The Retirement Clipboard and Notes, Hand-Written
by Ed McManis

This story won second place in the MAYDAY 2024 Nonfiction Contest.

• I taught for 40 plus years. Forty, a biblical number; the Great Flood, Jesus’ time in the desert; his number of days on Earth after the stone was rolled back. Forty years, a God hour. I worked with teachers who taught the same year forty times. Numbers can be tricky. 
• Full retirement age in the U.S.—for me—67. That’s a little more than one and a half God hours.
• My father never retired. His passions, I later learned, were portraiture art and science. He couldn’t make a living with either and so he abandoned his microscope, shelved his sable brush and resigned himself to painting houses to feed his brood. He was resigned to staring into the colored swirl of a fresh gallon of blue-sky blue over facing the other life he didn’t live. Old age was just another rung on that wobbly paint-stained wooden ladder disappearing into the clouds after the work ran out.
• Apparently, you can retire at 62, but you don’t get full social security payment. It’s kind of like drinking decaf coffee, late night re-runs. A participation award. 
• My favorite teacher in college, Mr. P, taught theater and Shakespeare. One Saturday afternoon, we were building the set for Three Penny Opera. Mr. P. was seated at a side table, fussing with paperwork. He ripped open a letter, “hmphed” then tossed the letter and envelope into the air. He stood, proclaimed, “We’re not even on stage yet and they’re already dismissing the third act, closing the curtain.” It was a University announcement outlining the teacher retirement plan.
• In Indonesia you can retire at 57. In Russia, men can retire at 60, women at 55.
• In college I wasn’t really thinking about retirement, but Mr. P. had planted a flag in my still-developing frontal lobe. (Teachers have buckets of unrealized power and influence.) I can picture Mr. P.  pacing the stage. “Did Shakespeare retire?” “How about Stephen Crane? Keats? Mozart? Sylvia Plath?” His pointer finger went skyward like Socrates, and I could nearly imagine Sylvia looking on. Deep into his soliloquy, he turned toward us. “Schubert? Bizet?” He suddenly realized we, his ardent students, were all looking on, gob smacked by his performance. He chuckled, brought both hands up and tugged, like a Lincoln lawyer, on his imaginary lapels, said, slowly. “Custer didn’t have a pension plan.” 
• When Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the great Laker center retired, it took an entire season. Every away game was a send-off, plenty of gifts: a Rolls, a Harley, a juke box, a sailboat, a Tiffany Apple, a surfboard. (I’m sure a rocking chair was in there somewhere.) 
• I’d paint for my dad in the summers during college. It was a kind of cheap-labor hell with masking tape, caulk, primer, and excessive drinking by his crew at quitting time. He’d sit on a workbench for one Miller Lite to be polite, then disappear before they brought out the whiskey. It was my first lesson into the brutal world of hard labor. Back then painters had no 401ks. 
• Stephen Crane died at 29. He had 13 siblings. He didn’t have a 401k.  
• I have nine siblings. I have yet to figure how this affected my writing, my retirement, or my affinity for slightly morbid, and mostly useless trivia. 
• Kareem was the points leader in the NBA until Lebron broke his record. His free throw percentage was 72%. As a teacher, this would be a C- in my book. I was an excellent free throw shooter. (There’s no one guarding you.) I hold the record in a couple of gyms. I cannot dunk a basketball. I did not get a Rolls at my retirement send-off.
• My first day of retirement, my wife, Sandy, baked me a cake. German chocolate. She’s a vanilla person; I was off diet for the week, even had a slice for breakfast one morning with my coffee. She also bought me six books, classics I’d identified through the years, (invoking my advanced literature degree) lamenting about not having time to read. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Magus, something by Proust; As I Lay Dying. They’re stacked on my bedside staring like six angry assassins thirsting for revenge. (To temper the chore, she snuck in Breakfast of Champions.)  
• Teaching wasn’t my first choice; I fell into it after my Great American Novel didn’t do much more than sit in my desk drawer like a pouty teenager who’s mad at the world. College sells you the myth that you can “be whatever you want to be.” You just need to finish X number of classes. Plus, one more, only offered next semester. 
