Beginning at an end: Retirement, sort of

As of New Year’s Eve, 2010, I am resigning from the job I’ve at Lawson Software for the last 14 years.  I have no intention of getting another job, not that anybody would have me and my creaking bones.  I guess it’s called retirement but that word suggests a life-sustaining pension which I don’t have.  But I’m done with work and happy, nay, near ecstatic about that fact.  Not a lot of detailed plans for retirement except to saddle up my leased pony and head out over the hills and valleys of Murphy-Hanrahan Park.

I have had an interesting succession of jobs over the years rather than a focused career.  My original career goal was teaching European history at the college level.  After getting a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, I took a teaching job in a local community college.

U of M's Social Science Tower

I liked teaching, I liked my students, especially the so-called older ones who were all much younger than I am now, but I loathed the view of the school’s administrators that learning was not all that important.

It was hard to get a teaching job elsewhere because the job market for teachers in the 1970’s was terrible.  In addition, my graduate school advisor sadly died of leukemia, putting a Ph.D. out of reach for me.  After seven years at the community college, I decided to give up teaching.  I enrolled in the business school at the University of Chicago, hoping to become a college administrator.  My husband had his Ph.D. in European history but he, too, was forced to try something other than teaching.  He and I and our 2-year old son moved to Chicago.

U of C's library

After I graduated with an MBA, I accepted an administrative position at the University of Chicago, one of my favorite jobs.  But living in the University’s south Chicago neighborhood surrounded by high-crime areas was not for us.  After a few years, I abandoned my goal of working for a college and just hunted for jobs.  I took a job in data processing with the American Bar Association which allowed us to move out of the city.

ABA headqtrs

 After a decade at the ABA, my husband and I, now parents of two growing children, moved back to the Twin Cities.  I took a job in computer training which morphed nicely into self-employment, another favorite job which featured a great boss, me, and a great co-worker, my sister.
 
My husband went to work for Lawson Software.  I then joined him at Lawson where I will remain until the upcoming jumping-off date,  New Year’s Eve next.

After many years and many twists and turns, I still think of myself as a teacher and would rather be in a library surrounded by shelves of old, fat, odiferous tomes than in a corporate cube facing a computer screen.  Museums are good, too.  But I also love my PC and my Kindle and the many  things that computers can do for us, such as letting us babble away on blogs.