The thought occurred to me on this first full day of full-time retirement.

My wife and I were tooling down the highway this morning and I kept making a reference to not having to go to work, that neither of us is tied to an actual paying job.

The thought took me back more than 45 years when we were newlyweds, and I’m sure other newlyweds have said — and are still saying — the same thing to each other.

We kept referring to each other as “husband” and “wife.”

“Hey, you’re my wife,” I would say. She’d respond with the “husband” thing.

Those of you who are married know of what I am speaking.

We’ve gone a long way down the road together since then. But now we’re tooling down an new highway of life.

She’s been retired since 2012. I kept working a number of part-time jobs since I left the Amarillo Globe-News in the summer of 2012. I had some media jobs; I toiled for a time as a juvenile supervision officer at the Youth Center of the High Plains, aka the “juvenile detention center”; I just retired from another part-time gig at Street Toyota.

Rest assured I won’t bore you with continual blog posts about retirement. It’s so damn new at the moment, you know?

Now we’re both retired. It’s a new feeling and a new experience … kind of like getting married.