Staying Fit
Here’s a dirty little secret: At age 67, I joined a garden club.
Not long ago, the idea of secluding myself in a church hall with a bunch of silver-haired dowagers who insist on proper botanical nomenclature (genus and species) would have been unthinkable.
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Not me. Not the hard-charging journalist who chased tough stories from tornadoes to triple murders to terror attacks.
Yet here I am, squirming in a folding chair as a lecturer drones on about how to grow unusual herbs for French culinary sauces I will never make.
How did I get here?
Two years ago, I retired. With a nudge from a neighbor, I joined the club to grow my skills as a floral designer. I had no interest in making a killer béarnaise, but I wanted to branch out, so to speak. (And shame on me, a bottle blond, for throwing shade on the club’s gray-heads.)
On April Fools’ Day, 2022 — no joke — I retired from AARP. My work as a writer and editor here focused on elder fraud, and I was gratified to help victims and alert others to this unconscionable scourge. I also wrote about Alzheimer’s research, centenarians and the catastrophic toll on older Americans of Northern California's Camp Fire, among other stories.
After four adrenalin-fueled decades of news reporting, my years at AARP were a cool-down phase. I was no longer on call 24/7. Even better, working for a nonprofit representing 38 million fellow older Americans proved a master class in retirement. I was in “pretirement” when I started, and I learned from the experts I interviewed and from those colleagues I spoke to for their stories about health, fitness, personal finance — you name it.
At a staff gathering six months into the job, I heard a talk on how to live to be 100. Among the speaker’s exhortations: Have a “playful, joyful retirement.”
Right afterward, I got a call from my oldest brother announcing that he was retiring. In light of our roll-up-your-sleeves upbringing, I was stunned. But I parroted the lecturer, wishing my sibling a playful, joyful retirement.
Thus, the seed was planted.
No poster child
Let me be clear that I am not an AARP-sanctioned poster child for retirement. No such person exists. AARP aims to empower people to choose how they live as they age. As we approach the off-ramp of our working years, our health, family and finances may be radically different from the next person’s. Everyone’s retirement is theirs alone.
I chose April 1 to call it quits for two reasons: I would never forget the date, and, mischievously, I wanted one last laugh as I bade farewell to the 9-to-5, the cubicle farm, the deadlines and the annual performance reviews (which, as a mature professional, I had come to loathe).
My finances seemed on solid footing. I had a modest newspaper pension and could rely on my husband’s paycheck. I would take a buzz saw to household spending, put off Social Security and not touch our nest egg.
When D-Day (Departure Day) rolled around, I laughed, cried, listened to tributes and gave what my colleagues called a funny speech. I was happier than an inmate being sprung from the big house. I would be out of the office — forever — and freed from the shackles of full-time toil. I’d worked since childhood, first at my family’s long-running restaurant outside Chicago and later in retail and for the U.S. Postal Service, among other places.
Ah, hubris. In the months to come I would learn that, much like other important endeavors — grieving, staying married, shaving my legs — there are stages to retirement. These were mine.
Stage 1: Euphoria
I had won the lottery. Every morning I could ignore the alarm my husband set and do whatever I wanted. My life seemed ripped from the script of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.