We had a plan, finally. After three decades of marriage we had a retirement plan and I was no longer wondering how we would financially manage those years when our youth dwindled and the creaky joints got louder. I was looking forward to retiring from teaching piano in three or four years when my husband sold his portion of the business, and we could pay off our home and begin service as missionaries for our church. It was a wonderful plan.
But then 2013 happened. It seemed that it would be like any other year. My husband would get up and go out on the road to sell pumps and other equipment to the gold mines. I would get up and go play the piano at the middle school and high school and then teach piano lessons every day Monday through Friday. Every Saturday I would accompany a sing-along at the local nursing home. We would go to church with our neighbors and friends every Sunday. We would have our monthly get-togethers with fellow empty-nesters. And we would travel to see our family in various states every chance we had. Yes, it would be a good year, as usual.
Then on February sixth, right before midnight, I received a phone call from a very sweet nurse at the University Medical Center. She told me to take a deep breath. My husband (Tom) had been in an accident and they were evaluating his condition. All she could tell me was that he was conscious and talking. She would call me in an hour with an update. For a very, very long hour I imagined what kinds of injuries a person might have and still be able to talk. That was the beginning of the "wreck" of-a-year we were going to have.
Tom had been lost in the fog on his way to the city three hours away. But before he headed that direction he had been on the road for ten hours. He didn't get tired, though; the fog was so thick he was disoriented and ended up driving across the freeway in front of a semi-truck. The impact knocked the bed off the truck and pushed the mortally-wounded Silverado three-hundred feet down the road. Although he was injured badly enough to be in the hospital for ten days, Tom didn't have a scratch on his head and didn't even require a cast anywhere on his body.
In March we celebrated Tom's sixtieth birthday, feeling more gratitude than usual to even be having another birthday. I achieved my goal of having sixty people wish him a happy year as he started a new decade of life. We bought him a new truck to replace his totaled old friend and, having recovered sufficiently, he went from working a few hours a day back to long hours supporting the company business.
In April his best friend/boss decided Tom didn't fit his vision of the future of the company any longer, forced a buy-out and sent Tom packing. We sold our home straightaway and we have been homeless and jobless ever since. So much for our plan. (A friend said to me, "I planned my life and God laughed.")
Our family of six married children has been extremely supportive. We have been traveling the country staying with our children, helping them with child care, finishing garages, mowing lawns, cooking, housekeeping, etc. Some of our children moved to different states or towns in the last year so we helped pack and unpack boxes. Because of the business buy-out we have money to pay our debt obligations, our health and car insurance, our cell-phones, and for storing all of our belongings until we finally have a home of our own. (We just hope we get a job before the money runs out. Our plan meant Tom needed to have that job for three more years.)
Our friends have been very caring, too, and some have offered us rooms if needed. Some dear friends own a penthouse overlooking the Salt Lake Temple and let us stay there, as it was vacant for a period of time. We had six weeks of respite there, but then we felt we had to go somewhere else to see if work could be found, because nothing positive employment-wise had happened in the West. So we tried the Midwest, then the South, on to the Southwest, and then headed back to where we started because we needed to get our taxes done. We are currently in Washington helping our daughter who is moving to where her husband is starting a new job.
And why isn't Tom working somewhere? Did we just decide to take a break from our once-structured life? If you've ever had to find work after you turned sixty years old, you know the answer to that question. Tom spends hours nearly every day looking at job listings and has applied for nearly six-hundred jobs. A few human resources people have called him for a first interview. Fewer have called for second interviews. Three have called to arrange the third (on-site) interviews. Out of the group that he has heard from to date, all but one have resulted in letters of rejection. We are still waiting to hear back from one company to see if he will get a second interview. (Do you know that sometimes it can take up to four months before you know if you're the one they are going to hire?) And he's not picky, either. He has tried many different types of businesses and positions. Not even places like Home Depot, Lowes, Costco, etc., have shown any interest, except for one HD in Kansas City that interviewed him and said they'd let him know in five days and he never heard another word from them.
It's not because he has a record of sloppy work, missed days on the job, lack of caring about his employees, etc. No, this man has a reputation for being a problem-solver, a man of integrity, faithful to his company, dedicated to making the business better by learning and then doing the job to the best of his ability. I see it all the time at home. It never ceases to amaze me that he knows so much! He can build, fix, cook, bake, can, clean, organize, grow (as in gardens and lawns) anything he desires. There has been a lot of comfort in knowing that if we were to be without utilities for very long he'd figure out how to provide what we needed. I feel sorry for all the companies from Canada to South America where he has been applying who have not chosen him. They won't find out what an asset my Tom would be to their business.
In the meantime, I try not to dwell on the jobless and homeless state we are in. But those two "lesses" mean other things, too. We are ward-less, calling-less, doctor and dentist-less. We can't have our monthly get-togethers with our friends, I can't have my piano studio (although I am giving a few Skype and FaceTime lessons), and there are so many other things we are doing without that I won't take time to list. If I think too hard about what I DON'T have, I forget what I DO have.
To keep myself thinking more positively, I started sending weekly emails to family, then added friends, and more friends, and knowing I'll be "reporting" to them in a few days makes me look for the good in everything that happens during the week, even if it's an unexpected rejection that was a huge disappointment. Optimism takes the sting out of the "Thank you for your interest in our company. Although you have an impressive resume, ......"
I've thought that perhaps someone else out there in cyberspace might be going through similar challenges with employment and maybe we can sustain one another by sharing our experiences. I will post some of the emails I have sent to my circles so you can get a better idea how we have used this time of "discovery." Please join the discussion; I invite comments that encourage, not disparage or demean. Please, don't use foul language no matter how angry you are because of what your boss did to you. We might each have something that will help, or questions to ask of someone who has already found an answer.
Maybe through this experiment I'll learn that "less" really is "more."
