Before I go there, however, let me wander off into a quick reminisce about this past Fourth of July weekend, which Irene and I spent in the company of friends on their spectacularly groomed 15-acre farm outside the rapidly-growing and decidedly (albeit rural-y) upscale Atlanta bedroom suburb of Canton, GA. Our friends Ann and Tom are each retired from exacting professional disciplines themselves; Ann was a touring concert pianist under management to Columbia, Tom a senior veterinary surgeon and professor. And today, while they are retired, it’s hard to imagine them being less retiring…Ann, who seems to have almost inexhaustible energy still, is a strong contender for the Martha Stewart award, given every year to the Southern hostess with the most-ess….but who also conducts music appreciation classes in her home, organizes book clubs, does friends-of-everything benefits, grows most of the food they eat and prepares it all in beautiful and unusual ways and even plays decent pickleball in her spare time. Tom, in turn, owns (and by this I mean he does) all the outside work around the farm, hiring only a few people to assist him, and in the meantime they both are prosletizing pickleball among the community and, on the two days we played with them, 12 and 8 other pickleball players showed up, on the busier day giving us three-courts-full of the four courts possible to play on their property…an excellent local turnout and an example of their generosity of spirit, time and place.

Why do I mention Ann and Tom and how does it related to Mitch and Raoul and this question of balance? Well, Mitch’s comments to me recently have been around how grateful he is that he again HAS a job, even though he is clear this will be his last job before he retires. He talks about how humbling the last ten months’ search for employment has been for him, even though he considers himself in some ways a humble guy to begin with…something I agree with, by the way; he is humble, in the good sense, and not because he would need to be, either. And Raoul? Raoul, straight up, is a workaholic, and when he lost HIS job six months ago, before long he was busier than ever as a computer and networking consultant and as a programmer, writing and implementing the programs he would recommend as necessary to his clients, a nice one-two punch of capabilities. Where Mitch is grateful for the new job and humbled by how hard even HE had to work to get it, Raoul is busier than ever and doesn’t have time to think about whether or not he is humble at all.

Melding in Tom and Ann’s experiences, both when working and after they quit, and you see that, in this small sample of four folks, these high-achieving people all work hard and they often continue to work hard whether or not they are gainfully employed per se (meaning, whether or not they get paid money to work), and they all get some satisfaction from contributing and some sense of self from the work itself, but they realize, usually down the line, that less is more relative to employment. Tom and Ann are there, Mitch is nearly there, and, although Raoul is NOT there (“there” being conscious of less work being more), he IS asking questions about balance that surely EYE never asked when I was his age, being…wait for it….too busy working to think of balance.

For me, I have a persistent thought (or is it a hope?) that my own work-life isn’t yet through, that there is one more page to be turned in in my work-book. But, unfortunately (or fortunately, I don’t know), I can’t read what’s on that page yet. As I mentioned recently a number of things that could become work still appeal to me…antiquarian book dealership, antiques in general, collecting (meaning buying and selling) artifacts about poker and gambling and fly-fishing, playing professional poker, writing at some level, selling my own book(s) and that of my brilliant brother the Judge….oh, and more, I’m sure.

And then there is the question of balance in my own life. When I STOPPED working…finally…in 2006, it took a good while for my psyche to understand that I was no longer working but that I had not disappeared because of it. And, truth be known, I’m still not entirely comfortable with my new identify, whatever it is, except that it seems to be more about me and less about what I used to do, in so far as I now know who “me” is, at least. And then there’s the whole question about who writes about you…and about Mitch, and Raoul, and Tom, and Ann, if it isn’t me, and if I’m off working, how do I do that, assuming it really does need to be done? Which of course makes one wonder if you can do both and make a living out of writing something…which I have certainly tried to do in the past, although I failed miserably at it…but haven’t the times and publishing opportunities changed now, and does that create new opportunities for Moi? Or not? Should I follow it up? Or just think about it all a whole bunch more? Eventually, the problem will resolve itself, but given typical life expectancy that could be awhile yet…..

What to do, what to do……

In fact, I’m sitting pretty today, typing away in an amazingly tasteful and even more comfortable customer lounge, (and, hey, you wanna look? Check it ooouuutttt….), Irene and I just waiting (and OH how we love waiting!) for six things to simultaneously get done on our Allegro Bus. Outside in the almost-spotless shop, Brannon and his consistently hard-working family – his brother, father, father-in-law and his wife – stay hard at it, replacing my 2,000 Watt inverter with a 3,000 Watt version, adding two more house batteries, and getting ready to install our Kenmore residential refrigerator, which will roughly double both our refrigerator and freezer capacities while simultaneously working, which the Norcold refrigerator standard to most motor homes hasn’t done very well. In fact, I could tell you stories about the Norcold but won’t, at least today – all I can say is that Irene is liable to be so happy having a reliable, working, decent-sized refrigerator instead of, as she so succinctly says, “that friggin’ Norcold” – that it could bode very well for me if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

But it’s all taking some doing, and don’t tell me ‘cuz I’ll tell you, nothing fits easily when you are doing a retrofit. For instance, the six batteries will be increased to eight, but there is no good other place to install the extra two batteries, so they are customizing two battery slide-outs and will install six batteries on the bottom on one and have the other two batteries on the top. The space they have to work with is exactly the size it needs to be…to about the sixteenth of an inch. If they get it working correctly, and right now it looks like they may, it will be a feat of custom engineering that will alone be worth the price of admission, not that I’m telling Brannon that until this is all done, of course.

