No biggie: I still have one of those old (almost extinct) “defined benefit” plans, and should be swimming in gravy one of these days, assuming BDS doesn’t go BK, something I once thought unimaginable—but let’s not go there. Still, they used to tell me that an unpaid month would elapse before the gravy started pouring out of the bowl. Yes, but...

Turns out the gravy will pour into an interim vessel for a few months before—January at the earliest; likelier March—and that it will be ladled out thereafter at a reduced flow, something like sixty to seventy-five percent of the eventual monthly sum, before the accounting staff at our Pensions & Annuities Division adjust their sleeve garters and green eyeshades, and sharpen their quill pens just so, to the point at which they’re prepared to calculate the figure to be disbursed every thirty days or so thereafter. Probably around June.

At some point, likely at this time next year, they will cut a check for the arrears, I am assured.

It is well that, between the spousette’s windfall last winter, the consequent pickup in her custom and income (a regular accounts receivable where my own has temporarily ceased), and my own modest patrimony, the household finances are sufficiently shored up for us to weather this shortfall. And I’m well aware that this is something of a subset of “first-world problems”: there are plenty of Americans whose retirement provisions, timely or no, are direly stingier than those I rather blundered into. But I had a colleague, about my own age and only slightly junior to me in tenure, who was forced out at the end of the summer, and although like me he was grandfathered into the old pension plan, I suspect that he does not enjoy anything like this cushion, and may not be prepared for months of short rations.

cordially,