The Retirement Gift That Was Not a Clock

Everyone knows the retirement gift clichés. The engraved clock. The crystal paperweight. The card signed by forty people who wrote variations of enjoy your freedom and you deserve it. These things are fine. They are also immediately forgettable.

My uncle Lou retired after thirty-one years at the same company. He started there young and he stayed and he was proud of that and also quietly ready to be done.

The office did the clock thing. I wanted to do something different.

I thought about what retirement actually is. Not the end of work. The beginning of time. Specifically, time to do the thing you kept saying you would do when you had time.

For Lou that thing was very specific. He had talked for years about learning to make things with wood. Real things. Furniture. He had a garage and some old tools his father left him and zero idea what he was doing with them. He watched videos online sometimes. He talked about it the way people talk about a hobby they want but have not permitted themselves to have yet.

I got him a beginner woodworking class. A real one, taught by a local craftsman, six sessions. And I found a book that a lot of serious woodworkers consider the definitive starting point. And I put them together in a box with a note that said: you said when you had time. You have time now.

He did not say a lot when he opened it. He looked at the class schedule for a while.

Three months later he sent me a photo of a small wooden box he had made. It was rough and lopsided and he was extremely proud of it.

The retirement gift that works is not about what they did. It is about who they are about to get to become.