Retirement isn’t something you “do”, nor is it who you “are” Therein lies the rub.
I thought I had a good plan for retirement, but it turned out it wasn’t a plan at all. P and I did some traveling early on, and I was still teaching as an adjunct at Jamestown Community College, two days a week. But that’s not a plan.
My plan was to start painting again. Actually, my plan was originally to take up landscape photography and then I thought ”Do I really want to get up in the dark of the morning, drive in the fog and cold to stand around for hours until the light was just right?”
The thing is everyone (every. one.) of the people I worked with said, “Now you’ll have lots of time for your photography”, and I thought “This is what I’ve been doing for almost forty years. How do I know that I don’t want to try something different?”
In the interim I kept myself busy with JCC, and when COVID hit six months later it was all a moot point anyway. JCC kept me occupied. For three semesters I was teaching a B/W film course via zoom, showing people how to develop film in the bathroom and scan the negatives using a cellphone. Each two-hour class took at least three times that to prepare. It was gratifying to be so busy.
Spring semester of 2024 was a sea change. I was tasked with developing a curriculum for a new Digital and Darkroom course. JCC has an old but serviceable darkroom which as an aside eerily looked like an abandoned polar base camp when I first opened it up after covid. We got the call to go home on a Tuesday night in March and never came back. Negatives were still in the enlargers, printing notes on the easels, dried crusty chemicals in the trays and tubs. My half-finished bottle of diet Mountain Dew greeted me as an old friend long forgotten. But I digress. It was an opportunity to hone my digital negative skills and up my cyanotype game. I taught myself salt printing. It was glorious and reenergized my art spark.
Everything was great- until the next faculty show came around. I exhibited eight of what I felt were stout examples of salt and cyanotype prints, in a Josef Sudek style. But they just hung there doing nothing. No thing.
They weren’t illuminating
They weren’t illustrative
They weren’t interesting
They just- were. So I wrapped them up tight and put them away. I felt numb.
And then one day I noticed that yellow garage along Rte 60 and something clicked…