• Keats died at 25. He had no 401k. He had no formal literary education.
• My all-time favorite student, Benji, was lousy at school; he struggled to read, was dysgraphic, his cursive like doctor prescription squiggles. He couldn’t throw a baseball, didn’t do his homework, never got higher than a C. His bathing was irregular, hair cowlicked and unkempt. He gave me a fountain pen one Christmas. “See, you stick an ink cartridge in there,” he said, pointing when I unscrewed the chamber. “I couldn’t find one of those…cartridges, but there’s a dollar there.” And he pointed again. He’d taped a dollar bill to the reindeer wrapping paper.
• My last week of work, a colleague—high school history teacher—told me in the teachers’ lounge at lunch that the Germans “invented” retirement. I remember her saying invented. “It was Otto von Bismarck” she said, “you know the guy with the pointy hat and the moustache?” I nodded. “Sure, I said.  “I love those donuts he invented too, you know, the long ones with all the cream?” She stared at me with the puzzled look of an affable labrador retriever, the generational chasm between us embarrassingly obvious. “What about the Romans?” I offered. “What happened to those guys?”
• My mom never retired. She had a double-bladed career: insurance underwriter and housewife, mother to ten children. 
• My second oldest brother, Dan, stops by, day two of retirement, swinging a bottle of Jameson to celebrate. “Now, you can go out to stud.” He pours two shots, toasts. “You know, there’s a stallion gets half a million a pop for—” and he punches his hand into his fist. How’s your hardware?” By the third shot, my limit, I remind him that some horses end up in dog food cans.
• Mozart died at 35. No pension plan. He did not attend college.
• I never wanted a “Bucket List.” I remember what Father Frank, the Czech priest, used to tell us at 6:15 Mass, stale breath, foreign accent, blessing the air before us, “The evil of the day is sufficient thereof.”
• Some people keep journals, diaries. I kept a Day-Timer, schedules, lesson plans, notes. I wrote down my first student suicide funeral, my first year, on the back page across from some weights and charts, conversions from liters to quarts. I kept the list through my career, kept writing in names. Suicides. Thirteen total. Four were students I was teaching at the time, the other nine had graduated and had been consumed by the world. Somehow, a colleague, physics teacher, heard about my list. He remarked, in the lunchroom one year, sipping his vegetable soup from his thermos, “That’s morbid.” 
• Sylvia Plath died at 30. Poetry can be morbid. Had I taught her, I would have attended her funeral. I think Mr. P. would have joined me. 
• Sandy has a bucket list. It’s organized, exciting, creative; it goes all the way around the world—Iceland, too—includes new skills, recipes from foreign countries, musical instruments, a martial arts class, scaling a mountain in Tibet, skydiving. I think there’s an angel in there, smiling like a tour guide. 
• I’ve received dozens and dozens of emails, a couple of videos. One card. No flowers. No watch. Everyone’s happier than I am. My grandpa retired at sixty-two from the IRS, mortgage paid, a pension, money in the bank. Even as a kid I could tell my grandma didn’t like him much. 
• Schubert died at 31, Bizet at 36. I can’t read music; this gives me little comfort. 
• I didn’t really “prepare” for retirement. Sure, I did the 401k, got signed up for social security, dug out the unfinished Great American Novel, dead as a grounded carp by the sixth chapter. No one told me about that sensation, when you cross the threshold, realize you have no place you’re supposed to be. No one told me how hollow the silence would be, how blank the day timer. 
• I’ve slept on it, reread that last note. Nah, full disclosure as they say today, the silence isn’t hollow, I’ve never been happier. I sleep in. If you don’t have anywhere you’re supposed to be that’s got to be the hallway to heaven. 
