I have spent the past few weeks fielding the same question: “Is he really going to retire?” I know Mark Dubois wrote that farewell article about how he was going to fix bikes and make soup, but truth be told, I have heard this all before.

When Mark worked with me in the Chief Disciplinary Counsel’s Office, not a week went by that he wasn’t threatening to leave. “Someday this will all be yours,” he would tell me. “Yeah, right,” I would think and go back to my office to delve into yet another sad tale told in a grievance file. At one point he was interested in an advertisement he had seen for a lawyer to set up a legal system in Afghanistan. It was the type of challenge that appealed to him, and he thought they played a lot of polo in Afghanistan, so that would be a bonus. Well, we all know he didn’t go to Afghanistan. But when he came home from his summer vacation in Provincetown in 2010 and told me he and his wife had bought a condo there, I knew the time had come for him to leave the stifling regularity of state employment behind.