When I was about thirteen years old, I had already discovered the great secret of retirement; practically everybody was doing it wrong. I had been watching my elders around me grow old, quit working, and then, within a surprisingly short time, die.

It seemed to me that the connection was obvious, and I was astonished that nobody else had noticed it. The trouble, as I saw it, was that these people retired from work and then from life.

They stopped going outside to play, stopped wandering around the woods, stopped wading in creeks, and generally behaved as though retirement were a sentence handed down by a particularly humorless judge. Then, within a year or so, they were gone, and everybody would say, “And he just retired, too.”

I thought this was a peculiar definition of a good time. I therefore devised a retirement plan of my own, and at thirteen I considered it practically foolproof.

When my turn came, I would continue doing what I had always done as a child. I would have a bowl of my favorite sugared cereal in the morning, sit on the floor wrapped in a blanket, and watch cartoons on Saturday morning.

Then I would go outside and play in the woods, wade in the creek, perhaps take a refreshing swim without the nuisance of clothing, and come home in time to color pictures with my crayons. It was a splendid plan, largely because I had not yet encountered adulthood.

I have now been unofficially retired for about six months, and I have discovered that the boy who designed my retirement program was a reckless little idiot with no understanding of biology, weather, law enforcement, or the human skeletal system.

For instance, the sugared cereal remains delicious, but I can no longer eat it every morning without my pancreas filing for divorce. At thirteen, I believed breakfast cereal was one of the basic food groups. At my present age, the ingredients on the box look less like breakfast and more like evidence in a criminal investigation leading to diabetes.

Then there is the matter of going outside to play all day, as children do. I had forgotten that the sun has become considerably more hostile since I was thirteen.

A few hours outdoors in Nevada can leave a man sunburned, dehydrated, frozen, or all three before supper. This is a state where you can experience several seasons before you finish your lunch.

Wading in the creek has also lost some of its former charm. My feet, once capable of walking barefoot over rocks, sticks, and whatever else nature chose to throw beneath them, have become delicate instruments of civilization. A rounded creek stone that once seemed perfectly harmless now looks like something specifically designed by God to make an ancient man’s foot fall off.

And then there is skinny-dipping.

At thirteen, I considered swimming naked in a creek a perfectly innocent expression of youth, nature, and poor judgment. At my present age, I have discovered that the same activity could involve law enforcement, paperwork, and possibly a cell in which the plumbing has more character than the accommodations.

I have retained my crayons, at least, although even that part of my retirement plan has been modified by experience. I still use them, but I no longer use them on people.

A couple of years ago, I drew a magnificent permanent black-marker mustache and beard on my wife’s face while she was asleep. She did not appreciate my artistic merit, and she has since concluded that crayons are safest when I apply them to paper.

So here I am, six months into retirement, with perhaps another six months to figure out how not to die from it. The situation is complicated by the fact that there aren’t any decent Saturday-morning cartoons anymore, and getting down on the floor to watch them would require a rescue operation to get me back up again.

I can already envision the firefighters standing over me while one says, “Sir, whatever you were doing down here, please don’t do it again.”

Still, I maintain that my thirteen-year-old self had the right idea. The only mistake was in the timing.

You cannot wait until retirement to begin living like a child, because by then the cereal is dangerous, the weather is trying to kill you, the creek is full of orthopedic hazards, the law has opinions about swimming, and your knees have formed a labor union against the floor.

I should have started much earlier. Fourteen, perhaps.

As my daughter-in-law likes to say, “What a catch 20/20.”