Psychology 101: Old guy compares life after retirement to childhood. As Lucy
said in Peanuts, the doctor is in. This diagnosis bears about as much credibility
as Lucy’s, but her diagnosis cost a nickel as I recall, and at least this one is free.
In life, hopefully we are granted a long
span of years. I am sixty-seven now, and in reasonably good health, so unless some nasty disease has my name on it unbeknownst
to me, I may be able to count on maybe another fifteen years or until my eighties. That
is if heredity counts, as my parents both made it into their eighties. So with
the fall weather approaching and melancholia blowing in the air along with the leaves, I have become philosophical about it
all, life up to now that is. I have come up with this conclusion. It occurs to me that childhood up until middle teens, and old age after retirement is linked in this one
marvelous way. Parallel frames of mind it seems to me existed within me fifty
some years ago and now in the next century. I feel a connection with that boy’s
feelings then as I do with the old guy he has become. With a waiver from argument
that the childhood we are comparing is one which was not one of those, ‘when I grew up on the east side of New York’,
kind of childhoods, but a normal not too traumatic regular kind that most of us were lucky enough to have been granted; and
an equal length of years in retirement. As I recall, and I will presume to speak
for all of us, it’s my ink; my childhood while not idyllic was certainly close enough to what I think idyllic means. My parents came out of the depression so money was not plentiful, but there must have
been enough or my parents hid their distress from me very well. My frame of mind
then, as best I can recall, give me a little latitude please, was one of contentment with no thoughts of having to make decisions
which unbeknownst to me were lurking just around the corner. But I couldn’t
see around corners and was content and happy living in the world as it was presented to me, either the real world or the world
my parents made for me, either way I was happy. This parallels exactly the feelings
I have had from retirement to the present day. I am content, happy, worry free,
and angst free. I again refuse to look too far around that corner. I am not an idiot, I know around that corner I don’t want to look around is aging and all it’s
possible horrendous possibilities. Those possibilities, or course are illness
and since we not figured out anyway of dodging it, death. But being an adult
and having a reasonably usable brain I have developed a faith that is my own private faith that even then I will enter another
parallel existence of contentment and happiness.
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