I haven't posted since May --during which time a member of my family received his graduate degree from Yale, and my spouse and I travelled to Scotland for three weeks, including ten days on a small boat in the Outer Hebrides. I retired from my position as a librarian. I have been preparing our house for sale and moving to Philadelphia.
This blog began in 2010 with my views about books, e-books, and readers. Then it was on the Typepad platform. Since then I have posted sometimes regularly and other times hardly at all, migrated to WordPress, and expanded my comments beyond my concerns as a librarian. I've had hardly any readers, nor sought them. I wrote this for my own thinking, my pleasure as a writer, and modest contribution for whomever might read it. I am from the generation which does not post deeply personal remarks on a public platform of any kind, so this is neither a diary nor an intellectual autobiographical sketch. It's merely a set of remarks.
So where do I go with this now? Retirement has freed me from having to be more diplomatic about the retrograde views of the administrative leadership of my previous academic employer. I certainly don't miss the commute and the daily experience of feeling insulted and devalued by a University leadership that could find no serious money to put into a library, nor will nor imagination to do so. I don't want to settle scores, though; that's old news.
Extensible might come to mean librarianship extended and transformed in my life into something not originally intended—observations on becoming more of a writer and less of a leader. The disciplines of a librarian: thoughtfulness, order, consistency, intelligibility, might serve me well with a new focus.
Recently I read Steven Petrow's hilarious and provocative Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. As the subtitle promises, it is highly judgmental, unapologetically honest, and sometimes very funny By the end Petrow turns much more empathetic than one might have predicted. It's a take-down, but not just a take-down. It's a mind-the-gap notice, but an entertaining one.
In my forties I once heard a wise older person say, "Be careful who you are when you're middle aged, because you only become more so when you're old." Anyone can find examples of people whose characters, as they age, tilt towards their negative traits and away from their previous more positive. That's a well-taken warning.
I do worry a bit about living away from younger people, since I spent my career on university campuses. I have already heard older people dismiss the very real mental health images of young, post-pandemic adults as mere whinging "snowflakes." I don't want to lose emotional sensitivity, flexibility, and empathy. I watched those qualities ebb in my mother as she lived with chronic pain in her later years —and pain can eat away at you. Still, plenty of people experience chronic daily pain and resist becoming judgmental. Working with young people took me out of myself, and I want to find a way to continue that appropriately.
Now that our house is on the market, and prepared for the market, I have a moment to pause and to feel retired, perhaps for the first time since August, when I officially left my post. Freedom, uprooting, moving, the space to write can be threatening, and I need to give myself some time for this transition. (And I've hardly had that time.)
Quo ibis? Quo vadis? I'm only now finding out, and I look forward to the journey through the later years of my life.
Shout-out to Mary Beard, whose blog has paralleled my own transition to retirement. (It is, unfortunately, pay-walled by TLS.) In her case it was pretty much forced by English law and academic custom. I had the relative freedom to chose my time after my spouse qualified for Medicare. I worked several years later than Mary has done, and I'm glad for it, and was ready to go all the same. Thanks, Mary!