A YEAR IN MY SHOES

Chapter 1 – The Soundtrack Before Dawn

The opening days of July arrive like a long, indulgent sigh. The rain’s steady patter is a metronome for a mind that can’t decide whether to sprint or to sit with a cup of tea and watch the world soften into a memory. The morning ritual is a quiet sermon: coffee is out of bounds for my wife, tea for her, the kettle on, the remaining paperwork whispering from the kitchen table, and the day’s impulses jostling each other in the doorway. I am not an imbiber of hot beverages to any great extent save a hot chocolate now and then.

In the first lines of this month, I feel the tug of two versions of myself in a room that’s grown a little quieter as it grows older. The Jeff who still carries the weight of the business, the calls for help, the problems to solve, the risk to hedge, and the Jeff who wants the calm of a long, still morning without a calendar’s demand. The climate asks: who gets the day’s steering wheel? The weather, the job, and the mind all push and pull, and the result is a day that unfolds like a long, meandering story told at the dinner table by someone who knows how to listen to the pauses as much as to the spoken words.

The month’s first business is the Sandbar Golf Club’s day-to-day, the way leadership works in a tiny community where a few people carry an outsized share of the practical load. I’ve learned that leadership isn’t about the grand speech in the moment of crisis; it’s about the long, unseen labor: ensuring signatures on a bank account can be moved; keeping track of a schedule that involves a dozen rotating parts; steering a ship when the ocean is churning and the crew is uncertain about whether the captain knows which dock to head toward. President Craig’s looming departure to Thailand becomes a heat-raising moment, a reminder that a club, like any small enterprise, depends on the continuity of its backbone. When you remove the structural beams, you learn what the walls were keeping upright. The ledger of the club’s life is not a ledger at all; it’s a memory of hands that pick up the pieces and carry them forward.

Meanwhile, July’s rain doubles as a shot of introspection. The weather slows things down, and in that slow, I can see the drift. Retirement isn’t the absence of work; it’s the reframing of work into something more precisely chosen, more deeply aligned with what still gives life meaning. The fixed costs of a professional life, software subscriptions, insurance, the rent on the little office where I have spent more hours than with any person, remain stubbornly constant. They remind me that, even in retirement, some structural rules don’t bend. They are the scaffolding that holds the possibility of a life beyond the daily grind. The irony is that, while the money may not be what it once was, the emotional cost of leaving a world where you’ve been the solver is perhaps higher than the monthly overheads you still carry. The mind replays an old memory: the client who finally found a long-lost refund after years of waiting, the moment when you realise you’ve actually helped someone recover a little peace of mind. Those are the moments that keep the engine running when the fuel gauge points downward.

Music again becomes the month’s weather forecast. Kokomo’s carefree optimism lands awkwardly against March-like rain and the practical reality of golf clubs soggy under a gray sky. The songs, in other words, are emotional weather reports, and they arrive not with perfect timing but with the stubborn insistence of a friend who knows you better than you know yourself. A melody triggers a memory, a line nudges a reflection, and suddenly a Saturday morning in a life of consultancy, carpentry, and city-to-country travel turns into a meditation on the long arc of a career that’s about to pivot.

There’s a charm to mundane pursuits in July. Haircut day, our old caravan park friend, my wife and I turning a routine act into a symbol of how life’s rituals become the day’s compass. The clippers, purchased in some long-ago Halls Creek moment, become a talisman of travel and memory, a reminder of a life lived through roads less traveled and the small, essential artifacts that mark those journeys. The present is a gift, an idea I’ve always found both ridiculous and profoundly true, particularly when it’s reinforced by a line from a cartoon panda that somehow lands when optimism fails. The present is not a myth; it’s a practice, something you have to decide to do, day after day, even when you’re tired or the numbers don’t quite add up.

And then there’s the spiritual, more personal centre of July: the Black Dog and the memory of a life in which a boy who once dreamed in numbers now negotiates a future with a partner, a wife who grounds him in practicalities and a family who still needs him to solve problems, even as he promises himself he won’t define his identity by that habit alone. The guise of “retirement” is a marketing line, a brochure with glossy pictures that don’t capture the texture of a real life lived with constraints and responsibilities. The memoir’s job is not to prove that retirement is easy but to explain how it feels when the most ordinary things, grocery shopping, a drive to buy a gift, a table on a bench in a shed, become acts of meaning.