• The one retirement card I did receive arrived the week before graduation. From Meredith, a student I taught my second year. Dyslexic, ADHD, hated school. She was the first and last student I ever gave an F. English composition. Her face, after class, after she received her final essay grade, is burned into my memory. It was my first true lesson about the power of a teacher. She stood before me, hands slightly trembling, the F in bold red at the top of the page, staring out like a wound circled in my teacherly script. Eyes misting, she stared at me, tried to speak, finally managed, “I can’t…” then she closed her eyes, saw something happening I couldn’t imagine. She took a deep breath, whispered, “My dad—” I changed it to a C. 
• Pension comes from the Latin and translates as “measured weight.”
• I figure I taught a couple thousand students. My penultimate year I was working with one of my mentees, explaining protocols for dealing with parents. She brought her hands to her temples like she had a headache, exclaimed, “Wow. How do you do all…this?” She was young and shiny and optimistic and smelled like a flower shop. Her “official” retirement date, I realized, would be 2066.
• By the end of my teaching career I’d gained nearly fifty pounds. All pre-pension. Measured weight.
• It’s my first retired Thanksgiving. Dad, 87, parades in with the turkey, mismatched oven mitts, steam rising, the bird a golden brown. My favorite niece, the struggling comedian now negotiating her late thirties, announces, “Wal Mart is the new retirement home.” I’m the only one who laughs.
• Pensions don’t pay by the pound. 
• My bucket list contains no goals or provisions to run a marathon, lift a weight, swim the Channel, eat kale and dirt, try a wrinkle cream, dunk a basketball, hold my breath for a minute, ask Salma Hayek out, master a Steely Dan solo, go back to church or write a villanelle. The evil of the day is sufficient thereof. 
• I learned priests and nuns retire. Sixties rock stars don’t retire. 
• William, a colleague who’s taught high school biology for 32 years in the room down the hall, tells me in the lunchroom on my second to last day. “You know, 82% of people who retire die within two years.” He says this casually, as he’s unpeeling a slightly black speckled banana. I remember my first year, one of my first lunches with him, he told me, eyes wide, “Cancer will be wiped out in twenty years.” He never married. Sometimes his socks don’t match. I never point this out to him. 
• College earned me a B.A. in journalism, a Master’s in literature, but no job. It was the 70s. Woodward and Bernstein were rock stars, gods, truth warriors taking on Nixon and the Dark Side. Newspapers were the illuminated steppingstones to the Kingdom. Truth could be revealed, upheld, defended with black ink, cheap paper, and a good lead. 
• Leaonard Bernstein (no relation) a musical genius, died five days after he retired. 
• Third day of retirement, I renew our newspaper subscription. Not the online version we’ve been reading off the computer the last decade—the real, flick-off-the-rubber band-hold-it-in-your-hands-snap-the pages-arms-extended-fold-sports-page-in-half-stare-at-the-shadowy-printer’s-ink-on-your-fingertips-paper. Except today’s paper is stuffed in a plastic orange half-bag, flimsy as a rich kid’s jumper. There are no rubber bands for our doorknobs. 
• Dan, six shots in: “Don’t make the same mistake now. Don’t relive the last forty years waiting for a monthly check. Don’t be a ‘byproduct.’” I offer dinner, he declines. ”Sandy’s still mad at me. Maybe I should just take the bottle?” he suggests, searching for the corked cap.
• Nixon was forced into retirement.
• No classics were written in retirement, I tell myself. A few intros, a couple of back-jacket blurbs. A whiny poem about how the world should behave, some obituaries. I renew my library card. 
• My oldest sister retired from a beauty shop, moved to Venezuela. She lives in a valley with fresh fruit and no postal service. She emails me videos about the “End Times” from a prophet who has “dreams” and a bad haircut. I’m not sure what country he’s from. I have dreams of my own. My hair’s about gone. 
• Dictators don’t retire.
• I realize that no one retired in the Middle Ages. They were all dead by 42. My first month of retirement this ersatz epiphany gets me out of bed feeling like I’m slightly ahead, thankful for my handful of prescriptions. 
• I found a yearbook from my first year in teaching. I am nearly unrecognizable; race-car smile, buffed and shiny, polish still gleaming, new kicks. Every page is signed, most in broken cursive, reversed printing, “good-byes” and “good lucks.” Johnny O writes, “You wre my favrit techer.”
