"I Need A Project"

Several years ago colleague of mine, a decade older and thus further along on the road to ruin, was regaling me over lunch with the story of maneuvering with his wife the Frankfurt airport terminals, being pushed in his wheelchair first by a stewardess from the airplane, then by a young lady from the express train that was to take them north to an island where he had summered since he was a boy in the late twenties.  I softly remonstrated at the enormous effort and general anguish this trip always produced to which he memorably replied in his wonderful Berliner English "What am I supposed to do?  Sit on the sofa until the stroke comes along to do me in?"  In the end, poor fellow, overcome by blindness and deafness, that's precisely what he did, raging against the emptiness and his impotence.  One of my dearest friends, at some point in her progress to her death at 97 complained to me: "I need a project."  I was amused at the time.  Although I was conscious as well that she had employed her time continuously since her official retirement turning out hand produced elegant small books of great distinction, I did not quite understand how this really rather old woman thought she had the physical strength, the necessary professional contacts, the mental acumen to do something quite so demanding.  And now, here am I.  I need a project.  When I retired from the classroom twenty years ago, I knew that enough was enough, and a semester substituting for a suddenly incapacitated professor at Tufts, lecturing on Euripidean tragedy, and (oh, horror!) reading student papers again, reinforced that decision.  I could not stand the lecturing, could not stand the students, and, really, truth to tell, bored to tears with classical antiquity or at least "professing" it.  I had amused myself in the previous two decades writing a few novels; I decided that I would take that up seriously.  But nothing I wrote passed muster with the many professionals in the publishing industry who generously agreed to offer judgement.  Then a publisher suggested writing the life of Odysseus, and a year or so of busy work ensued.  Somehow along the way enough speaking gigs and the subsequent publication of the lectures filled in the background of what seemed to be an engaged life.  Then there was the project of taking up a condo in Sarasota, and then surprise! a  publisher came with an offer to publish a memoir that I had shown him a couple decades earlier.  More time filled up with writing, and this time with some appearances at bookstores after publication.  That definitely signified that I was an author, you see.  And now we are selling the house with the garden.  No more weeding, deadheading, tending to plants.  Florida full time.  But wait.  What to do?  No talent at fiction, haven't considered researching anything from antiquity for so long that the field has long since left me behind, actually totally unmoved by dipping into Greek texts.  Cannot imagine picking up the Aeneid and trying to finish making sense of my ideas about Virgil and Apollonios, ideas twenty or thirty years old by now, for God's sake.  I need a project.  Maybe I will teach a course on ancient tragedy, on a volunteer basis, of course, to a classroom of retirees who are enrolled in an academy doing something they call lifetime learning.  Is that a project?