The Buckets and Barrels of Retirement

Retirement is full of new expectations and experiences.

First, the common expectation is that every day is Saturday. You can stay up late and sleep until noon. You have your bucket list of once-in-a-lifetime things to accomplish before you kick that bucket. You know – things like skydiving and climbing Mount Everest.

You now have time to drive across the country instead of just a drive around Lake Pepin. You can fly to Europe, take a cruise, visit Alaska or Hawaii. You can visit friends you haven’t seen in years. And you can take your time because you have loads of it.

Except that none of us knows how much of that time we have left. When you first retire, you might expect to live 30 more years. That’s so long, your main worry is arranging your will and funeral. So, you plan how to spend those years. You always wanted to build that storage shed, finish the basement, and learn to speak a foreign language. Here’s your chance. Do them while you still have energy.

But what you may not realize is that there are random events that will negatively affect your life. Things you can’t plan for, like cancer or glaucoma. You might call it the barrel list. It contains events just as likely to happen as anything in the bucket list. But it’s not a barrel of fun.

The Retirement Game

Picture retirement like a board game where if you land on a bucket space, you get to draw from the pile of fun cards. You might draw that trip to Hawaii. But you can’t take that trip until the next time you pass Go. Then, on your next turn you land on a barrel space. Now you draw from the pile of barrel cards. You might draw knee surgery. One card in that pile is always the dreaded “card of expiration” which eliminates you from the game. If you draw it, you have officially reached the bottom of the barrel.

See how this could work? Maybe there’s a rule that you age five years each time you pass Go. You’d collect Social Security and other retirement funds then, too. You could win the game by being the last player standing. I’d call it Buckets and Barrels in reverence to Shoots and Ladders.

Turns out there already is a game something like this. It’s called Retirement Road. You could look it up. There may be others. The game uses Yes and No spaces for good and bad things that happen in retirement. I like Bucket and Barrel spaces better.

A game like this is supposed to be fun, but for whom? It says it’s for “parents, grandparents, senior citizens and retirees.” That pretty much covers anyone old, including me. It is not designed for kids. They would be bored and wouldn’t believe any of the barrel stuff could happen to them.

My initial reaction is that I’m retired and don’t really want to be reminded of what my life is like or could be. Maybe it’s more fun if you’ve been drinking.

In real life we have our own buckets and barrels. So, what do we talk about the most? The barrel items, of course. You don’t plan for those events like you do with bucket items. Barrel events just happen, although life choices have a lot to do with moving some events toward the top. I’m not sure which I’d rather hear about – someone’s trip to the Ozarks or their ongoing battle with toenail fungus.

We’ve done a couple trips from our bucket list. It’s the barrel items that keep messing with our schedule. Catherine and I are helping older family members that live nearby. But with the involvement of others in our families, we were able to get away for short trips.

The Cat in the Barrel

It’s the latest barrel item that has thrown us for a loop. We suddenly have a diabetic cat. We noticed that she was drinking a lot of water, so we had her checked. Now we have to give her an insulin shot twice a day. We can never leave home again.

At first I wanted to tell the cat that she was going to die. But this was asking too much and cats don’t listen anyhow. It really wasn’t that long ago that a diagnosis of diabetes in a pet meant having them put down. Not anymore. And it’s not the $35 a month that was recently negotiated for human Americans. It’s more. Way more.

A quick bit of research reveals that a tortoise shell cat can live 12-20 years. Ours is 12 years old.

We’re not going anywhere for awhile.