Keeping retirement weird.

By the time I got home yesterday evening after picking up Ulysses at the dog-care place, the Bulls and Cavs were in the second quarter.

With five minutes left in the game I turned it off.

It was too painful to watch.

Even so, as my trainer posted on Facebook,“I was going to write a whole thing about how sad I was, but then I thought: if the worst thing about my day was that a bunch of grown men lost a basketball game…then I’ve had a pretty good ass day”

And I did.

It started with playing my ukulele with the kindergarten and first graders at the school in Little Village where we play every week.

The class has a bunch of newly hatched chicks. So in their honor, when we played “Don’t Worry. Be Happy” I started singing the chorus in chicken.

Y’know. “Puck puck puck puck puck puck.”

The kids thought I was crazy, which is always a good thing to remind a six-year old.

On the other hand, I’ve been told that they have named a chick after me.

If I remember the first grade classes with chicks in my old school, the poor things have a limited life span. I can only hope the one named Fred survives okay.

Next I drove north for the luncheon of the North Lake Shore Retired Teachers Association. The turnout was a little smaller than usual.

But our President Irene Jinks started things out with a terrific invocation, which I posted earlier.

Irene is a dear friend who I first met when she was on our district’s school board. It is a rare thing to find an actual educator – let alone an actual teacher – sitting on the board.

She has also been a leader among retirees, not only current president of our Illinois Retired Teachers Association chapter, but former president of the entire state organization.

If it weren’t for the IRTA our pension fight might have turned out very differently.

While the state’s coalition of unions was at the table signing off on a bill that compromised the pension protection clause of the Illinois Constitution, the IRTA promised to go to court if any compromises were passed.

Their position was a major cause for sinking the compromise bill and led to Senate Bill 1 – the pension theft – ending up in court with the Supreme Court ruling a week ago that it was illegal.

I ate light at the luncheon because after that I killed some time in the north suburbs and then joined my colleagues at the IEA Region 36 end-of-the-year dinner at Hackney’s in Glenview.

Hackney’s serves a deep-fried onion loaf. Which is why I had to eat light all day before sitting down with activists from all the Region locals.

Current Park Ridge Education Association president Andy Duerkop told me that seven teachers retired this year.

They retired knowing that the pension they spent their careers paying into is now secure.

It was six o’clock and I had to get from Glenview to Chicago and Western by 7 to pick up Ulysses.

So I grabbed a few more fried onions and asked for my burger to be wrapped up.