The body’s aging is never far away. The bursitis in the shoulder, the knees that protest a long walk, the occasional ache in a back that remembers days of cricket and fielding on dew-covered morning grass, these are not merely health notes; they are chapters in a larger book about time’s patient work on the body you rely on to do the work you love. The scales swing, the will to move competes with a desire to pause, and the mind keeps its own score, weighing the next day’s need for movement against the wisdom of preserving energy for the things that matter most.

In the background, the quiet, almost ceremonial, my wife provides the ballast. She doesn’t merely tolerate the day’s quirks; she anchors the day with a practical tenderness: a trip to buy the right umbrella, a shared laugh at the absurdity of a “final year” contract in a world that refuses to stop for a moment when the future is uncertain. Her presence is the soft light through which the day feels less like a war and more like a conversation you’ve been planning to have for years but kept delaying until now.

As July unfolds, I realise that the month’s central truth isn’t merely about weather or work; it’s about the way memory stitches itself into today: a memory of the past’s better days, a memory of younger bodies and stronger knees, a memory of the people who stood by us when our own faith was thin. It’s also about the memory of a future you’re still trying to build, one where the table you’re shaping will carry family dinners and the stories of a life that didn’t quit when the calendar demanded less, but grew more generous with time.

The middle stretch of July came at me like a long, patient tide, the kind that doesn’t surge so much as it insists you notice the way the shore holds its breath between wave backs. The weather kept its weather, which is to say it refused to hurry anything along, and the days stretched out with a soft ache in the joints and a certainty that some conversations would linger longer than the afternoon light. I woke to damp air and the familiar smell of rain that doesn’t announce itself with a drumroll, just slips in through the gaps like a guest who wants to be polite but also wants to stay for a long, maybe too long, visit. The house wore the rain as if it were a coat designed by someone who understands that home isn’t a single moment but a fabric that needs to be repaired and cleaned, folded and flattened, every few years to keep it from creasing into memory.

Two versions of me remained in the room with me, two voices that still quarrel and occasionally nod in agreement as if an old argument were a shared joke at a dinner table we’ve known since the time the kids learned to ride bicycles and I learned to pretend I didn’t mind all the noise in the kitchen. There was Jeff A, the practitioner of plans and deadlines, the man who can turn chaos into a labeled map, who believes that a good system is stronger than a good mood and knows the exact moment to press the button that says “send the file” and hope the client’s signature appears in the right place. And there was Jeff R, the retiree-in-progress, who wants calm and clarity and a pace that doesn’t require sprinting through every morning with a phone glued to the ear. He wants a life where the whiteboard holds more light than ink, where the memory of a day’s truth can be written gently and then left to dry. They don’t fight; they field questions and share the chair, trading glances across the table as if saying, Without you, I’d collapse into a heap of unfinished business, and without me, you’d never learn to trust the pause.

Between them sat the Black Dog, not a villain so much as a patient weather system that drifts in and out with the same quiet insistence that the tides keep their promise to return. He doesn’t roar; he hums. He doesn’t demand attention so much as remind me that attention is a discipline, one I have to perform every day whether I feel it or not. He attends the conversations I’d rather avoid, the ones about aging, about long-term health, about the money that keeps the lights on and the door open, and about the kind of legacy I want to leave when the calendar’s page has to be turned once more. The dog’s drift is part of the fabric of July, and I’ve learned to read his weather as carefully as I read the forecast. If the wind shifts and the mood darkens, I know there are days in which the human thing to do is to walk the dog and then walk the room and then walk the conversation until something honest begins to emerge again.

The middle of July is a roomful of rooms, each with its own temperature and its own memory. There’s the back room of the Sandbar Golf Club, a space where governance is discussed with the gravity you show when you know you’re stewarding something that feels casual from the outside but is, in fact, a latticework of obligations, friendships, and reputations held together with not much more than nibs of paper and a few stubborn signatures. Craig’s looming exit, his plan to depart for Thailand, hangs over the space like a rope you can’t quite see but which you know holds you in place. It’s not the spectacle of a resignation that makes you take note, but the slow, everyday erosion of an anchor: you realise that the club’s rhythm depends on a handful of people carrying things that others would rather avoid carrying themselves. The signatures on the bank account, which seem a dry procedural detail, become a metaphor for loyalty and faith in the future. You don’t solve a club’s life by one grand gesture; you keep the frame intact by showing up, day after day, even when the weather is stubborn and the talk is long.