• When you retire, everyone is suddenly worried about your heart. 
• I find myself, with my new newspaper routine, reading the obituaries. I check the dates first: 20 years older, 15, ten…shit, he died young. That guy’s my age—do I look like that? Sometimes they list the cause of death, usually you have to puzzle it out by where they want you to send donations. Sometimes, with the younger ones, you can tell it was a suicide. Or drugs. Journalists can be pretty good at clouding the truth, softening the blow. 
• I’ve been to 21 student funerals. Thirteen were suicides. I worked with an “at-risk” population. Treading the stairs in my retirement slippers I’ve learned we’re all “at-risk.” 
• My nephew, my sister’s oldest, the one with the AK-47—who dropped out of high school—gives me an impromptu history lesson in his mom’s kitchen, in rural Kansas, when we’re visiting. “Uncle Ted, don’t let them drive you to a cliff…” He fancies himself an historian especially regarding Native Americans. He believes he taught me the word “senicide.” Which is fine. As a teacher, I learned long ago to embrace and employ some codes. Just as doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, I have a few codes of my own, student self-deception for confidence, being one.  “Did you know,” he begins, Coors in one hand, Marlboro in the other, “they like take the old folks out, leave ‘em on a log? For the wolves.” He takes a swig, a drag, blows the smoke toward the ceiling. “Senicide.” I sip my Diet Coke. “No shit,” I say, expressionless.  “I didn’t know that.” 
• When you retire, everyone’s suddenly curious about your weight, your diet. 
• Someone has left a “Learn the Piano” beginner’s guide, in a King Soopers bag on my front porch. No note. Though the book was published in 1964, the pages are surprisingly fresh, crisp, unblemished. No coffee stains, no yellowed pages. Most of the songs are polkas. 
• I liked my life better back when my sister was giving perms to the neighborhood ladies and polishing nails and cutting bangs. Back when we all had more hair, more faith.
• Some mornings, I wake up in that dark corridor between three and four a.m., tell myself Jesus could have retired.  
• My second week unemployed, I drive to help my old coach move. His wife passed just before Christmas. A decade older, he had answers to all of my questions and confusion during those formative years. “You’ll love retirement,” he assures me, arms full of dresses and skirts. He sniffs. “Old people’s smell clings to everything.” He drops the pile on the bed, holds up a blue evening gown still wrapped in thin, dry-cleaning plastic. “Death makes it stick.” Then, turning to me, “Does your wife need any evening clothes?”
• Mark Twain wrote A Horse’s Tale after he was seventy.
• Johnny O. overdosed after dropping out of college. At the funeral his mother wept into my chest, her mascara streaking my tie, white shirt. I thought that would be my last year of teaching.
• In another voice mail from my nephew: “If you see them stacking wood, and lighting matches,” here he pauses to laugh, then in a burst screams, “Run!”
• The last week of school during the yearbook signing, I hid in my office. I could hear the student voices up and down the hall, “Have you seen…” and “I think he’s downstairs….” I thought I’d feel guilty later, but I lay down and slept like the dead.
• Your 401k gets taxed. Your pension gets taxed. Your social security gets taxed. Turns out that Franklin’s old adage about “…nothing’s for certain except…”  is true. And death, at the turnstile,  patiently waits.  
• Last night I dreamt my grandpa, the IRS official, was in the kitchen, in his WWI fatigues. He was impatiently waiting for Sandy to warm his coffee as he stared at his ledger. “I need a calculator,” he demanded. Suddenly my sock drawer appeared and he poked through it with the back of his pencil, writing furiously, grumbling, “You’ll never make it.” I followed him as he trudged to the living room. He stopped at the piano, lifted the fallboard, hit a key. “That’s an F#. Go get your banjo.”

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ED MCMANIS is a writer, editor, & erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Nimrod, Narrative, Lascaux Review, etc. His most recent chapbook is “The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie” Bottlecap Press. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) novel, Jubilee Year.

Little known trivia fact: he holds the outdoor free-throw record at Camp Santa Maria: 67 in a row.