A friend of ours invited us to be his guests at a charity dinner and although usually I just decline invitations on work-nights I paused this time because I started thinking about post-retirement possibilities.  I said yes.

So here’s how the night unfolded.

When we arrived there was a bar set up in the lobby.  On the bar there were four bottles; gin, vodka, wine, scotch.  I asked for a gin and tonic (after giving such an important decision appropriate thought) and the bartender said he’d love to give me that but he didn’t have any gin and he didn’t have any tonic.  Pointed to the bottle sitting there in clear sight … gin.  Asked if I should come around the counter and check to see whether or not he actually had tonic too.  Waited and waited to get a gin and soda, got it, and then entered the “big room”.

There were 9 of us sitting at a table together; 5 men and 4 women.  Brief introductions, those halting awkward moments of first conversation among people who don’t know each other, and then it started.  Golf.  The guys were talking about golf; talking about it as if it could possibly be of interest to anyone.  Okay - cut them some slack - this is what they think is worthy of a discussion.  Time passed.  Then it was basketball.  Lots and lots of basketball.  I remembered that there were some phone calls I needed to make and left the table politely to go outside and use my cell phone.

Time passed.

I returned to the table where the conversation had now turned to baseball.  I turned to the other women at the table, smiled, and said “maybe we should change the seating arrangements and have the guys on one side of the table so they can keep talking sports and we could sit on the other side and talk about whatever interests us?”  They smiled politely, nodded towards their husbands, and continued being good wives who listen quietly to the men’s conversation.  I had images of old English parlours with men smoking cigars.  I recalled so many movie scenes with women sweetly smiling at men who ignored then, dominated them, bored them.  Oops - more urgent phone calls to make!  One of those calls was to leave myself a message (need to get some technology to track my thoughts) to make sure to write about this in the morning.

So - here I am with one more thing I can put on my list of “don’t do this when you retire” and one more tale to add to my blog at http://forthefirstime.wordpress.com where I’m hopinig lots of women will come explore facing retirement with me.  Even though I won’t have to get up to work early it doesn’t mean that my free time has less value.  I’ll have to come up with some new response to invitations to things on week-nights that I don’t really want to do since I can’t use the “I have to be in my office at the crack of dawn” device any more.  I guess I could just rely on the old “so sorry, I already have something scheduled that night” side-step which wouldn’t really be a lie since I will already have something scheduled - my life!