Things seem to all come along in decades.
The 60s were my formative years as a teenager growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans. I lived in a neighborhood full of old live oak trees. I had all my crushing adolescent sports failures then. I was good student, I had a stamp collection I prized. Few friends, but an innate and flowering curiosity about life and people that persists thankfully to this day, along with an unending thirst for knowledge and the wisdom to find peace with myself and whatever awaits me in the next life.
The 70s were undergraduate college years, when I was an English major discovering literature and the humanities in all its richness and variety. I began my newspaper career. I had close friends.
The 80s were topsy turvy. That was the decade of my teaching career with years spent in graduate school working on, and completing, two master’s degrees. It was also during that decade when I was in my 30s that I embarked on a series of road trips around the country over a span of ten years because I was so unsettled and always between jobs, in grad school, or looking for jobs. I polished up and revised my resume quite a few times during those years.
During those years of the 70s and 80s, I discovered that I was a good writer, journalist and teacher, but also learned painfully what types of teaching jobs I was not suited for.
The 90s enabled me to pull together all the strands of my previous work experiences and synthesize them, so to speak. That fateful decade started out with great uncertainty and moved into turmoil, continued unemployment, and debilitating depression before stabilizing into my final career path, along which I finally discovered what I was probably most suited to do next to journalism and teaching — becoming a reference librarian and finishing my work life in a public library. That perfectly tailored job allowed me to do a bit of teaching along the way, often during the course of an average work day.
A ten-year milestone is important in another sense. Back in 1995 I marked a decade in the apartment that I dearly loved, and which was the perfect place for me at the time. It was “home” in every sense of the word. It was a quiet complex set a couple of blocks away from the busy thoroughfare that was my gateway to everywhere. It looked and felt exactly like a peaceful residential neighborhood, except all the buildings were the same. It had abundant trees, including a small oak tree that turned fiery red every Fall.
I am reflecting now on how much that two-bedroom apartment was transformed in the 15 years I lived there. When I moved in I had been out of work for a long time, was financially insecure, and had only a few boxes of books and memorabilia, a single gerber daisy, a bed and a few pieces of furniture. Over the course of those 15 years, the apartment became overcrowded and stuffed with books, papers, magazines, and much more memorabilia. Life in a nutshell.
Many think it’s sheer folly to keep paying rent, but I come back again and again to the fact that I was happy where I lived then, and happy now in my 55+ apartment community, where there are trees all around, a Nature path alongside a tidal creek and small expanse of marsh, and a small deck over the creek to sit out on during sunsets as the colors of the sky reflect in the slow-moving creek. There are no property taxes to pay and maintenance is included in the rent.
My immediate surroundings are quiet, and there are peaceful streets and sidewalks were I can take long walks in back of where I live in an older suburb that dates to 1946. I have come to cherish the changing of the seasons in this one small spot on earth that has been my home since 2022.
My walls are full of framed photographs that I have taken, especially of sunset marshes and other favorite landscape photos, some dating back many years.
The ten years from 2000-2009 witnessed my exponential use of the new technologies wrought by the Internet. I could write volumes about this life-altering period of my life, as I’m sure many others who didn’t grow up with the Internet could do as well.
From 2010-2020 I was consumed by caregiving for my mother, who had dementia, and by the last six years of my librarian career. When an author chose as a title for her book, “The 36-Hour-Day,” I knew exactly what she was talking about. In those years, I fortunately had excellent health because I took care of myself as well as Mom, but also I experienced what I can only describe as superhuman or divinely enabled energy, vitality, patience and love for my mother in spite of the often dreadful and life-sapping setbacks and deterioration she experienced as her dementia and diabetes got worse. I now look back on those ten years as the most rewarding and fulfilling years of my life.
Now, as the New Year 2026 nears, I really don’t have the desire to do anything other than what I am doing presently in retirement — writing and photography, the great passions of my life, reading, and taking walks in the nearby gardens and parks, while also photographing the beauty of those places I frequent often in every season..
My sister and her husband are going on a safari in Africa next month along with my nephew who lives in Rwanda. I wish them a safe trip and many extraordinary and exotic places to see and enjoy. It’s a great adventure, but it has not the slightest appeal to me. I am doing well these days to take a 100-mile day trip to Columbia, SC. I lived there for eight years, had close friends in that lovely city, and began my newspaper and journalism careers there.
This lack of interest in travel is partly due, of course, to my age and the state I have reached in life. One’s 70s are a time to look back and reflect on what you have accomplished, to be aware of your failures, and to accept that you cannot change the past but must look to the future knowing you have but one day at a time to live. Also, it is the time when the physical hallmarks of aging make their unwanted and dreaded appearance. Life must go on and it does, in surprising and stress-free ways. As I approach 75, I feel more at peace with my myself, and I cannot begin to describe how blessed I feel to live comfortably in retirement and not have the grinding pressures of looking for jobs and holding onto them. The life of the mind is more complex and active, while the life of the body is more relaxed and sedentary — in the good way, of course. I am thankful I can get out every day. There’s always something to do in this city, and with my Internet interests and compulsions I want to experience as much online as I can in the time have left. I never imagined a time such as now when the mind-blowing technological advances of AI would seem like science fiction come true.
Consequently, more and more now I want to stay close to home and savor the small things in life — where I am — rather than rushing along gobbling up experiences. We do that when we are young. In old age we consolidate all our memories and experiences, and treasure the smallest epiphanies in Nature and the reflective life. I’m not saying I won’t travel anymore, but the desire just isn’t there. I have all I need where I am, and I have many good memories of solo road trips around the country, and my travel journals and photos.
Life is never dull or boring. How could it possibly be?
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