Retirement, Blessed Retirement!!

Persistence Pays! After following numerous dead-end leads for part-time work, I managed to be selected for a dandy job at the Dixie College Library. I work Saturdays and Sundays as weekend librarian. They even took my picture to put with the list of library staff, which just shows how much weight a guy can gain doing a desk job for 33 years! [BTW--I've lost 50 pounds since the picture was taken.]

The weekend job works out great for me, since I spend three days a week as personal assistant to my father, Jean R. Paulson, who has become legally blind. Macular degeneration; same affliction that plagued John Milton in his later years. Dad was a career newspaperman, and has written magazine articles and newspaper columns regularly since his retirement. Now I am his "seeing-eye Doug." It has been a great experience to work closely with him in producing columns for the Provo Daily Herald , a novel, and a book which he has written with a co-author, Bart Anderson, a collection of Mormon folklore.

Now the challenge is to find publishers for them, and to try to keep up with Dad's pace. He's been churning out material for an autobiography, and is starting a Western. The people he associates with in the adult complex where he lives are mostly five to fifteen or twenty years younger, but many of them seem and act as if they were older. "How old are YOU?" they will ask. "None of your damn business!" is his response. And I suppose his philosophy of not worrying about age, or ignoring it, is perhaps the best for those of us in "our second sixty."

As for me, I have been taking some computer classes, to learn how to work with the internet, having milkshakes instead of meals once or twice a day, and recently started going to the college fitness center a couple, three days a week. This has moved my weight loss program off the plateau it got stuck on for awhile. When results are noticeable enough, I'll post another picture. Or, failing that, I'll take enough computer classes to combine Arnold Schwartzenegger's body with my head and just fake it!



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This page last revised November 17, 1996
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