The end of my first week of retirement...

I have just completed the first grueling week of my retirement.  I know, my one reader will wonder how I jumped from two months to go and the many domestic and structural surprises I encountered each evening when I came home, to the present moment where I am stretched out on a lounge chair in a post World Cup stupor, under a welter of fans trying to keep cool.  And now, with a cold compress on my forehead, I find myself wondering if my first fearful question about my ability to cope with both leisure and the loss of the thrill of my job, asked ten months ago, has been answered.

Let’s deal with the latter problem first; the thrill of the job.  A characteristic of June in education has traditionally been its winding-down quality.  Exams done, the students leave us in peace and people start coming to work in flip flops, in direct contravention of Health and Safety admonitions, and pottering around in a leisurely fashion.  People have time to talk. In the hallway, you hear happy voices raised saying “I’m going for sushi…anyone want anything?”  Then on the second to last day a mad flap of handing the little darlings their report cards and yearbooks, a weenie roast to bid adieu to the retirees and the annual legions of the laid-off, and then an eerie silence descends upon the place.   By noon the school is empty except for the management, and the whorls of dust in the slanted shafts of sunlight.

Not this June.  This June the teachers’ union broke the tension of a 3 month work to rule, the upside of which was no meetings with management…and brought their teachers out to the picket line.  I always used to wonder when big auto company workers went on strike and management were left to make cars, how they did it.  In fact I always wondered if the lemons I kept buying WERE cars made by management.  I never realized till this strike what a lot of swanning about signing papers and smiling encouragingly to the workers my job involved.  While the hapless teachers were out impoverishing themselves in the sun, in a doomed effort make the government see reason, we, the management,  were inside the darkened school emptying garbage bins, shifting heavy boxes off the sidewalk because unionized drivers wouldn’t drive into the receiving area, doing everyone’s marks, running exams that in a normal year take 20 people to do, moving furniture, cleaning things, and waiting for our keepers at HQ to shoot along any good news they might hear.  

Twice a day we went to the picket line with donuts and coffee, hoping their keepers had good news.  The union had nothing to offer but strident and hopeful solidarity, and Head Office news consisted mainly of instructions to present ourselves to mark exams all weekend, and get prepared to teach summer school.  No hope for an end to the strike.  Honestly, if 4 of us could do the work of the 120 or so staff that usually populate my former school, I can’t see why we bother with all that hiring and laying off we’re so fond of.

Needless to say, by the end of the first week of July, when I handed my keys to my successor, I felt I needed to go to a sanatorium in the Alps to recover.  Which brings me to the  ‘leisure’ part. Within the first two days, ‘would I come for drinks?’ X 1, ‘would we come for dinner?’ X3, would we take the kids? X 4, 'would I consider coming back to the mothership for a little contract work later in the fall?' X1.  Tucked in among those are doctors, tax men, a children's birthday party and the search for a new phone provider, as I am no longer able to sponge off my employer.  I honestly think I’ll need another week before I can speak authoritatively on the subject of leisure in retirement.