A former library colleague and I were discussing our retirement from the library and I asked her if she missed it. She looked at me with an almost sheepish grin and said, "Not really!" And I grinned back. Not really.
To me it's almost astonishing to utter those words! I waited so long to retire thinking I would be devastated not to see my" people" anymore. I had dozens and dozens of people whose lives I had followed for more than 20 years - through births, deaths, marriages, divorces, promotions, firings, joys, sorrows - the gamut of life. I loved them. I still do but now they are a memory population and they are doing just fine. I often take them down from the shelf and think about them, but now its almost like thinking about characters in a book. I cherish them still for all the enrichment they provided me through the years, but now that phase of our friendship is over. And its just fine.
As Tennyson said so many years before me, but surely he was thinking of me (:)) "All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move."
A toast to untraveled worlds!
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