Occam's Razor

The ROMEOs this morning are at the Virginia Kitchen on Elden Street, in Herndon, Virginia. This morning they are actually outside the restaurant, facing the strangely quiet Elden Street, which is at something of a commuter lull during mid August. We are sitting at metal tables under an occluded morning sky. It’s 8 AM. Even though I have been getting up at 6:30 AM for years, now that I am retired getting up at 7:30 AM to make this date with the ROMEOs seems somewhat onerous. But here I am because part of the art of retirement (so I understand) is to get away from your otherwise lovely spouse now and then and engage in something resembling real life.

So I’m trying out the ROMEOs: a bunch of guys who are also retired and seemingly have not much else compelling to do on a Tuesday morning except to get together for some fellowship and fattening breakfast food. ROMEO in this case stands for “Retired Older Men Eating Out”, and we make a congenial bunch, as we are all members of the local Unitarian Universalist church, so we are likely to agree on most stuff anyhow. Our wives (those of us who have wives) are grateful to get rid of us for a while; in fact, they have formed their own happy hour club called the JULIETs (Just Us Ladies Imbibing, Eating and Talking) that also meet once a week. Occasionally, aside from socializing, we’ll do something tangible for the church that suggests ours is not entirely just a social club.

Among the ROMEOs I am the newbie and appear to be considerably younger than everyone else at the table. The whole retirement thing, somewhat unusual for me at age 57, is still quite new to me. I’ve been at it less than a month, and much of it so far has been on vacation. But I’m usually up for a greasy breakfast, with or without companionship. The guys around the table though look like they are pros at it. They are Tuesday morning regulars at the Virginia Kitchen. The waitress knows them, if not by name, then by what they are likely to order and how much they are likely to tip. The menus, napkins and silverware are already outside on the tables anticipating our arrival when I arrive promptly at 8 AM. Apparently, I am late and the last to arrive. The banter is already well underway. The topic of the day, as is true most everywhere else in America is the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri over what looks like the unjustified homicide of an African American, Michael Brown, at the hands of a white officer. There was no particular disagreement among us on the outrage there. I’ll likely provide my thoughts on this in a future post.

The nature of fellowship though is to just flow with the conversation, and being UUs it got kind of strange at some times, such as a discussion on how citizen science took off (too many pastors in England on pensions with too much time to kill). One of the attendees is a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq who had much to contribute when we discussed issues in the Middle East. But along with the political discussion, which is a given when you put a bunch of UUs around a table with coffee, our conversation veered into many other areas.

It didn’t matter so much what we talked about. What mattered is that we had someone else to talk about stuff. It’s about having something to do, something to occupy our brain and somewhere else to see other than our four walls at home. For some of these men around the table, filling their days is a challenge. So far for me it has not been a challenge at all.

Many of the men around this table have a couple of decades on me. Behind their faces are hints of sadness and loss. Some have lost spouses. All have lost loved ones. Some have spouses with serious problems. One has a spouse with cancer. Some have serious health issues of their own, some that they will share and some that they will not. These occupy a lot of their time and thought, while they give the appearance of being men without care. Tuesday breakfast with the ROMEOs is something of an escape, not from their lives, but from weighty issues that come with moving from senior citizen to elderly citizen. For a while anyhow, they can allow themselves to be distracted from it, and engage in general banter like they used when they were younger and healthier.

Retirement for me is turning out to be a lot of work. As I mentioned in my last post, things went awry at home during our vacation: a burglary and a busted refrigerator. The locks are changed and the refrigerator is being repaired as I write. But then there is all this other stuff to do. It appears that I needed to retire just to make time for all this stuff. There is a class I’ll be teaching on Tuesday nights. Preparing for that meant that after breakfast I was off to the community college to make sure the Oracle database server was working correctly and could be accessed in the classroom. There is the huge general task of decluttering our house in preparation for moving next year, and doing whatever else a realtor recommends to make it stand out when it goes on the market. We meet with a realtor on Friday. Then there is my consulting, which resulted in a queue of work waiting for me when I got home. Most of that backlog is now clear. And there is a lot of stuff that falls into the “I always meant to do this”, like make doctors appointment for non-critical health issues and get my car detailed. The stuff I planned to do every day in retirement, like daily walks and trips to the gym, won’t happen for a while.

But there will be time, I hope, for fellowship on Tuesday mornings at the Virginia Kitchen, where the Chantilly Combination breakfast is likely to be my breakfast of choice.