Nor is the refrigerator install the end of the story, even given all it entails. By the end of tonight, per Brannon, not only will the refrigerator be installed (and the supporting batteries and inverter), but a residential-style fan will be in the bedroom,

Brannon and friend install fan

the old-school night drapes will be gone from the coach’s front and the new-school drop-down day/night shades will be in place, and Brannon’s peer Chris will have also showed up after having worked three other jobs to install our flat-screen TV in the bedroom. There are other things….trouble-shooting a water-pump light that shows a continuous “on” condition and putting a new power plug into a wall to facilitate the subwoofer’s new home, a change in placement necessitated by the previous replacement of the cabinets by the dining table, done yesterday by the famous Tim (who has yet MORE cabinet work to do, but that’s Friday…what day is this, anyway?).

They work hard and they apparently don’t stop and I recently learned they don’t sleep. Brannon has estimated we will be finished up by 11:00 PM this evening. But he and his brother won’t be finished. A bit ago he received an emergency phone call from the famous Bob Tiffin, who owns Tiffin Motor Home Company. Bob has a highly irate customer in a new Zephyr…the top-end Tiffin coach….without air-conditioning for three days now. In Raleigh, NC. Five hours away at least.  In 90+ heat and supercharged humidity. And, when Brannon and his brother are finished here, they will, without sleep, drive five hours to Raleigh and help out the guys there. Because, you see, Brannon is still working for Tiffin, and until July that’s the way he’ll roll.

If, when I talked previously about my observing a somewhat lackadaisical work ethic in some of the Tiffin employees over the month we’ve been here, I bet you thought I meant EVERYBODY who works back here, didn’t you? Let me say right here, right now, I didn’t. I didn’t mean everybody. I didn’t, at least, mean Brannon and his gang. Or Tim or Chris. I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for them. These guys, at least, rock big.

There was a time when I was able to relate to that, at least a little. If a business venture didn’t make much money, and I had several businesses that did OK but didn’t sustain, well, that’s just the nature of it, and we’ll get ‘em next time. Now, however, the sand is running fast down in my glass and there can’t be all that many next times, or at least I don’t feel like there are. My income is primarily fixed now and is certainly modest, my 401K, like most folks’, has been brutishly trashed by the economic downturn, and I can no longer easily imagine losing or winning, say, $500 or $1,000 playing poker in any given day….at that, a tiny amount compared to the sums Brunson and Reese were talking about but real money to me then and apparently even more so now.

I say “apparently” because, while I am still playing poker, I’m just obviously more restrictive in what I choose to play…can’t handle all that much risk anymore. Mostly I play tournaments on-line where my risk is set and defined; I can only lose the entry fee into the tournament, and I don’t play for more than $75 at a time, and usually for much less. Even the $2 and $5 tournaments have seen my smiling digital face (well, actually they’ve seen my avatar, which at this point is a turtle). When my change in attitutude developed I’m not sure;  in fact I only consciously realized my internal resistence to playing bigger-money poker games a couple of days ago when Trevor, one of the local Tiffin employees and a guy that, as Brunson would say, “has a lot of gamble” in him, came to the door to ask me if I wanted to play in a Texas Hold-Em  game they had running a town over that evening. He described the game and it was definitely my huckleberry…a low-bring-in No Limit Hold-em game, one or two dollars to start, no limit on how much you can bet once the three intermediate cards (“The Flop”) are visible. Better, it was populated by local guys who each had a fair amount of money. Exclusive of Trevor, who is still a working guy, these were youngish guys but apparently only semi-working. Poker, even no-limit, wasn’t much of money stretch for these guys and they would often play all night just for the joy of the game, which of course is how it should be. This is a game that I should love, and, frankly, one that I would probably beat.

Except that I just don’t have much gamble in me right now. I know that things wind down a bit once you are retired, and that you pay more attention to nickles and dimes when you used to let the dollars take care of themselves. But it ain’t fair, somehow, to lose your gamble. It’s like losing your macho, your ‘tude, your mojo. Playing big-money poker, or at least big enough to make you a little tingly, is like asking out a cheerleader, having her think about it, and then saying yes, (this being the one I married, in my case), and playing for pennies is like taking your sister to the Prom. One is risky but worth it. The other gets you to the dance but you don’t care. Dumb analogy, but you get it, right?