My parents couldn't be more different from each other. They have both retired within the past year. I felt a heightened anticipation about what they would choose to get themselves into. Secretly I was hoping that my father would open up an Einstein Bagels or similar franchise so that I could try my hand in the restaurant business by helping him out. If that didn't come to fruition, I was hoping he follow through on his dream of buying a room full of professional woodworking tools so that I could quit my job and become a maker of one-of-a-kind furniture pieces. But this isn't about me.

My father has started to dabble. He has been quail hunting a few times, he has joined the Y and meets his friends at the gym for spin classes and swimming, he has asked me if he can borrow my Thermarest to go camping. He has taken a 20-hr/week contract job in which he is a project manager for a new resource learning center. My mother took a part-time position for about 20-hrs/week as well. Both of them have become much more aware of what is going on in Birmingham in terms of cultural and social events. They applied for their passports so they can do some traveling outside of the country. And, of course, as grandparents they like to babysit the little ones, take them to the playground, and have them stay overnight.

So my parents are different in that my father seems to be using his time for constructive purposes, and my mother's idle hands are becoming the work of the devil. When she has more energy she likes to pick on people but I have made it abundantly clear that if she picks on me, then I will pull a disappearing act for a month or two until she can behave. So she has found other targets. She has befriended all of the other women in her little locality and they get together and gossip about the other people they know who aren't present. And then she wants to tell me ALLLL about so-and-so, how they are getting married, divorced, havingababy ondrugs, arrested, newjob, boughtbighouseandcar, babyisretarded, goingtothischurch, datingsomeoneinAtlanta, gotveryfat. This reminded me never to tell her anything about myself ever again so that other people who should not care about me and probably do not care about me will not have anything about me to pass around to the other idle people who have nothing better to do and badly need to get a life.

In short, my mother, in her retirement, has developed diarrhea of the mouth.