“When one door closes another door opens,” Julie Andrew said in The Sound of Music. Actually, Alexander Graham Bell said it first, if you don’t count John the Apostle,1 Helen Keller,2 and Miguel de Cervantes.3 My personal favorite? Comedian Bonnie McFarlane: “When one door closes another door opens. Usually a refrigerator.”
Any way you pose it, retirement is a distasteful word.
Etymonline.com traces the word to the late 16th century:
retirement (n.) From French retirer “to withdraw (something) 1590s,” act of retreating, act of falling back,” also “act of withdrawing into seclusion,” 1570s; Meaning “privacy, state of being withdrawn from society” is from c. 1600; that of “withdrawal from occupation or business” is from 1640s.4
For the most part, I put my writing on hold while my daughter was growing up: “I will always be able to write but I will never get these years with Jesse again.” When she was in high school and I returned to teaching, I put my writing on hold: “I will always be able to write but I will never get these years with my students again.”
However, I did attend Oxford University for a summer term while working on my second M.A. degree—this while teaching—studying Eighteenth Century Literature and the Arts with the brilliant and sweet Professor Peter McCullough. Only five others in the tutorial, we met three times a week in his spacious Lincoln College study, scrutinizing passages concerning Gardens in Paradise Lost, examining excerpts from Virgil’s Georgic translated by John Dryden, scratching the surface of Alexander Pope’s poem Windsor Forest. I discovered the literary essayist Joseph Addison, sending me on a search that resulted in an absorbing paper on imagination.
Regularly we traveled throughout London and the Cotswold’s, exploring architecture and manor garden designs. Peter’s course energized, making constant connections between history, literature, and artistic movements.
As readers of Rain Dodging5 will know, it was while researching a ‘Peter paper,’ that I stumbled into the late-17th century court of Queen Mary of Modena, consort to British King James II, resulting in my book.
Fortuitously, in my first month of retirement, I had attended a 5-day virtual publishing workshop, knowing that the industry had changed since my daughter’s youth. I did my homework. Before the year was out, I had a book contract.
So now I am on a different adventure.
Retirement?
Hell no.
1Revelation 3:8 “I have been told many times, by several people, that when God closes one door He another opens.”
2We Bereaved 1929
3 Don Quixote 1605
4 https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=retirement
5 Rain Dodging: A Scholar’s Romp Through Britain in Search of a Stuart Queen.
She Writes Press, 2023.
