Can You Hear Me Now

Note: The underlying article can be found at Free Range Retirement.

Pip: There’s a quote that opens the post we’re covering today: “The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.” Which, honestly, sounds less like a warning and more like a sales pitch.

Mara: Andrew Prokop is two years into retirement and using this site to take stock of what that actually looks like — connection, service, growth, and what he’s chosen to let go of. Let’s start with the retirement story itself.

Free Range Retirement

Pip: The frame here is a coming-of-age story — not for a teenager, but for someone approaching seventy. The question the post is really asking is: what does it mean to build a life after the life you built around work?

Mara: The post reaches for Treasure Island to answer that. Here’s the line that anchors it: “It was Silver’s voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.”

Pip: So Jim Hawkins is the stand-in. Fear, yes — but the only exit is forward. That’s the emotional logic the post is borrowing: retirement isn’t a finish line, it’s the moment the protagonist realizes turning back isn’t an option.

Mara: And the post gets specific about what moving forward looks like. The final years of work were fully remote — no physical coworkers, four managers never met in person. The post describes that isolation directly: “I needed people in my life — real people that didn’t exist only in a video conference or on a telephone call.”

Pip: Which led to rejoining a Unitarian church and, notably, showing up to the men’s groups before attending a single Sunday service. Priorities established.

Mara: Connection is one pillar. Service is the other. The volunteer work spans church dinners — cooking, dishwashing, bell ringing — and AARP fraud prevention work across the Twin Cities, teaching people to recognize and recover from cyber scams.

Pip: The fraud work is the one that lands differently. He recently spent hours repairing a PC caught in a Punchbowl Invitation Scam. That’s not abstract civic duty — that’s someone’s grandmother and a Tuesday afternoon.

Mara: The post also covers growth through spiritual writing and ongoing democratic resistance work, and family — particularly the grandfather role, described as something of a do-over. And then there’s the letting go: the development tools installed on the retirement PC that went unused for months.

Pip: Forty years as a software developer, and it turns out the job title was never the person.

Mara: The post closes with a poem — still rash, still coloring outside the lines, long past sixty. The retirement isn’t a retreat. It’s the next chapter of the same stubborn story.

Pip: Coming of age at seventy, bell ringing, scam repair, and a poem about refusing to fall in line. There’s a throughline there.

Mara: Connection and service as the foundation — and the sense that the work that matters most doesn’t come with a paycheck. More of that next time.