On the day I retired, effective March 20, I opened my phone and looked for the internal address of the company president. I thought I would not be able to see him anymore. I sent a message: I am retiring as of March 20, thank you for everything. The reply had a mobile number in it. I had not expected that. I gave him my number too. From there we were connected by text message. He retired as well, in June.
People say that after retirement, a man loses his male friends. So that is how it goes, I thought. But a few faces come to mind for me. The carpenter I have known since I was a kid. Colleagues from the company. People from a community I joined recently. If I count them up, it might come to five or six. Then again, maybe I am the only one who thinks so. Do they think of me as a friend too? I do not know that.
Thirty years, and we had not met
With those three, it has been more than thirty years. That does not mean we were seeing each other all that time.
The organization changed, the department changed, the place I was posted to changed. We were inside the same company and we hardly met. Once I retired, I might never see them again. Each of us has a family. That was how it felt to me. So I sent the message. If I had not, we would not have met.
Since I retired, we have met three times. In winter the snow stopped us, but I expect we will meet again. Two of the three do not drink. We eat, we talk about nothing in particular, we go home. That is enough.
Rank had nothing to do with it
One of the three was the president. Two were department managers. I retired as a rank-and-file worker. We still meet. Rank has never got in the way.
Probably we were never associating by rank in the first place. Maybe what we aimed at was similar. Maybe we simply got along. I do not really know. Maybe I was just the pushy one. But when I look at it now, we are still connected.
There is one more, the carpenter I have known since I was a kid. He built my house. Even after I retired, a message comes in saying he is short of hands. He is someone I can deal with as an equal. This kind of tie sits somewhere outside the company.
You meet, and that is how you come to get along
People say you stop meeting because you do not get along. I think the reverse happens too. You keep meeting, and that is how you come to get along.
Friends are supposed to be the people whose values are close to yours. But nobody has the same values as you from the start. I think the values get closer as a result of meeting again and again. And if you stop meeting, you drift apart on your own. It is not that the values move apart. You drift because you do not meet.
Right now I can meet them. What happens later, I do not know. We all get older. Some of them will reach a point where we cannot meet anymore. That cannot be helped.
A man after retirement has no company, no place that forces him to see other people. If you do not move yourself, the days go by without seeing anyone at all.
To be honest, there is a part of me that does not like people. I hate being lonely, and I also hate moving in a crowd. But because I know that about myself, I pick places where people whose basic values are close to mine gather, and I go to those. If there is someone I do not like, I do not go. That is all it is.
Some days it may hit me that I have no friends at all. But when I actually move, there turn out to be more than I thought.
Well, that is about how it is.
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