ForumGarden

My husband just retired. He tried working 10 months past his 65th birthday as a Courier Driver in Vancouver, and decided to throw the towl in after nearly 20 years in this City. Mainly, it was due to the Olympics, because the Company nor the City had any steadfast plans for Couriers. So be it, he decided to call it quits. Since then he has acquired the job of Resident Care Taker for the building because the now caretakers have sold their place and are leavinb.

He get about $375 tax free for doing very little. The problem is, I hear every detail of filling up salt and pepper shakers in the house, and little things like that, that I never gave a thought to when I took days off for a mental health day to do things like that even though he worked. Now, he cooks too, and there are a few good things, but as far as tonite, it was not so great. I am not a good liar.

Need hints to lie - please help!!

Does he have a dormant interest that might take him out of the house if you goaded him into taking it up again? Or, alternatively, have you one you could get out for? Either would re-establish a more welcome pattern to the day.

Playing keno, which would defeat retiring!! LOL He is such a sweet man, and I did not mean to sound so krass, I just could not believe, that stuff like this was so important to him!

I can't speak of your husband obviously, I've never had the good fortune to talk with him. As a generalization though, the first few months of retirement are potentially so stressed as to be lethal. People can drift into it thinking wow, finally I can sit back, only to face introspection, depression and a sense of ultimate futility. They contrast their virile former selves, poling timber down rapids in the early spring, wrestling round camp fires with their chums, with the apparently cramped and diminishing potential of the future.

What I had in mind was that if, perhaps, he'd talked for decades of a desire to put on evening dress and authoritatively conduct Wagnerian opera to enormous applause, now would be a good time to buy him new cuff-links and a baton.