I had to see a new doc—nothing huge, just some spots I wanted checked and removed—and thus had to fill out a multitude of forms. All of them asked for my birth date or my age. The spots turned out to be some perfectly normal growths, not a sign of skin cancer; these growths happen to older people, though doctors don’t know why. The dermatologist said a colleague of hers refers to them as barnacles, as in “Old ships get barnacles.” We agreed that no woman we know wants to be thought of as an old ship, old bag, old bat, old anything. But the age-related skin growths and the repeated dates on forms reminded me that I am close to retirement age—just not close enough. I’m more than ready to spend my days without the burdens of work, if only I had a trust fund.

I’ve been retiring for a long time; I blame this not on the bossa nova, but on my version of a midlife crisis—attending seminary. At the time, I joked that going back to school was cheaper than a little red sports car, but with the interest on my student loans, I’m not sure that’s true. The first year I received a full tuition scholarship and decided to work only on campus and devote myself to my studies. I needed to do this, intellectually and spiritually. The year was a complex unraveling of a lot of cherished notions and connections.

So I attended classes, read the assignments and worked hard on papers and projects, unleashed some creativity I didn’t know was there, made friends, and worked for student wages at the library several hours a week. I lived on student loans, in a nice one-bedroom apartment a mile or so from campus, because on-campus housing prohibited pets. Also because I’d lived alone for more than a decade and didn’t think I could face dorm life again. I needed the solitude and distance to process all the thinking-feeling-growing.

Aside from a few summers, it was the first time in 21 years that I wasn’t going to work 40 hours or more a week, and it was heady. It also spoiled me for work. I had what the ancients called “holy leisure”—the luxury of three years of study and thought, interacting with classmates and with some great women and men of faith, many of whom had died centuries before. Even when I took part-time jobs off campus during my last two years, I wasn’t bound to a 9-5 schedule.

Graduation was a shock; I’d spun a two-year program into three, but I really needed to go. The only problems were where and to what? My original idea of seminary librarianship wasn’t going to satisfy me. My mother grew more ill, fighting COPD after decades as a smoker. I thought I needed to be around, so I wasn’t checking national job ads.

By the time she died, fourteen months after I graduated with a degree that didn’t lead anywhere, I was working in educational publishing, back in the valley I loved. Although my plan was to stay three years, make contacts for freelance work, and take a leave from working in-house to write, I lasted only two years and three months.

Eleven years later, here I am, having borrowed from the government and from my own retirement funds to go to school, making less money than I did when I jumped ship in 1994. And scrambling to do so, with insurance premiums that I can’t afford, a retirement account I’m gradually depleting (with the help of the volatile market), freelance work when I can get it, and a part-time job.

When I left my editing job, I joked that I was retiring, but just couldn’t afford it, so I was freelancing. I was 48. I had watched my adoptive father sink into a brooding state after he retired at 59; he was dead within months. I didn’t want to die with my music still in me, as the saying goes. But this kind of life is starting to feel less like freedom and more like a burden.

I’m tired. Working five hours a day at the library is as tiring as eight hours used to be. The monthly scramble to pay bills and to find new freelance work is tiring. Freelancing, when I can get it, is hard mental work, even if I get to write or edit at home in casual clothes. Dealing with multiple cancers is tiring, too. Although I’m in remission, a voice whispers in my ear, as Caesar paid a servant to whisper in his, “Thou, too, art mortal.”

If the educational publishing world would get back to its pre-2008 levels, there might be hope. But that’s not going to happen. Too much has changed in that world—too many buyouts and consolidations have left more highly qualified writers and editors hanging out to dry. The competition is fiercer than it was in 2000, when I bailed, not really knowing what I was doing and not planning to be gone more than a year or two. Technology has changed the way books come together, if in fact the end product is a book, not an mp3 file or an online learning course. Content providers are often expected to own and know how to use newer software packages, to be more sophisticated Web design.

Let me risk shooting myself in the foot and admit that I don’t care about those things. I don’t want to learn yet another computer program. I care about, even when writing prose, is getting the best words in the best order (as Coleridge defined poetry) onto the page or the screen. I am, as a friend says of herself, a dinosaur, valuing the printed word more than images. And I’d gladly shuffle off to Buffalo, if I could only figure out how.