Ch-Ch-Changes

I'm workng very hard to be able to retire at the end of June. This came as a surprse to the people for whom I work as, based on their perception of my output, they assumed I had retired about a decade ago. Everyone's a comedian, I guess. 

My wife, Sigrid, and I are married for a skosh over forty years (she often says it feels much longer, but I think that's because Germans use the metric system of measurement. See my above remark about comedians). 

We started out zum zweite or, as Erich Fromm and Helen Reddy might say, 'you and me against the world,' and evolved into an LLC with the birth of our son, Patrick, and then more towards a GmbH with the arrival of our daughter, Michelle. 

Now, Sigrid and I are, for the most part, back to where we began if not in that exact same physical location. Something about no one steps into the same river twice as both they and the river have changed comes to mind but, in my case, only briefly. 

Speaking of water, we journeyed across the ocean to start here again after we thought our lives' paths had been pretty much determined, proving that what you learn after you know it all is often more valuable than anything else you could imagine. 

And now, as we sort through pensions, retirement plans, social security and analyzee charts of expenses and living costs, have concluded we may be moving from the only home we've had in over a quarter of a century. 

Where we live, we all understand, is not the least expensive place in the USA to settle, which sort of proves the difference between a rut and a grave is too often only the depth, but I, like so many others, prefer problems which are familiar to solutions that are not.  

A solution for us in our situation should be to relocate, but possessed by the possessions we have acquired and allowed to accrue over four decades of life (and we have a crammed to overflowing basement to prove it), we've never progressed much beyond the "we may have to move" discussion part of the program until now. 

And as I'm learning with more shock than alacrity in the course of this week, that discussion may be taking on a more urgent tenor and tone as the days on the calendar dwindle down, proving again that time moves slowly but passes all too quickly.         
- bill kenny