The American Spectator : Rehearsals for Retirement

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Rehearsals for Retirement

By Christopher Orlet on 5.12.11 @ 6:07AM

Even a supreme being needs some time off.

On the last day of school my normally stoic creative writing teacher strode into the classroom and giddily announced: "I'm going on sabbatical to Florence. I'll be back in a year….Or two."

The next day I officially changed majors. Goodbye medical school, hello pipe and tweeds. I figured I'd be crazy not to. Not only did English professors have the cushiest job on the planet, they got to soak in the Italian sun for a year on somebody else's dime. I could almost imagine myself lounging under the Tuscan sun, reading Dante, drinking Chianti and ogling Florentine girls. Talk about La Dolce Vita.

Needless to say, I never followed through on that threat. It turned out a gazillion other liberal arts majors had the same idea and most of those Ph.D.'s are now selling shoes at the Foot Locker, which makes me feel a little better.

I wasn't, however, going to allow a little thing like not having a doctorate thwart my grandiose ambitions.

A few years ago I decided to take some time off. I didn't make it to Italy -- I didn't even make it to Little Italy -- but I did imbibe a considerable amount of Chianti while ogling girls of Italian ancestry. (Sadly, I abandoned all hope of getting through the Divine Comedy twenty pages into the Inferno, settling instead for season 3 of The Sopranos.) Since I wasn't on some one else's dime, I had to live frugally off my meager savings, but it was as close as I was ever going to get to a genuine sabbatical. And I loved it.

I was able to get away with this because I wasn't married, I had no mortgage, or credit card debt, my vehicle was paid off, and, most important, I felt like I had earned a break. I'd been a working stiff since I was nine and got stuck with my older brother's paper route. And I kept right on working all through high school and college, at which point I graduated and… I began working professionally. Besides, it wasn't like I was jumping off some great career ladder to the stars. I had been pretty much spinning my wheels for a decade. It was now or never, or at least another 25 years until retirement.

SOME PEOPLE WOULD have been bored stiff. Some would have missed the office gossip and politics. Not me. While all the office hacks were crawling off to work, I would leisurely make the first of many pots of coffee and fire up the old laptop, then sit down in my pajamas to hammer out the great American novel. It was an adventure tale about an escaped slave in 1850s Arkansas, and it took me almost an entire year to write, and it was absolutely dreadful, but it was a great learning experience. Among other things, I learned I had no business writing novels.

When I wasn't busy kicking down the doors of American Literature, I would go for long hikes along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, breathing in the solitude and the all-too-fleeting freedom of being unchained to a desk. Afterwards I would sit on my patio and read, waiting for my friend Andy the realtor -- who seemed to be on permanent sabbatical -- to stop by. Then we would stroll to the neighborhood bar, where Andy never failed to say, "I am really impressed how you just quit your job like that."

Looking back it was probably not a wise thing to do. When my savings were gone and I began interviewing for jobs, the human resource managers would look at me like I had three heads. As soon as they learned I had walked away from a perfectly adequate job to take a year off they would shred my résumé, not once, but twice. Worse, this was right at the start of the recession, so my year-long sabbatical stretched on another nine months.

Businesses and nonprofits like to say that they are more open to sabbaticals, but what they really mean are unpaid leaves. And these unpaid leaves are more like long vacations and they are only for the one or two employees who are so valuable and irreplaceable they can walk away for an extended period without management saying, "Hmmm, maybe we can get by without this guy after all." Not that such people exist. "The cemetery is full of irreplaceable people," my grandfather used to say.

I certainly don't regret my time off. Nowadays, between office-chair induced back spasms, I like to remind myself that while I may not always have Florence, I will always have my sabbatical. It's too bad we don't take seriously the Lord's commandments, because in Leviticus 25, God commands us to desist from work every seventh year. As the inventor of the Sabbath, He knew the importance of time off, even if we don't.

About the Author

Christopher Orlet writes every Thursday from St. Louis.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (14) | Leave a comment

Appleby| 5.12.11 @ 7:11AM

I am close to retirement age and have worked at a very stressful, high-maintenance job for about 25 years, with a side job that is even more stressful although a whole lot more fun--and last year having returned to Job 1 from Job 2, I was summarily fired because while I was gone the tyrant I worked for decided he didnt like me. (Since before I left for Job 2, I had written in my journal that this would be a delightful outcome, I had only myself to blame, I guess). I had to go look for another job promptly, but at my age this was tough -- facing little girls 1/3 my age who asked me why I had majored in Victorian History and watching their bewildered expressions at the whole idea of a world that existed outside that two-inch screen between their thumbs...but in between I read, walked in the big park across the road (and thanked God I was not one of the toddler-minders with screaming brats on the back of their bicycles), drank tea on the patio of a local restaurant and watched little dramas play out -- and got a journal and wrote my memoir in longhand, as far as I could get before I found another job.

And it has spoiled me for steady work, but writing that memoir has reminded me of the wonderful life I have lived and the good times I had in between the exhausting work. (The 24 Hours of Le Mans, for example, which I reported on for 6 years, actually takes 36 hours to cover. Sometime in the after-midnight hours when one is napping under ones desk, one is awakened by ones photographer saying *Its 3:00 am, what do you need?* and one answers, *Who are YOU?*)

I will enjoy retirement. All I have to do is figure out how to retire.

Bob K.| 5.12.11 @ 7:38AM

Actually God commands Israel in Leviticus 25 to leave it's fields fallow and unreaped and it's vineyards unpruned with fruit unpicked once every 7 years which in reality means no income from them during that year. It is really a year of rejuvenation, a "year of rest unto the land."

It is a good analogy.

Petronius| 5.12.11 @ 10:10AM

Life is always good for those who don't have to make a living.

JP| 5.12.11 @ 10:59AM

I never could understand why someone would spend years studying "literature" in order to become a writer. A writer just writes. He can only get better by writing more. A writer also reads; but he reads with a sharp eye. All a writer needs is a good book of style, a computer, and books. Going to college to "study" to write is a waste of time and money.

I think its great that there are people who just love to read great literature. However, too many people mistake this love for books as a calling. They waste 4 years getting a lit degree. After finding that there are no jobs for lit majors they panic and waste more money and time pursuing a Phd in the same wasteland. And unless you are a politically motivated radical there is no way you will ever get tenure at any of our universities (at least not in the Humanities).

One last thing, I knew a few aspiring novelists who were determined to write the Great American Novel. But, thier entire life was spent either in libraries, cafes or classrooms. I asked one woman, why she thought she could write the Great American Novel with such limited expierence? Her answer was more political gibberish than anything else. I told her that the Great American Novel was a fantasy. America is so complex and diverse that no one could capture it all. There is no grand theme for America like there was in Stendal's France or Dicken's England. Tom Wolfe or Saul Bellow might have capured a sliver of it, but even their novels dealt with limited themes. I told the aspiring novelist just to write something that she would enjoy to read. Don't be pretentious or a snob. Dean Koonz made a pretty good living writing about subjects he enjoyed to write about. That should be more than enough.