Where's the 'off' switch?

It’s hours before the turn of the year in the US, and 2025 is a landmark. In a few hours it will be 50 years since I officially began my journalism career.

In all that time I interviewed politicians, bad guys, gang bangers, business leaders, royalty and heads of state. I wrote countless columns and editorials and movie and theater reviews. I covered city council meetings in Chicago and county board meetings in Florida.

I loved every minute of it. It was like eating chocolate pudding nearly every, single day of my working life.

Having said that, 2025 is supposed to be the year that I do what people my age are supposed to do: retire. Or at least as my teacher, friend and mentor Sr. Lorraine Trotter advises “Slide into retirement.”

Right. She then adds, "“Well then of course, writers don’t retire.”

So what exactly am I to do?

I’m a poet, so I’ll spend some of this “retirement time’ writing verse, teaching a poetry class blue-haired ladies who want to pen Valentine messages to their grandchildren.

Then I’ll fiddle around with a couple of novel and short story projects for which I had little time when I was ‘on deadline.”

Finally, I’ll pitch a few stories - mostly about the industrial uses of gemstones or Poet Laureates in the heartland - to the small, but consistently appreciative publications to which I regularly contribute.

Sooner or later though, I will start to miss the politicians and the bad guys and the gangbangers. This whole retirement thing will fly out the window and I’ll find some way to practice journalism again.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Pursuit

I 
 have
lived 
 a 
lifetime
 chasing
losers
 and 
liars 
 and 
freaks
 and
all
 the
 while
I 
 learned 
to 
 love 
them
 so 
no
 wonder
I 
 can't 
stop 
 running
toward 
them
 and 
start
 chasing
after
 you

I can’t turn off the journalist switch, but I will try anyway.