The Wilderness of Summer

I only have 20 minutes of grades left to do, so, in effect, summer has come. For one of the few times in the last decade or so, I can look forward to an extended period of time with no one's academic clock to govern my activities.

A colleague of mine recently mulled over what she would do when she retired, trying, I think to convince herself that no longer teaching would be okay--she would be able to keep herself busy.
"There are so many books I want to read," she said. Yes, I thought, but at a book roughly every two weeks, you can go through 20-25 books a year, and within a couple of years have used up most of those books you really want to read.

What would I do? This summer is another beginning of retirement, like temporary retirement. I will be writing music, practicing the tuba, going to rehearsals, maybe the occasional gig. There seems to be no end of activities that renew themselves day by day, phone call by phone call, idea by idea. Instead of just reading novels, why not write some? Even if they don't get published (I wrote seven, and not one has seen print), it's the writing itself that matters.

The people next door spend their time keeping their yard neat and watching television. Their yard looks very nice. But there's got to be more to free time than trimming the jasmine plants with a scissors.