My Dad was a huge admirer of writer-producer Norman Lear. Who wasn’t? Lear embodied a youthful excitement about his current projects as well as his next. Dad frequently quotes him with the above. The quote is here in this wonderful article by Steve Lopez about what kept Lear going to the ripe youthful age of 101. I am inspired by this and by Lopez’ own research around retirement in Independence Day: What I Learned About Retirement From Those Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will. It’s next up on my listening queue in Audible.

I’m squarely in the Next pew now, having ordered my The Birds of Costa Rica A Field Guide to take with me on the retreat in May. I don’t know when I’ve been quite so excited about a package arriving. I’d asked about it twice and only the postal carrier in the mail room prevented my getting it until later in the afternoon. Birding has been a mental preoccupation since I was a child. My Dad’s mother was a bird lover. She spent much of her adult life on the hilltop in Greensburg, PA, in the living-room-sized-fenced porch behind the house my grandparents owned which faced out onto a wide swath of lawn, and a huge orchard filled with multiple varieties of fruit trees. We basically lived on that porch in the summer time.

My nana and I would take frequent drives out into the rural countryside around that hilltop, and she imbued in me such a love of birds that I memorized the North American Field Guide of Birds prior to one of our five hour family drives to our maternal grandparents’ home in Wilkes-Barre. I remember nagging my brothers to quiz me on one of those trips. Sadly, my youthful sponge of a brain has relinquished much of that study. “Hard drive is full.” That and a maturation of my sight has slowed my original skill in identifying birds. But I am undimmed in my love of finding and enjoying the beautiful plumage and calls of birds. Nana was obsessed, and so was I with catching sight of a bluebird, or a tanager.

I also had a teacher in the fifth grade, Mr. Murphy, who took us on a birding trip to Lake Erie, where we canoed and also identified birds. It’s ancestral, you could say, my love of birds and birding. It might have been on that trip where I participated in banding and counting birds. My memory is faint, but I think there was a net spanning between two trees and someone instructed us on how to gently free the birds from the nets, identify them and then band them, releasing them back into the sky. It was exhilarating and the recent Cornell Lab of Ornithology announcement about the Great Backyard Bird Count coming up Feb. 16-19 got me thinking about my early avian love. I’ve even registered for the Live Stream instructions on Tuesday, February 13th at 1PM Eastern. I submitted a question, as well – How would I accurately begin to count the visitors to my hummingbird feeders in downtown Los Angeles?The thought is dizzying, exhilarating.  

I’ve decided that Over and Next are excellent guidelines for the soon to be retiree.

Today I spent the majority of the day completing the diabolical Frank Lloyd Wright puzzle that Leia had loaned me. I had been working on it for about a week, but suddenly today it came together. (Picture above)

Tomorrow I get my teeth cleaned, have a bevy of meetings with colleagues and administrators, then tomorrow night fly to Washington, D.C. to visit my Dad and his wife, before heading to NYC for Valentine’s Day. Can’t wait to see family and good good friends and spend time plotting what’s Next!

One thought

Would love to hear what you are thinking!