In the shed, “Beaumont” tables sit beneath a thin skin of dust and a history of attempts and redos. I’ve watched the table that refused to behave gradually begin to tell a story I recognise from the rest of my life: a story about patience wearing down impatience, about the stubborn belief that a thing might still be made right if you’re willing to work at it long enough. The resin’s quirks, the way a photo print dissolves into a memory rather than a picture, become a small theatre about craft: there is art here, yes, but the art is in the discipline that makes craft endure. The little battles with uneven legs and blotchy finishes become a meditation on how to meet a stubborn material halfway, how to respect the wood’s memory while insisting on a future that includes a place for family memories to be built and displayed. The Beaumont table isn’t merely furniture; it is a vessel for a living family history, a story that the room can carry if I keep telling it in the right way.

Port Macquarie is a long way from the shed, but the drive is a thread I’ve learned to trace with a quiet patience. My wife’s new Crosstrek sits in the showroom’s glow like a promise, a daily companion for a family that knows how to move through life with practical humor and a willingness to do the things that need to be done even when they don’t feel glamorous. The car’s future is a conversation I’m careful to hold lightly: a gift for my daughter, a note of love from us, a moment when the kids discover that the parent they’ve always known is really good at orchestrating a moment rather than performing in it. The handover will be a ceremony of sorts, not a surprise addition to the family’s ledger, but a memory we can lift and carry forward, the way a tailwind lifts a kite just enough to make the pull easier to bear.

Then there’s the personal calendar, the calendar that refuses to forget the people who still expect me to fix something, the people who still need a steady hand to guide them through the fog of the property market’s latest report, the family who still expects a voice that knows when to listen, when to speak, and when to hold back and let someone else take a turn. The middle stretch of July is a reminder that retirement isn’t a cease-fire; it’s a treaty signed with the future: a promise to resist drift, to choose carefully what to fix, and to keep a space for the stories I want to tell after the clock’s hands stop moving so quickly.

The club’s back room remains a theatre of quiet drama. We talk about the future not as a single snapshot but as a procession of small acts that must be prepared and performed well if we’re to keep the room’s energy alive. The talk isn’t always elegant, and the solutions aren’t always elegant either. It’s more like a chorus of practical souls who believe that a clubhouse can be more than a building; it can be a living memory that people lean on when life has a spiky edge. The negotiations about succession aren’t about who gets a chair and a title; they’re about who’s willing to bear the weight when the day’s light dims and the tasks don’t vanish with a flick of a switch. It’s not glamorous, and that’s the point. Real leadership isn’t a moment; it’s a rhythm.

Meanwhile, our daughter’s wedding looms as a bigger hush in the room, a reverence you feel more than you hear. The plan to gift her the Flying Mango’s while purchasing a successor for ourselves, isn’t a cinematic reveal; it’s a patient, careful orchestration. It’s the art of balancing surprise with sustainability: a moment that lands with a smile rather than a showy display, a moment that says, We are stepping into the next chapter in a way that makes sense for us, for her, and for the life we’ve built around her. The memory of Robbie the Robot, Forbidden Planet (1956 – Metro Goldwyn Mayer) and the old caravan days, how we learned to navigate road trips, the repeated rhythm of leaving and returning home, lends a quiet gravity to this one. It’s not a gesture of excess; it’s a gift of continuity, a signal that the family’s narrative will not end with a door closing but will be carried forward in the easy, stubborn ways we’ve learned to navigate life’s big and small curves.

The middle stretch is also a season of memory triggers. I find myself thinking back to MASH and Star Trek as if memory itself were a fuel I need to keep the engine of life running. The old TV lines show up not as parlor tricks but as metaphors for the kinds of choices I face: Should I stay the course when the bank’s hard questions arrive, or should I ease into the life of a man who can say no to the next large project and still sleep at night? A line from a film becomes a compass: a reminder that memory isn’t just a repository of past mistakes and past glories; it’s a map that can guide a life into new territory with greater clarity.

I’m not blind to the pain around me either. The mid-month brings a thought about illness, about the long, slow ache of a friend who’s fighting a war that has nothing to do with the calendar. The memory of former employee, Sue-Ellen’s cancer, of Christine’s mental health, of Mayette’s ongoing chaos, sits in the room with us, not as a weight to crush the air but as a reminder that care is a long practice. There’s humor and tenderness here too, the way my wife’s steady presence can turn a heavy moment into something you can bear, the way a shared meal can become a classroom for kindness, and the way a simple, well-timed joke can reset a day that’s tipping toward strain.

In July’s middle, the body’s wear shows up with a practical honesty. The shoulder that protests, the knees that report minor betrayals after a day in the shed or a day behind a desk, the stubborn scale that shows movement is possible but not guaranteed. The body asks you to respect it as a partner, not a problem to solve with brute force and a big calendar. Movement remains the antidote and the reminder: you don’t have to prove you’re still a man of action by sprinting through the morning; you prove it by tending what’s needed with patience, by showing up to the job with a plan that respects the body’s limits while still offering something of value to the people who rely on you.

