Guest Post: My New Unemployed Life.
By Ellen Prague.
Small retail businesses don't have a mandatory retirement age.You work until you're burned out, have enough savings or get sick. But once you stop the feelings are the same.
For 35 years I owned and operated The Paper Shop, Inc., in Winter Park, Florida. The shop allowed us to be intimately involved in our customer's lives because we created special invitations for all their family milestones, from birth to death. First, we created a "stationery wardrobe”, a set of ideas for every possible announcement. Then, there might be a party or two, then an engagement, showers, weddings, birth announcements, sympathy acknowledgements, and then the next generation would begin again.
From 2000 until 2008 I also had a linen shop around the corner, called Luxe Linens, where you could purchase the most fabulous bedding and tabletop. Going to someone's home to show them how to make the bed creates an interesting intimacy. You learn all kinds of things!
My husband and I had a very active social life, even though I worked almost every day. On a Saturday, retail’s busiest day, I could get "black-tie" ready in thirty minutes–and I often had to. l enjoyed my life and, loving what I did (most of the time), I envisioned working until somewhere into my '80s.
Mother Nature had other ideas. Somewhere in my '70s I started having trouble hearing what people across the room were saying (by the way, we don't call them hearing aids anymore, we refer to them as ear jewelry). My arthritis became so painful I had to have one of my employees lift the sample books off the shelves. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like that, but was still reluctant to give up the work I loved.
It fell to my two best friends to throw a Surprise Retirement Party for me. They contacted my staff and got together a list of my best or favorite customers and invited them to say goodbye. Yikes! I was shocked. There was a lot of love in the room and everyone brought gifts and love notes. That was heartwarming but unsettling. I now had no choice. I was done.
I've been unemployed (I refuse to use the word retired) now for four years and while initially there were lunches and cocktails with the customers who shopped with us every week and came in for the latest gossip or a quick retail therapy session (we had unusual, upscale gifts), once Covid-19 hit my only opportunity to connect was on my daily walk with the dog.
Now that we are out and about again, the things I miss are the daily interaction with customers and the loss of identity. There has been a tremendous influx of people moving into town and at the same time many businesses closed and new ones have opened. I had been well known in this small community. I had a well-known shop on a prestigious street for a long period of time. But now, in a very short period, I feel as if I have vanished.
It's been suggested several times that I write a book about some of my experiences in retail, but a great deal of what I know was told to me in confidence and I have always been mindful of people's privacy. That's why I know it all! There are some stories that can be told, but a lot that can’t!
My daughter moved back to town from New York before the shut-down, and she and I are ghost-writing a memoir for an old friend. We've spent the past year interviewing and researching all her stories and now are working on an outline to find a publisher.
Our friend has had an extremely unusual life. She started modeling at age 3 (she is now 83 and still stunning). She had a highly successful cosmetic company which she ran out of Palm Beach. She was the first weather girl in Tampa, Florida, she had a house burn down and another house blow up. Among other things! Some of you long-time New Yorkers may remember her late-husband, the financial radio talk show host Sonny Bloch.
Our working title is "And Then What Happened?" I feel as if that’s a good title for my life now that I am unemployed too!