New Story

Last week started out full of stress.  I guess that's what happens when you have too much work and also have a family trip planned.

But, sometimes stress can lead to good things.  One night while trying to wind down and get to sleep a thought for the beginning of a new story came to mind.  Who knows when inspiration will come?

So for your consideration, "I began planning my escape the day I turned fifty years old."

As I have talked with other people near my age this thought seems to hit some kind of a chord.  I'm not sure what it is but the most common reaction is laughter accompanied by a nodding of the head.

We are not of the me generation or the x or y generation.  We are the tail end of the baby boomers.  Most of us are not quite at the age to retire and the more I talk with people even fewer of us are ready to retire.

I remember graduating from high school and going out to look for a full-time job.  There were two factories in our area.  The first was a paper products finishing plant. This included packing and shipping.  They weren't hiring.  The second was the manfacturer of moblie and modular homes.  They were hiring but I was neither a skilled carpenter nor an electrician.  So my first job out of high school was at the grocery store.  Because I was out of high school and not attending college I got the day shift and I was usually scheduled to work at least thirty hours a week.  Quite a treat.

At about the same time I was visiting with my paternal grandfather who had some advice for me.  He said, "Find a job, work there the next twenty or thirty years and then retire."  I'm sure he thought this was sound advice, he had just retired after twenty-five years with the City and now he and my grandmother were living in their retirement home on the Colorado River.

At the time I thought that was terrible advice.  I didn't want to go to work for some company for the next twenty years or more.  I wanted to travel, I wanted to try different things.  I didn't want to just settle down.

Hindsight is wonderful and a curse.  Looking back my grandfather's advice wasn't so bad.  I have friends and know others who followed my grandfather's advice.  Here they are at fifty-five years of age and retired.  Some of them have even retired twice.  And what am I doing.  I'm getting up each morning and heading out the door to work, taking orders from people younger than me and hoping that the next round of layoffs don't have my name on them, again.

On the plus side I have traveled, some.  I have expereinced new and different things, not always by my choice.  I haven't just settled down.

So, like many others of my generation I will continue working, while plainning, dreaming about, my escape.  Hoping that one day my numbers will come up.  The only problem there is in order to win the numbers you have to play them.