I took my bride to the theatre last night. It was a romantic date followed by a late evening dinner. That is if you can really call our venue a theatre. there were rows of metal folding chairs in the grade school gym and about three rows of bleachers on each side. Although the gym has a stage at one end, the set for the play was erected on the floor in front of the stage, I suspect in part because none of the audience would have been able to hear a word from the actors had they set up on the stage. And the late evening dinner wasn’t at some romantic bistro, but rather leftovers at home, warmed up in the microwave. I had a bowl of the previous evening’s jambalaya. Susan had a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup. It was late enough that neither of us bothered with dessert. And I don’t think that 6 pm is a fashionable hour for the theatre in most places. Still, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and the evening’s activities.

At one point in the evening I commented to my wife, “This is why I retired, so I could do these things.”

The event was a production of the Missoula Children’s Theatre of a play called “Red Riding Hood.” It was a pun-filled take off on the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood, complete with a Big Bad Wolf, a Little Lovable Wolf, and guest appearances by the Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and three of Red Riding Hood’s girlfriends who find themselves in trouble as they stray from the trail during their walk in the woods. We were particularly interested in one of the little wolves from Little Lovable Wolf’s pack and a friendly raccoon who appeared for a couple of the numbers. The play was a musical on top of the comedy written into the script. Even though the gym was noisy and we couldn’t hear many of the lines in the play, the jokes got big laughs and the cast received a thundering ovation. We joined right in, showing our delight with our applause.

In addition to a week’s worth of auditions and play rehearsals, the two artists from the Missoula Children’s Theatre offered a post-play workshop titled “Fitting all of the lights, props, staging, costumes, and scripts into the back of a F-150 pickup.” Their visit to the little town of Custer, Washington, was a huge hit.

Since 1972, the Missoula Children’s Theatre has been bringing productions to local communities and teaching children the fun of acting. They have produced plays in all 50 states, all of the provinces of Canada and dozens of overseas countries. Their touring artists have delighted audiences in cities and small towns. They are calling 2023 their 50th year of touring because they were forced to suspend tours for a year during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

This really is one of the incentives that we had to plan our retirement. Our children lived a long ways from where we worked for the last 25 yers of our career - too far for us to attend the children’s concerts, plays, and sports events. Now their grade school is just a short drive down the road from our house and we’ve already attended numerous events at the school. Our oldest grandson is in middle school, just a little bit farther from our home and we were able to catch his choir concert earlier this year. Attending our grandchildren’s school events is every bit as much fun as I thought it would be.

As an added attraction for the evening, our youngest grandson, just a baby, has learned to “cluck” his tongue and will imitate his grandpa to the delight of parents, siblings and most of all grandpa. He was in a good mood despite the noise of the crowd in the echo-filled gymnasium. A copy of the playbill and his father’s car keys were all the toys that he needed to remain entertained during the production.

The play kicked off spring break for our grandchildren. They get Holy Week along with Palm Sunday and Easter weekends off from school. The two oldest grandchildren will be part of the Palm Sunday intergenerational worship at our church on Sunday. As a bonus, the restrictions following a medical procedure are now lifted for Grandpa and he is once again allowed to pick up the baby and get down on the floor to play with the other grandkids. This morning we will start work on a kit that our oldest grandson has been waiting to assemble. The kit involves the use of precision screwdrivers and a soldering iron. It provides a perfect opportunity for a bit of teaching and since our son has the day off from work, we’ll probably get in some time with three generations working together. Life is being extremely good to me.

I continue to be a bit surprised by how much I am enjoying this phase of my life. I had such a wonderful career. I didn’t mind my job. I enjoyed my working years. I was in no rush to retire and have been delighted to get the opportunity to work again for a couple of years in my retirement. My work brings me great joy. But the one thing that was always part of my working career was that I was called to serve where the church needed me, not always to the places where I wanted to live. Each place we served was a beautiful setting filled with very good people, but now we have been able to move close to the place where our son lives and where our grandchildren are growing up, a luxury that was not part of our active working careers, though we did enjoy watching our children grow up and we were able to have our parents close during the later years of their lives.

Now, If I could just figure out how to get to a few youth soccer games in South Carolina, I’d really have it made. Prospects for such adventures are looking good. Life is good.