What do you do when you don't have anything to do?

To this point on my blog, all my posts on “Hello Pension Goodbye Tension!” have been about taking adventurous trips - -  Tuscany, Rome, Nebraska, biking the Great Allegheny Passage thru Appalachia- - and devoting myself to getting my UBER license, which ended up taking way more time than you could ever imagine. . . . and I will get back to that on this blog, count on that.

But what about a normal day, here in New York, when you don’t have anything in particular planned . . . . ?  No matter what, there are a lot of them.

You could sit around, and a lot of retirees do, until the inertia leads to more sitting around.  But remember this:  people don’t wear out, they rust out.

So I am beginning to find pleasure in looking up stuff going on around town, and then just doing it.  You can’t even think that way when you’re working . . . . because you’re working!

New York is, as my pal Ron Leven terms it, assisted living for the affluent.  If you have the means, then all of a sudden you have the time to do fun stuff that you either didn’t know about or didn’t have the time to plan for.

But now I have the time.

So here are the things I’ve been doing that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten around to as long as I was working:

One day this summer - - one of the few days I was here! - - I went to the Queens Museum.  First, I didn’t know there was a Queens Museum.  Then, it’s on the grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair, and while I had seen the grounds from afar - - the subway to Shea Stadium to see a Mets game - - I had never actually been in the park.

I went with my new neighbors and friends, and fellow retirees, Anne and Phil, and the exhibit was on The Ramones - - The Ramones!  I had seen them live at CBGB in 1978, and listened to them a thousand times.  But considering all 4 were younger than I and all 4 are dead, it seemed the respectful thing to do.  And their music is still so alive, at least according to my ears (of course, I thought Green Day, for whom The Ramones set precedent, were the coolest group I had heard since The Ramones when my kids Jack and Lily told me Green Day was . . .  “so 90’s”).  The music and the pictures at the exhibit took me back to those days, with lots of fond memories, and probably lots of forgotten ones.

And Broadway . . . . shows you think you can’t ever get tickets to are surprisingly available on the day of performance at TKTS.  So I saw “The Humans”, perhaps the best thing on Broadway in 20 years.  And “The Cherry Orchard” with Diane Lane.  And Blackbird with Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels, the most frightening yet believable play I’ve ever seen.

Spontaneity is a surprising delight.  One morning when I awoke, I looked at my email and saw one from my friend Andy Ostroy, calling attention to the day being the 10th anniversary of his wife Adrienne Shelley’s tragic killing.  Adrienne wrote and directed and starred in the movie “Waitress” upon which the Broadway musical of the same name is based.  So I got on my bike, headed to TKTS, and showed my observance by seeing how her amazing work lives on in a new form.

And there’s more: Dorrance Dance at the Joyce, Kathleen Battle at the Metropolitan opera singing gospel songs from the Underground Railroad, and Doomocracy in Brooklyn, which seems, after the election, oddly prescient.

And this was anything but spontaneous, as I arranged to take Lily and Jack to “Oh Hello” on Broadway.  Thanks to my friend Charlotte St. Martin, the Executive Director of the Broadway League, we had spectacular seats, and I could see my kids enjoyed it even more than I did.

And other stuff . . . . after all my years in NYC, I’ve never been to
Schermerhorn Row, at the South Street Seaport, the original houses still existing from the 18th century.  The tour was narrated by an outstanding New York historian.

And just last night, I went out to The Bell House in Brooklyn because I heard Norah Jones - - Norah Jones! - - was doing a Holiday show with an all women group she plays in, called Puss 'n Boots.  She sang with her distinctive voice, and for some reason wore an Elf hat.  They put on a great show, all the more accessible because, thanks to the MTA, I could take the subway to and from.

What I have found is the more you do, the more you’ll want to do.  If anything, my “To Do” list is growing.

So to conclude with the theme of this blog, the importance of going FROM career and going TO something with as much meaning and importance and gratification, I’m finding a surprising benefit in hanging loose, and acting quickly, because if anything, I’m choosing wearing out over rusting out.