Out to pasture?

When my father retired, it took a while for him to get used to the new normal, and he about drove my mom crazy until he figured out what to do with himself.

I have a feeling I am going to understand quite a bit better what my dad experienced. I have been working as a copyeditor since the early 1970s, starting at my husband’s newspaper fixing press releases and stories. After we sold the newspaper and moved here in early 1980, he began writing for trade journals as a freelancer, and I worked on cleaning up his manuscripts, which he continued to do until COVID shut down the last trade journals he was working on.

Sometime in the early 2000s I started working as a copyeditor for medical manuscripts for Elsevier, a major publisher of medical journals. Over the years, the long list of Elsevier journals I worked on has dwindled as the company went “in another direction” and transitioned journals to other companies to provide copyediting services.

At the end of July, I received a notice that two of the last three Elsevier journals I have been working on have been transitioned to the “supplier,” a major company in India. I started working on one of these journals in 2003, so this has come has a bit of an unpleasant shock. I will not be surprised if the last journal I have will also be “transitioned” before too long.

I am not totally without work, I still have 3 journals published by the American Diabetes Association, for which I am grateful, but it is not enough to keep me as busy as I have been used too.

Perhaps too busy! One of my friends thinks “it is about time you slowed down…” Perhaps she is right. We’ll see.

My dearly beloved predicts I am going to be climbing the walls from boredom. So now I have to find things to do. Of course I could spend quite a bit more time each day keeping up with the house work, which I have not been very good at. Perhaps volunteer at the library? Volunteer at the nursing home? Spend time writing for this blog, which I have neglected terribly.

I can crochet, but I am not in the mood for projects with a crochet hook and I am not an artsy-craftsy sort of person, but I do love reading. One thing I did earlier in the year was join the Willow Springs Library book club. Sometimes we are given a topic or theme, sometimes a specific book – including one, A Gentleman and Thief, about a burglar who stole rich people’s jewelry in the 1930s – that I would never have picked on my own. For September we are to read any book published in 1926, so I’ve read Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I was so used to seeing Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot in PBS series that I haven’t read very many of her books. She is definitely a master of the murder mystery! 

Novels I have really enjoyed recently, picked at random for pleasure, are Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi; The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans; Whistler, by Ann Patchett; Life: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Berg; and We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman. I have been reading the wonderful The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower to Richard while we eat lunch.

I do have faith that God knows what He is doing in my life. I love God and believe I am called according to His purposes (We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him, those whom he has called according to his purpose), so something good is going to come of me suddenly finding myself in semi-retirement.