Wrapping Up

Well, that's it.  I'm done. Finished.  Kaput. Cashed  in my chips.  I've hung up my dialectics; I've parked my doctrines and principles in a rented shed.  Which is to say, after 45 years. I have taught my last class.  I'm over it or, or as we say in the trade "retired."

Well.  Like all such bald assertions, this one is a grotesque oversimplification.  I actually signed the papers 10 years ago but they've let me double dip.  I also am,  I admit, booked to go back into the classroom next Fall but that's a volunteer stint in a different place and so it doesn't quite count. As far as the University is concerned, it is for real in that I suspect I will never again take the King's Shilling to impart knowledge/wisdom  in one of his schools.  

So in the narrow sense, yesterday was the last day.  My Chinese grad students gave me a bottle of wine--"we don't know anything about wine but this one was expensive," they explained (I assured them  that Mrs. Buce and I would quaff it with enthusiasm). Also pictures: I am memorialized in a number of cell-phone photos, by now ensconced (I suppose) in other cell phones all up and down the East Coast of China.  A good bunch, these Chinese grad students, even if I don't have the foggiest notion whether they are (were) enjoying it most of the time.  I choose to assume they must have enjoyed some of it; else they wouldn't have sprung for the wine.

Meanwhile--of course I like to think of myself as unique but I open this week's Economist and find that I am part of what the E calls "a striking demographic trend."  That is:

… for highly skilled people to go on working well into what was once thought to be old age. Across the rich world, well-educated people increasingly work longer than the less-skilled. Some 65% of American men aged 62-74 with a professional degree are in the workforce, compared with 32% of men with only a high-school certificate. In the European Union the pattern is similar.

Well, that would be me, sort of.    I haven't been working full time (only four months a year).  But I'm even older than 74 (in base 12, I'm 65; I feel about as old as my Volvo, so in Volvo years, I'm 20).   But I have been doing it for the sheer fun of it, thankyouverymuch, and the bald truth I might have been  willing to do it even if  I had had to do it for free.  Day to day, I still enjoy (did enjoy it). But the plain truth also is, I'm tired. Moreover, I can tell I've been winging it; too many war stories, never a good sign.

Do I have a bucket list, they ask? Well, sort of, except that most things on my bucket list, I have already done.  I am willing to do some of them again.  I do have a few other projects in mind, and I do enjoy being free to read any damn thing I want. For the moment, I suppose my real bucket list is a coffee shop with Wifi.  Meanwhile, there's this: