Composing a Further Life

that. So that’s what I did for two years, about three days a week. They appreciated it. They gave me a bonus at Christmastime for volunteering, so everybody was happy.”
    Many people begin retirement with travel, producing a new version of the
Wanderjahr
that was once a tradition in Europe for young men of means, who often traveled abroad for a year or more before settling down to marriage and careers. The
Wanderjahr
offered what Erik Erikson called a
moratorium
for sorting out issues of identity before marriage and commitment to a particular adult role, and it often serves a similar function today in the form of a “gap year” between college and professional school. 1 Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape.
    The first step in the Lawsons’ retirement was the purchase of a mobile home, the kind of recreational vehicle designed for actual travel. They set off across the country, and along the way they visited a couple who were former clients of the Brooklin Boat Yard and had been spending their winters in a trailer park retirement community near Tucson. It was the wife who told Hank about learning jewelry making there and who had shown the Lawsons a promotional video about the park, part of the Rincon Country West RV Resort.
    “She knew that I made all the hardware at the boatyard, and she said, ‘You know what, you could pick up that trade and I bet you’d love it,’ ” Hank recalled. “So with that in mind, that maybe I should try that, I went up to the workshop where they made jewelry. It’s called the Silversmith-Lapidary Shop. I went in there, and this fellow met me at the door and he says, ‘What are you looking for?’ I said I didn’t know, I was looking around, and I thought this might be interesting to get into. And he said, ‘What do you know about it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ He asked me if I had tools, and I said, ‘No, I don’t have any tools.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you don’t belong in here.’ So I thought, Well, you’re absolutely right, I don’t, so I closed the door, and I left. Then I was telling this lady friend that it didn’t work out, and I told her my experience. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you must have run into the wrong person, because,’ she said, ‘they love to have new people come in and they love to help them. The people are always helping one another.’ ”
    It was two years later when the Lawsons revisited Tucson and Hank went back to the Silversmith-Lapidary Shop. “This time I went in and I bumped into some lady from Texas in there and she was very friendly and she grabbed me by the arm and, boy, she wheeled me around inside and told me this and that and everything. She made me really feel welcome. What a difference a person can make! That was probably fifteen years ago. And now I do have my own tools.”
    Jane laughed. “And now when people come through the door, he’s the one who takes somebody on and tells them …”
    Hank went on to describe the complex of workshops in the resort, where groups of residents do their thing, woodwork or ceramics or sewing and needlepoint; his favored “shop” specializes in silversmithing and polishing semiprecious stones, although he does woodwork as well. When I went to visit the Lawsons in Tucson, he took me around the workshop, stopping to confer and advise on ongoing projects and showing me the different machines, and then on briefer visits to other workshops. Jane’s sewing and embroidery workshop is across the hall. Each craft group has its own officers, and both Hank and Jane have been involved as officers and in teaching newcomers.
    The crafts complex is only one of many facilities at the resort. “It costs almost four thousand dollars a year to rent the spot we’re on. If you take advantage of all the facilities, from crafts to dancing to hot tubs,” Jane said, “it’s not that expensive, but if you’re just going to come out there and not ever go to the Center, which there are people that do that, to me that doesn’t make sense.”
    Hank added, “If you’re a pessimist who doesn’t want to get involved, I mean you’re welcome there and there are plenty of people to be friends with, but it’s hard for us to understand anyone wanting to just