By Steven Mentor, Recent Retiree
After working in the District for 29 years, most of them as a full time English professor, later as AFT 6157 vice president and then President, I retired this last May, 2025. And the first thing I felt was, what an incredibly powerful thing a pension is! I thought of all the people who fought to get such pensions, the union leadership and rank and file, electeds, and the general social agreement that if someone chose public service (teacher, firefighter, police, among many others), they should not worry that the limited pay would mean an impoverished old age. And of course, one of the last acts of coherence from our national government was getting rid of the Windfall Elimination Provision, which meant those of us in teaching can collect a pension and collect the Social Security that we paid into all those years. (Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about WEP; buy me two and I won’t!).
So when Leslie Rice asked me to write something about retirement, I considered what my standard response is to people who ask me, how’s retirement? I say, well, all those people who say it is so great? They undersell it!”
That is, I have that precious commodity, time, to spend, to waste, to bestow. I can spend more time with my wife and partner, until she tells me to go ride my bike. I can ride my bicycle all around the West Side of Santa Cruz, drop in at all my favorite cafes, read for pleasure, and not to get to the end of a massive pile of papers. I can take notes on A.S. Byatt‘s novel Possession for the sheer delight of being a literary critic, and as a blessed break on the horror of each news cycle. (Someone wrote regarding Halloween this year that the haunted house will just be a room with a TV playing the news). I can go to the No Kings march and then visit my six month old granddaughter and feel the fullness of a life with those extremes in it.
I will say this: retirement from the District was a part time job. It doesn’t seem that much, on first blush, but it took me from March to middle May to figure out Social Security options, Plan D and Plan G and Plan I Can’t Read Another Plan, CalSTRS options and paperwork and website logins and workshops. I leaned heavily on good people in HR and on our own Jory Siegel for help and still struggled. I consider myself a reasonably smart person, but something about the way retirement information came at me made me feel less smart and more, well, stupid. And there’s a lot at stake, too, if you have a partner and/or dependents. How much should I take monthly versus how much will my partner get if I die? I asked Margann what she thought, and she told me, and I said, well, let’s do that; the money calculation is important, but more important is how the decisions feel, how protected or taken care of we feel.
So I’m saying: go to the AFT workshops on retirement earlier than the last minute!
What else? I asked a lot of retired people what advice they would give and what thoughts they had on retirement. Most said it was wonderful for all the reasons above; some said no longer working didn’t feel like retirement because they had been gig economy workers and it was more just a cessation of the work. Many felt as if they did not have a decent sendoff from their place of employment (often these were people who worked in medicine for large hospitals). I felt so truly blessed to have gotten such a good sendoff myself, from our college President and Academic Senate, from the party that Language Arts threw for me and other LA retirees, from the end of semester party that morphed into a sweet goodbye from my peers from other disciplines. And I realized that in my union work I got to know and love so many more of the amazing people who teach and work at EVC and in the District.
Lastly: more than one person told me that while retirement is the word in English, the Spanish word is quite different. In Spanish speaking countries, your retirement pension is pension de jubilacion. I love that! Jubiliacion comes from the same root as jubilee, a time of celebration and happiness, rather than the more English or French notion of retiring to less money and less work. It evokes feelings of joy, freedom, and a joyful new phase of life. I plan to be more politically active, to make art and perform, to spend more time off my phone and screens (unsuccessfully so far!), and to stay connected to our union fights (our pension millions propping up corporate fossil fuel dinosaurs when it loses us all money every year, for example).
So: retired, but also jubilado. A drink at 5, sure, but also, fighting the madness and living this life fully.
Steven Mentor
6 October 2025