Retirement Hobbies

Beware the inspired new retiree. After they have spent a year or two figuring out how to sign up for Medicare, these individuals will likely dive into that creative hobby they always wanted to pursue with near-religious fervor. The difference between a creative profession and a creative retirement hobby is that retired hobbyists have no carefully constructed audience (from a lifetime of achievement). Their audience is merely a close circle of supportive family and friends and a chatty couple with a cute Chihuahua whom they met while waiting on line at the pharmacy.

So, basically, when Mom retires and decides in a brilliant lightening-flash of genius to take up painting, her children had better begin clearing wall space for those paintings. Just when they have filled the walls with the scribble-scrabble produced by their children, they will be laid siege to an army of masterpieces by Mom, because what else will she do with the output from all her newfound creative productivity? Watercolors of wildflower-blanketed meadows, birds with eerily human expressions, picturesque streams running through forests, and her cat (repeatedly) in one of the three typical aging-cat  poses:  sleeping, eating, sitting up while pondering sleeping or eating. (Isn’t she the most adorable cat?) Mom can only give so many of these paintings away to the Chihuahua couple (and perhaps the pharmacist if the pharmacist makes the mistake of showing enough interest) and after that it’s all on her adult children.

Expect a similar outcome from the avid retired photographer, potter, glassblower, sculptor in large metal, jeweler, maker of wooden walking sticks, bird cage weaver, pajama knitter, tie-dyed shoestrings artist, whatever. Hope that your retired family member doesn’t develop unusual dietary interests, such as vegan juicing. Only a retiree has the time to clean a juicer.

If the retiree decides to learn to play the piano, then chances are you will have weeks and weeks of “Fur Elise” to look forward to, and after that the avid new musician will move on to ruining “The Spinning Song” for you. That piece is insidious. You will need to hire a professional pest removal company to get “The Spinning Song” out of your head once it gains traction. Although, it could be worse. Your darling retiree could take up the trombone, which doesn’t make any sound recognizable as music for several years in the hands of a novice. (Trust me on this, I speak from experience.) In fact, if you live near a forested area, hide a trombone from any enthusiastic retiree musician before he inadvertently summons a herd of wild pigs to take up residence, yearning for another uncanny replica of the mating call to emerge from that trombone.

You never know what exciting diversion will capture the fancy of an enthusiastic retiree. If you thought they would finally organize all the photographs, find and fix that weird problem with the plumbing, start growing herbs and making curative tinctures, or take up cooking gourmet French cuisine, then think again. No. They will start weaving homemade steel wool, become obsessed with nut-related limericks, alphabetize the canned food in the pantry, and decorate all the light switch faceplates with clown faces. It’s as if the practicality bone disintegrates at the stroke of midnight on retirement day one. Granted every once in a long while a geriatric genius becomes a superstar in their old age, like Grandma Moses. But don’t count on it in your own family.

This train of thought reminds me of a time, back in the day (in the previous century, I’m sad to say), when I was a college student working toward my degree in English, I had a good friend, also an English grad student, whom I will call Daisy. Daisy and I believed the naysayers who convinced us that we would never make a living from our first love, which was writing. So we frequently brainstormed fun professions we could enter to support ourselves while we each wrote our own version of The Great American Novel in our off-work hours. More practical than Daisy, I planned to work as a carpenter because I didn’t yet know the rampant sexism I would face in that trade. Daisy, on the other hand, would come up with the most hair-brained schemes. For a while she seriously thought she could earn a living as a cheese taster. She had read in a magazine article while waiting to get her teeth cleaned that big cheese companies hired tasters to give feedback on product quality. She even dragged me to a Cracker Barrel cheese outlet once to taste all the flavors for practice. I could see her point that it seemed like the right profession for us, since we both love cheese. But we never did figure out how to convince someone to pay us to eat it.

The one thing that stuck with me from these speculations about career opportunities with Daisy was an addiction to reading the classified ads, back before Craigslist ruined all the fun. I loved to see what other people did for a living and how much they could get paid for it, so I read the job listings in the newspaper every week for years, even long after I had established myself on a sound career path. It turned out that we had nothing to worry about because Daisy and I both used our English education to become professional writers; and we have both made a good living at it. I am not retired from the profession, but I have begun to consider what I will do in retirement if I ever manage to get there. I’ll probably just keep writing because I don’t know how to stop. Little did I know that all those years reading job opportunity listings would prepare me for this time in my life when my friends are retiring around me and taking up surprising crafts, such as refrigerator magnet collage or beading garage door opener pouches. The want ads taught me that people can make a living doing the darnedest things.

All this said, I think my retirement hobby, should I ever have enough money to retire, will be making chocolate. Organic dark chocolate. My loved ones won’t have to hang it on the walls, listen to it, wear it, or keep a garage door opener in it. And since, sadly, climate-change scientists predict that land suitable for growing cacao will be disappearing in the coming decades (because of warmer temperatures destroying the cacao habitat), I think it behooves us to eat as much organic dark chocolate as possible while it’s still available on the planet in order to appreciate this magical food given to us by the Creator before it ceases to exist. So chocolate it will be. However, if you or anyone you know will pay me to eat cheese, message me privately.