Pink in the Pantry

I was just away from work for 19 days.  Went camping for a week up in the Porcupine Mountains (cold and wet, thanks for asking), saw U2 at Spartan Stadium (quite awesome, again - thanks for asking), lounged around the pool with my wife, took a bike trip and stayed at a B&B, went to Grand Haven, watched the fireworks in Hesperia, and started a new book.  Overall – a pretty darn good vacation.  But now, I’m back at work and finding it difficult to get back into “work mode”.  You know how the first day back at work after a long vacation is, like… how to put this…?  The worst day of your entire year.  Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.  You’ve got 567 e-mails, 84 voicemails, and two-weeks of back-logged work that apparently nobody else could do.  Welcome back!  It used to be, that after two weeks off, I was ready to get back to the office. The older I get though; I’m starting to think that I’m really going to enjoy retirement.  Yes, I know I still have about 20 years to go before I can realistically even think about retirement, but still…

Ever given any thought to what you’d like to do in retirement?  My wife and I keep talking about opening up a little art gallery to sell her paintings and my photographs.  I’ll carve walking sticks and sell them to tourists, and maybe we’ll sell ice cream too.  My dad surprised the heck out of my when he retired.  He spent the first half of his career as an engineer and the second half in sales for a very large auto-part supplier (windshield wipers).  He was a very successful, high-powered businessman, and I fully expected him to move south and take up golf.  Instead, he started volunteering for his local hospital, where he “works” 3 days a week.  I guess that after working 50-60 hours a week for 45 years, he didn’t know how to do anything else.  I also have a nagging suspicion that I’ll be the same.  I got my first job at age 13 and have, literally, not been without a job since.  I’ve been working full-time since the age of 19… that’s 25 years, and I’ve been at TrueNorth for almost half of that. 

We get a lot of retirees who volunteer here at TrueNorth.  There are a couple of older gentlemen who work in the Food Pantry that really remind me of my dad; kind of gruff and grumbley on the outside, but big-ol-softies on the inside.  These are men who worked hard their whole lives, and aren’t about to stop just because they’ve retired.  There’s also a group that volunteers in the Pantry on Wednesdays who all wear pink shirts every week (just for the fun of it). Whenever they’re here, our staff has started to say - “it’s pink in the pantry today.”  I can imagine a day, in the not-so-distant future when an employee at some non-profit asks a co-worker; “Hey, where’s that nice lady who used to be an art teacher and her grumpy, bald husband?”  And the reply will be; “Oh they only volunteer here on Tuesdays and Thursdays… they run a little ice cream shop the rest of the week, I think they sell arts and crafts stuff or something too…”

It’s Wednesday today and it’s pink in the pantry.  And that’s what going on in a day in the life of TrueNorth.