Hope/Despair

On Retirement, Not Going Insane, and Being a Novelist Wannabe

| Rob Ehle

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.

Bearing Witness

| Rob Ehle

I haven’t put a thing up on this blog since just after January 6, 2020. Partly because for a long time I thought we were finally moving on from the Great American Dumpster Fire of 2017–24 and I couldn’t think of anything else to ramble on about. But mainly because of a time-honored internet tradition of forgetting I have a blog.

Under Trump 1.0, I wrote a number of thingies here trying to get friends and family who didn’t seem to understand how horrible the situation was to understand why it really was. I was never sure it was doing any good. And when Trump, now a convicted felon, was re-elected in 2024—again, over a plainly sane, competent woman—I got my definitive answer.

But now, here I am again. I heard a story a while ago about some guy who during the Vietnam War allegedly stood outside the White House every night holding a candle in vigil, even in the rain. This may be an exaggeration. Still. The story goes a reporter once asked him whether he thought he could change the country this way, and his answer was, “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

So he was just bearing witness, which I’ve started thinking is at least something. So here’s me, bearing witness a little. I don’t expect it to make much a difference. I mean, I don’t see people like Heather Cox Richardson or Robert Reich or Jimmy Kimmel making much of one. And before you say, “Are you kidding? They’re making a huge difference,” name one MAGA friend or relative of yours whose mind any of those people have changed.

Mainly, I just want to have a record somewhere years from now, after the USA is a huge shell of its former self and we’re all scurrying about just trying to find bread for supper, that I wasn’t hiding away. That I occasionally yelled some truth.

I know there are all kinds of people who say it’s still important to “believe in America,” that the country can still rise above its current tribulation, once again live up to its ideals, etc. I believe this is just so much sad horse shit. I’ll be the happiest person in the world to be proven wrong, but this is what I believe:

The USA, aside from being founded on a continent that until recently had been completely unknown to Europeans, was born of the same mix of religious fervor and rapacious greed that had defined the old continent for millennia. There were a few well-intentioned idealists who tried to shape it into something new, but really this wasn’t much different from what the idealists in Europe were trying to do at the time—except that American idealists had slaves, on land stolen from inhabitants who’d lived there for tens of thousands of years. It’s arguable that the only thing “exceptional” about American history is the degree of its hypocrisy. Now, you can love a flawed country (especially since there’s no other kind) just like you can love a flawed family, and I think this is what people mean when they say they still love America even in its darkest days. But just like there comes a time a flawed family must face a reckoning, there comes a time a country (an empire, let’s be frank) sees its best days behind it.

And this is now true of the United States. I honestly don’t see a way out. We re-elected Donald Trump. This time with a popular majority. What’s the best possible outcome from this? A “Blue Wave” next year? Super. What’s the rest of the world going to do with this? Breathe a sigh of relief and take the US back on as an ally? Well, first of all, it’s still another two years of Trump. Secondly, we already elected him twice, so we can’t be counted on as a rational or emotionally stable population. From now on, the world’s going to be holding its breath every four years. We’re certainly never going to be “a City on a Hill” again. Speaking again of the example we set, places all over Europe (thirdly) are now electing their own extreme right leaders. Whatever world some hypothetically non-Trumpist U.S. President is going to be working with in early 2029, its remaining liberal democracies will not be taking any cues from us.

And a non-Trumpist in 2029 is by no means assured, of course. The only people whose minds were changed between 2020 and 2024 were the sliver who either decided to stay home or decided, after voting for Joe Biden, to vote for Donald Trump. This is not an encouraging trend. If real elections are even going to be a thing anymore.

So the only thing vaguely optimistic I can do right now is to bear witness. I welcome sunnier takes. Evidence-based ones, anyway. In the meantime, let’s each of us try to live honestly, do good work, and brush our teeth daily. Baby steps.