And so, the middle stretch keeps a life’s rhythm intact, even as it tests the bounds of what can be carried. It’s a chapter of push and pull, a lesson that you can’t always fix every problem in a single breath, but you can keep the air moving by staying in the conversation, by accepting help when it’s offered, and by remembering that humor, dry, stubborn humor, keeps place for resilience when the day’s gravity grows heavy.

The drive home from the shed is a small ritual in itself. My wife’s calm voice, the back-and-forth of decisions about who will do what next, the wag of a tail or the brush of a hand on a workbench, these are not minor notes in the day; they are the music of the life that remains after you’ve learned to stop pretending you’ll conquer every obstacle with sheer force of will. It’s not that I’ve become soft; it’s that I’ve learned how to stretch the arc of a life so that it can include more than work and more than success. It can include a moment’s generosity, a table that finally sits right on a family’s floor, a car that becomes a symbol rather than a machine, a club that becomes a second home where people learn to be their better selves by watching others do the same.

As I ask and begin to answer them with a patient craft and a stubborn hope, it’s not a victory lap; it’s a pause that humbly asks, What else can be built here? What else can we repair, and what else can we hand forward in a way that doesn’t require you to pretend you are someone you’re not? The middle stretch isn’t about pretending retirement is easy or about pretending the Black Dog isn’t real. It’s about telling the truth: that aging isn’t a problem to solve but a season to live within, with kindness toward yourself, with honesty about limits, and with a relentless, stubborn faith that there is still work worth doing and people worth loving, even when the days don’t arrive with dramatic endings.

As the days drift toward the month’s longer sunsets, I carry with me the sense that July’s middle is training me for the last third of life. It’s teaching me to keep a balance between care and effort, between a life of service and a life of rest, between a mind that wants to fix things and a heart that knows when to hold space for the people who will carry tomorrow forward. The road ahead remains uncertain, as it always does, but the road behind is steady enough to give me the courage to keep walking. And so I walk, with the two of me still in the same room, with the Black Dog as a weather system we tolerate rather than fear, with a wife who anchors us both, with children who remind us what a life can look like when it’s built with intention rather than impulse, and with a golf club’s quiet chorus of faces, all of them bearing memory’s marks and promising that this middle stretch doesn’t end in a wall but in a doorway, one that opens onto a future that remains ours to shape, day by day, table by table, stitch by memory.

The middle stretch of July kept its weather close to the bones and its stories close to the heart, so I let the day ease into me the way a long drive lets you settle into the seat and listen to the road hum back. There was a quiet to the mornings that felt almost ceremonial, as if the day itself were a room you walk into, shoes still damp from yesterday’s work and memory, and you take a moment to read the air before you decide what to do next. The two versions of me, the one who wants a plan and the one who wants a calm, still sit in the same chair, but they’ve learned to speak in softer tones, to pause before speaking, to listen a beat longer to the room’s quiet gravity.

The Sandbar Golf Club remains the steady pulse beneath it all. Craig’s upcoming departure lingers like a note you can’t quite finish: the club will survive, yes, but the tempo will change, and the familiar players will have to learn a new rhythm. The back room, where minutes and signatures take on the weight of trust, stays a kind of sanctuary where the small acts accumulate into something substantial. We talk through the bank signatures as though they’re little rituals that keep a family home alive, and perhaps they are: not glamorous, but they are the kind of quiet commitments that make the difference between a building that stands and a building that falters. Leadership here is not a single grand gesture; it’s the daily insistence that someone show up, sign the forms, and remind everyone that the course is more than its fairways, it’s a social contract among people who choose to belong to something bigger than themselves.

In the shed, Beaumont tables continue their stubborn education in patience. The memory of misaligned legs and blotched finishes lingers like a stubborn stain you keep returning to until you figure out the trick that makes sense of the chaos. The resin test prints a memory of childhood and adulthood colliding: photos you swear you’ve printed clearly turning into something that looks half-dream and half-reality when encased. Yet the process itself is the lesson: you don’t chase perfection so hard you erase the life in the grain; you learn to respect the wood’s story while carrying forward the memory those images represent. Each coat of varnish is a small act of faith, an act of saying yes to time, yes to the audience that will look at the final piece and yes to the life you’re shaping for my daughter’s future and the family’s ongoing ritual of sharing space, meals, and work.

