A Minnesota teacher, retired at last

After 24 years of teaching English classes at Lakewood/Century College (31 years altogether, counting all the colleges where I've worked), after facing 5,000 students (at least!) in composition and literature classes, after grading 30,000 (by my conservative estimate) examinations and papers, I have retired.

Like so many of my friends, I've been set free to do whatever I want to do, and nothing I don't. When my friend Mary, a retired professor and amateur flutist who's always rushing off to another rehearsal, calls to invite me to a Thursday-morning concert, I won't be saying, "I'd like to be there, but I have to work." Now I can say, "Save me a seat!" (Unless, of course, she and Jonathan are playing in the ensemble, as they often are, and I have to reserve my own seat in the audience.)

When my retired friend Bill invites me to tour the latest exhibit at the American Swedish Institute on Tuesday morning, followed by a leisurely lunch, I won't be saying, "I have classes and office hours until 3 on Tuesdays." I'll be touring and lunching, leisurely.

Like all my retired friends, I'll probably be busier than I was when I was working, but I'll be busy by choice, able to clear my morning, my day, my week, my month with a few phone calls.

When I see in the mind's eye the bike trails of northern Minnesota, or the tree-shaded streets of the small Iowa towns where I grew up, or the mountains of Colorado or the beaches of the Oregon coast or the ancient blooming February lanes of St. Augustine, Fla., I don't have to sigh and turn back to the pile of papers I'm in the middle of grading; I can hitch up my little Scamp RV and follow my heart's desire.

And because my late wife encouraged me to choose a good pension plan and to put as much of my income as possible into tax-sheltered retirement accounts, I don't have the financial worries that trouble so many of the soon-to-be or would-be retired.

And my health is good, aside from a little osteoarthritis in the knees, a legacy of a lifetime of biking and hiking. I have a good medical plan and, knock on wood, the prospect of years of active retirement.

It's not a strong, pervasive, life-darkening dread. It's the hopelessness when I wake up in the morning, the feeling that the day is not worth beginning, that none of the things I have to do is worth doing, or even doable.

It's the fear with each new twinge or spot or tremor that this is the beginning of the slow degenerative condition that will finally, after years of growing helplessness, end it all.

It's the fondness with which I remember the dread-free past, and the feeling that the best years are over, and it's all downhill from here.

The dread mostly departs after my first cup of coffee, or a bit of talking sense to myself — the spot is often washable.

And I remind myself that I don't remember the dread I felt during my fondly remembered past because I know how things turned out, that the dread I felt then was of possibilities that didn't happen, which was mostly the case, or of actualities that I survived, usually in better shape than before. So I don't remember the dread, and feel nostalgia, and wish that this present transitional phase were as happy and dread-free as the others. But the dread was there.

I want to say to this kid: Look, you're beginning four of the happiest years of your life. You're going to make friends you'll still have 50 years later (your future friend Mary is playing her flute in the college band at this very moment). You're about to encounter Plato and Falstaff and Natty Bumppo and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You're going to meet the woman with whom you'll spend 30 happy-together, unhappy-together years of your life, with whom you'll raise two wonderful children. You'll begin preparing for a long and rewarding career of teaching and research and writing.

So cheer up, kid; the best is yet to be.

I remember this kid, and the dread all but completely disappears. Then I remember that I'm now much closer to the end of my life than that 18-year-old was, an end that has inspired dread in just about every thinking human being. Maybe a certain amount of dread is unavoidable; maybe a small manageable amount of dread is a sensible response to a sometimes dreadful world.

And it may be that this world that, to my great surprise, I found myself in nearly 70 years ago, this wonderful, terrible, preposterously unlikely and obviously unfinished world, really is the prelude to something greater.

And I remember the words of Saul of Tarsus, a k a St. Paul, a man who had more reason to dread the future than most: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us."

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