The Trip Begins

Dear everybody,

This is the first entry in what I'm told is called a blog, though it feels closer to the letters I used to send home from Nairobi - except this one reaches all of you at once, and nobody has to decipher my handwriting.

The news itself is simple: as of Friday, I am retired. Thirty-one years with USAID, the last chunk of it in education. I have attended my final budget review, surrendered my badge to a very polite security officer, and walked out into a Monday with nothing on the calendar. I recommend it.

What I'll miss

The classrooms, mostly. The particular noise a full primary school makes at recess in about forty languages. The colleagues who could fix a procurement mess in the morning and a gin and tonic in the evening. I will not miss the fluorescent-lit conference rooms of this world, and I have said so at every exit interview they were unwise enough to offer me.

A teacher in Jakarta once told me something I've kept above my desk ever since:

“You keep showing up. That is ninety percent of education policy, Mr. Tom. The other ten percent is biscuits.”

She was right about the biscuits.

The plan, such as it is

Retirees keep asking me what I'll do with my time, as if time were a filing cabinet that suddenly stands empty. The answer, in no particular order:

Dive the reefs I flew over for three decades without a single free afternoon

Sit quietly on meditation retreats until my knees file a formal complaint

Catch up with a certain band, wherever they happen to be playing

Write to all of you, properly, at last

This site - my daughter set it up, I just write the letters - has a map where every update gets a pin. Apparently Silver Spring, Maryland is stop number one. It's a long, strange trip, friends. I figure we're still near the beginning, and that's the good news.

Yours from the porch,