Port Macquarie’s drive of delivery, becomes a thread that links the shed’s quiet world to the kitchen’s daily life. My wife’s Crosstrek, the symbol of a new cycle, that sat in the showroom’s glow as if it’s listening for a cue, until we collected it, to become a partner in our family’s next chapter. The plan, to gift my daughter the Flying Mango, feels less like a film moment and more like a carefully composed melody that unfolds in small, meaningful gestures. It’s about setting up a scene where the surprise lands with warmth and honesty, where the moment of handing over the keys is also a moment of saying, We trust you to carry forward what we’ve learned, to blend your own voice with what we’ve built, and to make your own life with the tools we’ve laid out. The act is not extravagant; it’s the quiet, stubborn push of a family toward continuity, the belief that love is best expressed through small, doable acts rather than grand declarations.

Meanwhile, life presses in with the usual chorus of tasks that never fully vanish, only rearrange themselves. There are calls about loan structures for friends, and the sensation that the world still needs a steady hand even when you’ve decided to step back. I walk the line between telling the truth about retirement’s uncertainties and keeping the door open for possibility. The reader’s sense of balance matters here: I want to show how a mind trained to deliver solutions can still learn to say no to some invitations without turning cold to opportunity, how a man who has spent decades making things work can still allow room for new voices and new plans without losing the old ones’ generosity and restraint. The negotiation is not theatrical; it’s the art of keeping a life moving when the scale tips toward “done” but the heart keeps whispering, “not quite yet.”

The middle stretch’s memory peaks come not with a single event but with a series of small, cumulative moments. There’s a dinner with friends where a table becomes more than a place for eating; it’s a ritual where the world outside is recapped, where the day’s small disappointments are weighed against the evening’s warmth, where the laughter sings louder than the moment’s fatigue. The jokes land not as punchlines but as lifelines, the kind of humor that doesn’t erase pain but makes it easier to bear, the sort of dry banter that steadies the nerves when the bank’s questions come again or when a client’s dream grows heavy with risk. This is not the loud celebration of a single triumph; it’s the steady, quiet cheering that life expects of someone who’s learned not to overstate anything and to trust in the power of small, consistent wins.

The busyness of late July is not a chain around the ankles; it’s a set of tools in a toolbox you carry forward. There are moments with my daughter’s wedding that feel like a rehearsal for a different kind of life, the one in which you build futures with the same careful calculation you used to build a table’s final shape, the same instinct to measure twice and cut once. The Flying Mango’s replacement arrives not with fireworks but with the kind of quiet certainty a parent feels when a child’s future becomes real and tangible. We’re not buying a car for drama; we’re laying down a memory that will sit in the family archive the way a photograph sits in a frame, and we’re letting my daughter see that the adults in her life can still orchestrate a moment with care, not chaos.

In the background, the DP, dear friends and colleagues who’ve become extended family, offer their own version of support. The junior colleagues you’ve mentored become more confident, their own voices growing clearer in meetings that used to be dominated by the older, louder presence. It’s a gentle revolution: not a storm but a steady weather change that whispers, You can step back a little and still lead because leadership isn’t about the glare of a spotlight; it’s about the quiet, patient practice of showing up, again and again, with steadiness and respect.

This portion of July doesn’t hinge on a single drama or a single victory; it’s about the daily work of making a life that feels whole when you’re balancing the old and the new. It’s about the way memory and memory’s music carry you through days where the rain won’t stop entirely and the body’s aging insists you slow down just enough to notice the small miracles, my wife’s patience, a table that finally sits flat, a kid’s smile when you hand them the keys to a car you once owned, and the sense that your work has mattered enough to be worth handing on.

The mid-month has taught me something both stubborn and generous: retirement is not the erasure of purpose but the redistribution of purpose. It’s a chance to reallocate energy toward the people who matter most, toward the projects that leave a mark beyond a quarterly report, toward the moments that will be remembered long after the receipts have faded. It’s not about ending; it’s about redrawing the map so that the lines you draw include the future as part of the journey rather than a prize at the end of a race you’ve already run. And in that redrawing, humor remains a patient guide and memory remains a trustworthy compass.

The thread  of July, toward a final reflection on what the month asked of me and what I chose to give back. The travel to Melbourne for the conference, the opal handoffs, the final rounds of Match Play, the quiet gifts to my daughter, the conversations that reframe risk and reward, these will not vanish as soon as the month ends. They are the texture of a life in motion, a life learning to move with intention, to carry forward what matters, and to tell the story at the table in a voice that sounds like mine, slightly weathered, honest, and stubbornly hopeful.