Snapshots
By Ellie Dauber

This is another of my older stories, appearing on Big Closet for the first time. I hope you enjoy it.

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Retirement is a time to pull back, to take a much-earned and welcome rest after more than forty years work. But for those people whose work has become their life, it's an early death, the end to any useful purpose, while they still have the minds and the heart to continue.

For Lillian Wagner, it meant the sorrow of watching her newly retired husband, Ed, sink into the despair of imagined uselessness. Things, however, aren't always as bad as they seem. Ed and Lil will find a reprieve in a very common place that just happens to lie at the edge of... the Twilight Zone.

Rick spoke in a clear slightly voice as he launched into telling them how and why he’d flunked second and third grades. How his failed jock father tried to use him as a surrogate but was too ignorant to realize all he’d succeeded in doing was to age Rick out of sports eligibility for his junior and senior years short circuiting any hopes for college. The he told of the drunken beatings and horrific verbal abuse from his dad while admitting he’d become a bully in elementary school.