A trip to a childhood home. Boxes of old letters. A storage room filled with artifacts from long ago. The memories they evoke have never felt so dear.
By Stephen Kreider Yoder and Karen Kreider Yoder, The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2024
Steve and his younger sister outside their home in Japan. Photo: Marvin K Yoder
The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. But they also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, the 67-year-olds chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement.
Karen
There’s no place like home. For me, it’s a small college town in northwest Ohio where I grew up.
I hadn’t visited for almost a decade. We moved away when I was 18, and life was too busy to feel drawn back much.
But retirement seems to provide more invitations to walk down memory lane than before and, finally, the free time to accept those invitations. With work life behind, my distant past suddenly feels more precious.
So I jumped at the chance in January to return to my hometown for the anniversary of a nonprofit my mother helped start. I found classmates, old friends and memories of my parents, and got a peek into the bedroom I shared with siblings.
I was there 50 years to the day after Mother opened the first of many thrift stores across the U.S. that raised money to support our church’s overseas development work. She had a grand vision that has endured and still inspires us.
My siblings and I gathered to honor her at a yellow-brick church that exuded memories. The basement room where my Sunday-school class met was little changed. The stained-glass windows were in the sanctuary where I gazed at them during sermons. A rope still connected to the belfry—it was our job as fourth-graders to pull it 15 minutes before the service for exactly 10 rings.
The Kreider Family outside their home in Ohio. Photo: Leland Gerber
The event also tied me back to the rich childhood Mother and Dad gave us. We gathered in my friend Mary’s home for soup. She and I had learned to sew together, baked cookies together, skated on our creek, played in a violin quartet and read books together for hours.
Our conversation seemed to pick up where we left off 60 years ago when we were best friends. There are few things as satisfying in retirement as reliving common history with an old friend.
We dropped by my childhood home, where the new owners graciously allowed us to walk from room to room, remembering. “The patterns in the linoleum!” “The rock garden is still there!” “That’s where we’d climb up to our treeboat!”—a rowboat in the tree.
I pulled back a poster on a bedroom door, and there was the hole I’d poked with a broom handle, aiming at my annoying little brother and missing.
Karen finding the hole she poked in the bedroom door. Photo: Stephen Kreider Yoder
Back home in San Francisco, I finally have time to open the boxes of memories that lay unopened while I was caught up in my daily worklife.
There’s the box of fabrics I’ve collected from childhood sewing projects. All five of us siblings sewed some of our own clothes, and we saved bits of cloth in a box. I sent out samples of those fabrics to my siblings with the question: “Which hold vivid memories for you?” With those, I am piecing together a quilt filled with gingham, small florals, bold ’60s prints, stripes. The quilt—and an accompanying book of memories—will be a window into our childhood years.
I found another window into history this year in a filing cabinet stuffed with letters from relatives and friends, each filled with memories of life events and decisions.
During my working years, going through the letters seemed a daunting task. But now, with time, the letters provided a delightful narrative of family history.
I read through them, jotting down tidbits to remember—an older sister persuading me to take my senior year of high school in South Dakota, my little brother asking my advice, “Know of any good zit medicine that works?” I returned those letters to my siblings, a small chronicle of their lives.
I hope they return my letters to me. My old writings will surely invite me on a whole new jaunt down memory lane.
Steve
The mildewed black leather backpack brought a smile to my face when I dug it from a storage-room box, and then a pang of loss. So did the Tombo-brand harmonica and tiny toy sailing ship.
They were artifacts of my life as a grade-schooler in the 1960s in a north-Japan village. I was back in the storage room of our house on my postretirement crusade to cull stuff of little intrinsic value that doesn’t see use. Much of what’s left is valuable only to me.
I wore that backpack—the traditional Japanese randoseru school bag—to the schoolhouse a half-block down the dirt road from our cinder-block home. I played the harmonica in my first-grade band there. The ship was a Christmas present my older sister, Debby, brought from the distant big city where she lived in a hostel to attend fifth grade.
There’s something about being retired that makes these things feel dearer for the memories they evoke. Maybe it’s that I finally have time to reflect on how pivotal the era was in my childhood, how just a few years in the village so enriched the rest of my life.
Maybe it’s that retirement has me thinking more about mortality. It’s harder to deny that we have few years left to make new memories, so the old ones grow more valuable. And as our parents age and die, we realize what a big investment they made in us, and we treasure the memories all the more.
There are, no doubt, lots of memory triggers—family gatherings, class reunions, obituaries, trips to old haunts.
The storage room is what does it for me and Karen most often these days. Like many retirees, we feel a new urgency to downsize. But delving into boxes leaves us spending hours pulling out things, reminiscing and putting them back.
College-era books were easy to winnow until I got to a few special tomes—a philosophy text with notes in my handwriting, a dog-eared novel radiating memories of an English professor who made me think, a Haynes repair manual for the BSA 650 motorcycle I restored.
There are the two pairs of moldy boots Karen and I were wearing when we met in college. We pull them out, laugh, and then can’t throw them away. On a top shelf is a box of maps and ticket stubs from dozens of trips during our 45-year-marriage that mean nothing to anyone else and bring us joy in thumbing through them.
A heavy plastic tote contains reminders that I am holding on to others’ memories as well. It’s labeled “Nikon Stuff” and contains five film-camera bodies, 11 lenses and an assortment of viewfinders, bellows attachments, flashes and other relics of a long-closed chapter of my life.
Some of these are mine, including the Nikomat I bought on my 16th birthday. But most is Dad’s gear that he began slowly acquiring from pawnshops in Japan as a young missionary in the 1960s—“my treasures,” he said as he passed them on to me a few years ago.
Steve’s ‘Nikon Stuff’ with his father’s camera. Photo: Stephen Kreider Yoder
Handling his prized Nikon F in the storage room is a multisensory trip down muscle-memory lane: I slip it from its case, attach a 105mm Nikkor lens with the familiar smooth twist of its bayonet mount, slowly thumb the advance lever to its stop. And then “cha-clink,” the inimitable sound and feel of a precision-machined Nikon shutter and mirror tripping.
As I put the Nikon back into the box, a slideshow runs in my mind of the thousands of family photos Dad took that his children now treasure as windows into our long-ago lives.
Those include images of me and my family in the north-Japan village where I walked to kindergarten with my little sister, Becky, who died at 18. I was so proud to graduate and wear the black-leather backpack to first grade. Along with the storeroom artifacts, the photos are about all I have but the memories.
I didn’t expect to recognize much in the village this July when Karen and I bicycled through on our summer tour of Hokkaido island. I knew that all the other houses of my childhood in Japan were no more, but I hoped to find a little something familiar.
Steve in front of where his childhood cinder-block house in Japan once stood. Photo: Karen Kreider Yoder
The cinder-block house was gone, as was the school building and the field where my friends and I played. There was nothing I recognized downtown, nor any trace of the train line where steam locomotives once huffed.
“Well, you can’t go home again,” I told Karen, citing the Thomas Wolfe title, not for the first time on the trip.
Only on the horizon did I spot something familiar, the silhouette of Musadake in the haze. The mountain’s abiding profile, which I missed after we moved away more than a half-century ago, felt like a distant glimpse of an old friend.
The Yoders live in San Francisco.
Source: Stephen Kreider Yoder and Karen Kreider Yoder, The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2024
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