What Do Yu Do When You're Retired?

My hosts at dinner last night are thinking of retiring and asked me what it was like.  I had to think; 1997 was a long time ago.  But, yes, I remember that no one called me on the telephone from the office, and the one time I communicated a piece of advice, the reply was "We always welcome your suggestions," an elegant way of saying "fuck off."  I moved back to Cambridge where Richard was already living in my house because he had taken a very wonderful job teaching in a first rate suburban high school.  So I became a landlord in New York until I could stand it no longer, and sold. Meanwhile we kept Richard's studio as a piede a terre, and spent all our energies, or rather he did, converting the two family house in Cambridge into a very large one family.  I say "we," façon de parler, since Richard's carpentry skills was doing all the work.  But let's say it was the first major distraction in my retirement.  Then we bought the house in Hull, January 1999, and that summer converted a large lot with nary a tree, shrub, or blossom on it into the beginnings of the shady elegant italianate rose garden we have today.  The summer of 1999 was a backbreaker!  And the garden henceforth is like an over energetic child who needs our parental supervision putting on too much weight (all that pruning), going out with the wrong people (where do these weeds keep coming from?) acquiring mysterious ailments (oh, the red beetles are back!). I was going to be 70 in 2000, and did not want it remarked upon, so I enrolled in a language school in Cuernavaca Mexico for five weeks, living with a family, not speaking a word of English the whole time, and spent the actual birthday with fellow students who were kept ignorant of the fact wandering around Taxco. Then a former student, now the publisher of Hyperion, suggested for a trade book a mock autobiography of Odyssseus which was totally fun to write, and I proudly saw it published in 2004.  2006 was occupied with writing up a chapter on Gilgamesh for a new edition of Ancient Epic Poetry which required a lot of preliminary study.  Just before the financial meltdown of 2008 I sold the house in Cambridge and we  moved into an apartment preparatory to moving into an old folks apartment to nursing home "experience." But that went bust  and so I  took some money and bought us a condo in  Sarasota FL and we started to prepare a life of "snow birds" as Richard retired with six months in the warm climate.  Turns out we love it; lots to do in  Sarasota, one of the most significant is hours at the gym!.  2011 I wrote My Husband and My Wives and that came out in 2012 and I did a few readings.  And in between Richard and I go abroad at least once a year, to Tokyo, one time. Paris, another, Sicily and so on and so forth.  As long as our health holds . . . . . .(we're keeping our fingers crossed!)