small canvas.  After that, pet rabbits were allowed to hop around on the Ziploc to paint a pretty picture.

It was at that point that the relaxing image of watching daytime TV evaporated. Slow day for feature segments, I guess.

I realized that sitting around isn’t as fun as it sounded, and there’s only so much of it that one can do before you get almost catatonic. However, once you’ve sat for a while, you are almost in such a stupor that you can’t get up. 

After realizing this, in a state of alarm, I ran out the front door and pulled weeds for half an hour and then went into the garage and swept the floor. Then I drove up to the car wash and vacuumed the car, stopped at the store for a jug of iced tea, and drove back home to wheel the trash cans out for the next day.  

All are mundane tasks, but tasks that I could do during the day while everyone else was at work.  

So, there’s that.

I also see that things aren’t as fast-paced as they used to be.  I still have some stress from time to time, but nothing like it was when I was teaching. Plus, the constant need to completely finish a job isn’t there like it used to be. It seems like most things I do lately can be revisited tomorrow if I don’t finish today.  

Then again, I probably accomplished more when my time was limited, before I retired.

Now, it’s still fun to take long breaks in this retirement life. It’s still fun to have a second cup of coffee and watch another rerun or two, or an old movie. When you have a day stretching before you, with things to do but nothing pressing or on a schedule, you tend to think maybe you’ve at least harnessed a little of that fairy-tale retirement image you had in your head.

But I wish the insurance fairy would be part of that story; she hasn’t shown up yet.