The Bookless Club: How do you view retirement?

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So, Maria Fonseca has retired. After working six days a week for almost half a century, while raising a son on her own, she has finally called it quits. The transition isn’t easy. How do you disrupt a lifetime of routine and habit? How do you suddenly eliminate a community of people you’ve spent most of your life amongst? How do you discard all the flotsam and jetsam of a commercial enterprise? Maria’s collection of spools thread alone numbered in the hundreds. And it’s specialty thread, not stuff you can pick up at a dollar store.

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The lure of retirement is immense, but the reality is a series of difficult adjustments, many of them unidentifiable until you’re in the throes of it all. Many of us live in anticipation of that hallowed day in the future when we don’t set the alarm, don’t do the commute, and don’t worry about the details. And then that day arrives, freighted with its own challenges.

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Heaven knows Maria has earned her retirement, but it really is a loss. The professional landscape of the city has lost an artisan and ethical businesswoman. Someone with the mettle to go it alone and to deliver a topflight product to the community. Someone who developed trusted relationships with people.

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Future brides may have to forgo the redeployment of the family lace, but it’s Maria’s rare amalgam of professionalism and thoughtfulness that I’m going to miss.

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Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She writes The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

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This week’s question for readers:

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Question: How do you view retirement?

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Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at [email protected]. We will print some next week in this space.

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Last week’s question for readers:

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Question: Do you cook with alcohol? Any tips?

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• A few years back, my wife and I had an almost four-hour tour of an Italian grappa distillery. At the end of the tour, our guide noted we were from B.C., famous for our salmon. She said that they were trying to pair foods with grappa and gave us a spray bottle of grappa to mist over planked salmon — a wonderful use of grappa.

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Rick Bortolussi

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• One side of our fridge faces the stove. On the exposed portion are a number of magnets with short quotations pertaining to the culinary art. Here’s one that fits your question: “I like cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put some in the food.”

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Peter Zirpke

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• I love finding a recipe and then adding a bit of “life” to it. My go-to is using dark rum in main dishes, and typically a liqueur in a dessert. My children, knowing me so well, gave me my favourite Father’s Day present: a cookbook entitled, “Cooking With Booze”. The best recipe so far is Canadian Club and maple syrup-glazed salmon — a truly Canadian dish. I have to say, though, my favourite recipe is my late sister’s. I have named it “Carole’s Rum Ribs”, made with — of course — dark rum.

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Ed Welters

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• I often use alcohol such as coffee liqueur, brandy or rum when making European-style pastries, tiramisu and tortes. It adds flavour to the sponge part of a cake, making it moist and very yummy. Red wine works well with sauteed trout. I add it together with chopped Italian parsley towards the end of cooking, wait until it is reduced, and serve. The trout needs to be salted and peppered inside and out, then fried in olive oil and butter, with fresh chopped garlic.

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Katarzyna Laskowska

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• I have been trying for 23 years to use up a cupboard full of liqueurs. It is not exactly cooking but marinating: orange slices or strawberries with Cointreau or Grand Marnier, prunes with port, figs with pernod, poached pears with Amaretto, rum on bananas, brandy on peaches, pisco with grapes. All served with whipped cream.