TIME TO GET AT IT

I have crashed.

This is really a special message for all my “google” members, the ones who responded with Emails just over a year ago, to my “celebration” of my 80th birthday by having my hip replaced.. Many have dropped from sight and my blob, where this appears, has been only lightly visited by some of you. You haven’t missed a whole lot – just the usual Solway rants about injustice, misunderstanding, bad grammar, and a potpourri of imagined concerns. I say “imagined” because I always tried to believe that we share concerns about the world, the people in it, and the relationships we have and hold.

I crashed today. My wife and I were in the car on a few errands, medical supplies, a stop at our accountant, and then the coup de grace: half an hour in Loblaw’s buying foods that are approved by Dr. Bernstein, he of the Spartan weight loss diet.
That was it.

All my “Looking Forward” ideals have taken a turn for the lazies. All the good intentions I had, based on “Don’t Be Blindsided by Retirement,”
Seem to have evaporated.

When I said to my wife: “We’ve really done nothing today.” She insisted that occupying our time running a few errands was not a waste. I say it was, because we were simply filling time – WHICH IS NOT WANT GROWING OLDER AND LOOKING AHEAD IS ALL ABOUT!
The book I co-wrote was a primer for the retired and soon-to-be’s My whole reason to writing it was to explore, with others like me, the problems and pitfalls inherent in later years. Aside from the obvious: managing health and finances, is the most important: that you must not lose structure. According to what I wrote, you must avoid sitting around reminiscing about what used to be, and bemoaning the state of to-day’s generation with their Blackberries and Text Messaging and IPods hard-wired-wired to their brains.

I think the dawn broke fully yesterday. As some of you know, I returned to University a few years ago to get the undergraduate degree I missed out on. After a couple of years, I dropped out. It was because I thought I was a little too old to anguish, a 3 o’clock in the morning (!) over a deadline for a History essay or an English exam.

Perhaps I could get advanced standing, based on life experience, and go directly into a Master’s program, probably in History. (I’m fascinated by the ay the world went from the French Revolution when despotism fell to 1919, when most of what remained of feudalism evaporated.).

So I visited with Sheldon Levy, the chancellor of Ryerson University. I found a kindred spirit. He told me he was anxious about it his own retirement... Soon he would be without structure, without a reason to leap out of bed every morning, without people depending on him and without having important decisions to make.

It’s easy to lose your way when there are no signposts, maps, or directions signals. You find that there are some days when you “forget” to shave, or find that at 5 o’clock y9our are still in your bathrobe. You haven’t cracked a book in days. Your piano lessons are going to waste because you don’t practice enough... You wallow like a lizard in the sun in front of the TV. Everything you told yourself you had to do to stay focused and have a reason to jump out of bed in the morning for – gone.

Dr, Levy asked if I would be interested in giving a few lectures. I think he meant to the Continuing Education Department and I guess he wanted something about surviving retirement.

I experienced the same anxiety I used to get because a school essay was not finished.
It was only different in that the essay would have substance, and I was not sure I could fill an hour hectoring people about getting off their asses. Is there 60 minutes of meat in that? To many of the most widely respected motivational speakers, there is. They can babble for hours about my topic” Looking Ahead.

I realize that this come as a long whine to many of you, many who are going through the same process. I realize I am busy feeling sorry for myself.

I realize that I have enough excuses to go around. I just had my gall bladder removed.
My new hip isn’t ready to the double black diamond hills. I sold my wife’s tricycle because she hates it. My own new recumbent bike is sitting with flat tires in the garage.
Worst of all, I have neglected the one thing that is right at my fingertips to do any time I went to: my Blog. I have written one piece in the last several weeks. I want to comment on another of those “let 'em eat cake” type pieces. This one by a Wall Street guru who believes that “bailing” people out is not good for them, and that we have to learn thrift, planning, and thoughtfulness. It’s easy for the wealthy to tell those on the precarious edge to shape up, tighten your belts, and try to live through it.

\I didn’t write it.

In the same vein was a slightly reminiscent piece about how in my earliest days in radio I learned about consumerism and the way it makes the free market system work. \

Didn’t write that either,

Fear not, I may have crashed – but I did not burn. I’m coming back.