Retirement, A Birthday Trip, and Five Miles of Frozen Togetherness

Ah, retirement. That magical moment when you get to sleep in every day, sip coffee in your PJs, and spend all of your time with the love of your life. I should be thrilled, right? Well, I was. At least, that’s what I told myself as my husband, Larry, once again brought up the yearly trek to an automotive swap meet.

Now, I love Larry with all my heart. I truly do. But we’ve spent 40+ years building a life together, and suddenly, we are sharing 24/7. There’s a limit to how much “together” any human being should be exposed to, and let’s just say, I am not quite ready to become a full-time Larry observer.

But as with everything in life, there’s always the curveball. And this time, that curveball was a cold, miserable trip to the annual auto swap meet—which always happens around his birthday. Oh, the joy.

Every year, Larry has this ritual: his birthday gift to himself is a day spent scouring dusty tables piled high with vintage car parts, rare tires, and, I’m assuming, other things that go “vroom” but not in any modern way. And this year, we’d be walking, I don’t know, five miles of it. Five. Miles. In the freezing cold. That’s not a gift; that’s a torture device.

“Come on, Debbie! It’ll be fun!” Larry said, flashing me one of those endearing smiles, the kind he thinks can convince me to do anything. I wasn’t sold. I looked out the window at the wind blowing, checked the temp on my phone  and pulled on my scarf, cursing the calendar for this ridiculous tradition. What kind of person walks five miles in a field of cold metal to look at car parts?

We arrived, and of course, it was windy. Of course, it was freezing. And of course, I didn’t have enough layers on.  But off we went, Larry’s excitement rising like a child on Christmas morning. I trudged along beside him, muttering under my breath. The rocks hurt my feet, my nose was red, and my hair was doing that thing where it had an unspoken agreement with the wind to never look cute again. But there was Larry, hopping from booth to booth, gleefully inspecting every rusty old road sign  and faded license plate as if they were treasures.

I’d like to say that I had an epiphany about how much I loved him at that moment. But no. Instead, I decided to complain. A lot.

“Larry, are you seriously seriously looking at a box of old license plates right now?”

“Yup, these are vintage!” he said with the same enthusiasm someone might have while finding their long-lost puppy. I rolled my eyes.

By the third long row of booths, I was over the license plates, the road signs, and whatever else people sell in the name of vintage cars. But here’s where the magic happened. It wasn’t the cold or the fact that I was trying to ignore my developing frostbite; it was the fact that we were doing this together. Yes, I was freezing. Yes, I may have developed an irrational hatred for old car parts. But there was Larry, excited like a kid in a candy store. And in that moment, I realized I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

We finished our five-mile trek, the last booth finally in sight, and Larry looked at me with that tired-but-happy smile. “See? You survived! And it wasn’t that bad, right?”

I nodded, trying not to let the wind whip my face off entirely. “It wasn’t that bad… I guess.”

And that’s the thing about retirement, I guess. You don’t always want to do the same things your spouse is passionate about. You don’t always want to walk five miles in the freezing cold just to look at some old car parts that have  seen better days. But, despite all that, it’s those shared moments that create a kind of magic. Because, in the end, what’s a little cold when you’ve got each other?Retirement means we’ll have more of these moments—maybe not the cold moments, but definitely the moments when we find joy in being together. So I’ll embrace it. I might even start looking at old road signs  with a little more enthusiasm… (Okay, no, I won’t, but I’ll try.)