Attic Salt for Nov. 1, 2009

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 1, 2009

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A good vacation begins a month before you load the car.

Weeks before I left on vacation, my body was at my desk or out talking to people for stories, but my mind was at my wife’s family farm.

For a week, I mentally packed books, clothes for cool weather and warm (often worn the same day), laptop to do a little work but also for the killer hearts game and movie watching, the bathroom scales to monitor weight, bicycle for riding in the hills north of Ruston and what I needed to split wood I hoped to find in the front yard.

The idea is to move daily life from Baton Rouge to the farm. This is a life I can live for two weeks before starting to get antsy, a glimpse of life when I no longer rise to a clock.

When I no longer work at a regular job, I will have to find something meaningful to do. I know people who say they do nothing in retirement, but I think they must do SOMETHING.

Vacation, I’ve come to look upon as a trial run for no longer having to keep hours or meet deadlines.

Whippersnappers at checkout lines confuse the color of my hair with retirement.

"Are you retired, sir?" they ask.

I always hesitate a second or two before answering, hoping that in that brief delay I’ll gain some insight into what it feels like to be retired.

Retirement to me is still the old men in khaki shirts, khaki pants and brogans who worked in neat shops behind their houses in the neighborhood where I grew up.

A printer at the Alexandria Daily Town Talk retired to his garage which he’d set up as a miniature version of the newspaper’s press room. He did job printing on a restored Washington press, a wonderful black sculpture in iron with a moveable bed. It gave off a smell of hot ink.

Unlike copying machines, a small boy could stand beside that press, look into its guts and see how it worked.

Behind the printing press, there was a car the printer had built — chassis, curved sheet metal sides, regular car tires, a steering wheel and engine open for work or inspection.