GOOD ENOUGH

   

Retirement is not the same as losing you job. To retire means they don’t want you to come to work anymore but someone will put some money in your account just the same. So, I am retired with a modest retirement income. It is sufficient for my simple needs, allowing me to come and go as long as good health goes with me. But to work at a task for so many years, it does things to your mind. It can provide a sense of purpose. Some of us are fortunate enough, we got paid to do what made us feel complete. There are many who work at a job, just a job, so they can afford to spend their free time doing whatever it is that makes them feel complete. If you like and find purpose in what you do it’s hard to imagine anything else, as in ‘It’s just a job’. 

For me, I had to figure out what to do with myself when someone else had taken my place. After a year of rain and bad road I smoothed out the new, reinvented me. I miss the contact with students and camaraderie with peers but I was ready to move on to something else. I do my own evaluations now, every day. They used to come twice a year with a formal check list and detailed observations. My boss always found my work satisfactory but with the caveat, room for improvement; that’s how it works. We heard a lot of ‘Excellence’ hyperbole but in the end I have always been delighted to be ‘Good Enough.’  I know me well enough to recognize the difference between ‘Sucks’, ‘So-so’, ‘Not bad’ and ‘Good enough.’ If I can stay between the lines, right side up, with a great day now and then, that’s good enough for me. 

One of the things I do now is build houses, bird houses, wren houses to be precise. If you make the entrance hole one inch in diameter, all the other birds are too big to get in. So, if your wren house is occupied it must surly be by wrens. I have a couple hanging on low limbs in my back yard, unoccupied at the moment. But this morning there were sparrows, trying to get in through the quarter size hole. I suppose I should feel for the sparrows but I don’t. They will find a place to build without me and I’m partial to wrens. The wrens are a link that connects to my mother. They would sing call and response to each other through the kitchen window, all through spring and summer. I don’t have to see them; I know their song. My mom would like that I shelter wrens. The houses I build are crafted to some degree with overlapping seams on the roof boards. Putting them together has a different kind of feel-good than listening to the singing but good is good and that’s good enough.