It’s coming on four years now since I retired. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I also can’t believe how long it’s taken to settle in. Really, like almost four years, I think.

This is another attempt to write about anything at all not having to do with this country’s swift and final decline. But, in my responsibility to keep shining a light on that dark corner and never letting anyone feel comfortable about it, I’ll leave this link to a paper from the Cato Institute about the effects of immigration on the US economy. The long and the short of it is that Trump’s and Noeme’s ICE goons have been going door to door arbitrarily kidnapping people, including US citizens, of course, whose population has generated more in taxes than they received in benefits, and has created a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion, in real 2024 dollars. Basically, proving once again that immigration is very, very good for the country, and that even when there are issues that need to be addressed in how it works, being anti-immigrant is and always has been stupid and racist. Anyway . . .

Where was I? Settling in. The word I keep using is peripherality. On my Facebook profile and in other places that ask my profession, I say I’m tending my villa in exile. Lots of people—the lucky ones, at least, who can even afford to retire—soon find they just don’t have the stomach for it, and go back to work. At least in some capacity. If it has to be volunteering, so be it. I have stubbornly refused, sometimes at a mental cost, I think. Instead of surfing and writing, as I always said I’d be doing, I took up guitar and Portuguese. I’ve stuck to this regimen pretty faithfully. After three-plus years, my guitar playing is still unimpressive, but I’m reasonably good at Portuguese now. Very impressive to anyone who doesn’t speak Portuguese. I have some Portuguese-speaking friends, in Portugal and in Brazil, whom I chat with five or six times a month, and I’m struggling through my first Portuguese language novel.

People are always impressed, or at least happy to hear it, when I tell them these things, but the fact is that these are very much retired old man hobbies, and don’t much relieve that depressing feeling of being on the sidelines. It also doesn’t help that I’m not around people the way I was when I went to an office every day. Talking to language partners on WhatsApp really isn’t the same thing at all. I found a MeetUp group of Brazilians, whose company I’ve very much enjoyed when I’ve seen them, which was about three times in the last year. There’s a group of classical guitar afficionados I may eventually get together with, as long as I don’t have to prove I can play.

Occasionally, I’ve sat down to try to write. Something besides this blog. Eighteen years ago, I got the you’ve-won-the-lottery kind of news that I’d been given a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. That changed my life. At least for two years it did. For a little more, actually, since I got a number of short stories published and even got a residency at Macdowell, the fancy-wancy artists and writers retreat place in Vermont. I started writing a novel during the Stegner period, but it was very slow going. Out of a combination of indiscipline and methodical plodding—I really have to be “in the mood” to write, and once I’m doing it, I’m revising every sentence—it has usually taken a year and a half or two just to finish a short story. And to make sure success was as unlikely as possible, I wrote an “experimental” novel that took ten years, two agents, and finally, all the gumption out of me. I’ve still worked on short stories, but it is amazing, once one is finished, how long it can go before some magazine picks it up, if they ever do. With every polite rejection e-mail, you want to shoot back, Do you know who you are dealing with here, buster? Did you not see “Stegner Fellow” in the cover letter, you self-important little . , . but who is really being self-important there?

Anyway, in the end, it just got to be too much—to work so hard on something, knowing the long odds. As soon as you get stumped someplace, the voice comes in, No one’s going to publish this, anyway. Don’t you have something better to do? And this is where the Portuguese study, the guitar practice, came in. Because there were no stakes there, really. I was doing these things because I enjoyed them, not to prove myself. Actually, I proved myself anyway, at least with the language study. Got the little A2 certificate required of anyone applying for citizenship, which I won’t be doing any time soon, but still. Nice to have filed away.

Then something clicked a couple of months ago, and I started scribbling again. Not out of any great revelation. Just knowing I was good at it, better at it than I’d ever be at either Portuguese or guitar playing. And as long as the odds were that I’d get something published again someday, they were better than me performing guitar on stage. I mean, there’s still the old Lucy-holding-the-football thing, the idiocy of doing something over and over and hoping with all the evidence against you that something will change. But I did finish a story, finally. And I did send it out, and it did get rejected. But at least the reply was timely, within a couple of weeks instead of four months, and the editor said he’d like to see more. Sure, Lucy.

I also found a group of other deluded individuals, writers, with accolades of their own and many with just as much disappointment in their literary careers as mine. So I’m again seeing folks face to face. And doing something I’m good at. And it’s almost feeling like it did before retirement. Four years in.

And I’ve started another novel. Don’t hold your breath.