Rehearsing Retirement, Part 2

Guy Clark--"Desperados Waiting For A Train" (mp3)

But I am old

And you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue. -- Yeats

Retirement, that last phase of life, is something that no one really wants to think about in concrete ways. Retirement, glorious on the front end and difficult at the back, seems best pushed for later years, when you get closer to the time. But it doesn't just happen. You don't just work one day and quit the next. And how do you even plan how long to work?



You have three basic choices in the afterlife of retirement:



1. You settle into your present home, or at least your present city.

2. You move to a retirement community in a warmer place like Florida or Arizona.

3. You split your time between the two.



Any other option is a spin-off of these choices. Maybe you have more than two places to live. Lucky you. Maybe you plan to spend your time and money traveling all over the place. Luckier you. But what do you do on the average days of retirement?



1. The lures of staying at home, in a home you probably own, in your home city are perhaps obvious. This choice is practical, comfortable, viable. You know the city, you know the neighborhood. You have friends here. You have doctors and hospitals you know. Retired living is a continuation of the life you had been living, without the work.



My friend who has chosen this option has plenty of time to pursue his hobbies, but also seems to spend an inordinate amount of time working in his yard. I cannot tell whether he takes joy in that or not. I get to see him fairly often. Because I still work and he doesn't, we work more carefully to schedule our friendship, trying to keep Thursday night each week sacred.



He is able to maintain a greater number of friendships with more depth.



He also does a lot of volunteering; he is asked to a lot of volunteering. Note the difference. The causes he enjoys bring him deep satisfaction, and he regularly devotes both time and money. But it also needs to be said that people take advantage of him, especially during that first year after he quit working. People assume that because you are retired you automatically have plenty of free time which they can freely draw upon. It's kind of like you just won the lottery, but with time instead of money, and everyone was just a little of that time, not much, you will hardly even miss it. This situation is compounded if you stay in the city you worked in. And maybe it's what you want. You still feel vital. Maybe it's right that you are now asked to do for free what you were once paid to do.



2. Each morning, the old men gather outside the Panera at one of the tables with an umbrella that does little to block the early sun. It is a bull session, I can tell as I walk past. Every morning it is a bull session. Whether it carries over from day to day, I can't tell. But what is clear is that, at this coffee and danish outpost situated in a strip mall among the retirement communities of Venice, Florida, is that the same pecking orders of middle school or high school continue once again when a bunch of men of similar age and background gather to debrief on their life of leisure.



There are the same blustering blowhards, the same once-athletes with stories of what once was. There is the same worry, should you choose to join this community: will I fit in? The common denominators are age, of course, plus a geographical background in either the Northeast or the Midwest, and a similar socio-economic status. After all, the condominiums of Venice are moderately priced. You can spend as much as you want, but you can settle quite comfortably for not too much over $100,000.



And, for me, at least, as I ponder my eventual option, there is an existential question: what happens down here if you don't play golf?



The social life is as all-encompassing as you want it to be: poolside chatting, organized events with pot-luck food and music from "back in your day," golf outings, day trips, meals in homes or at restaurants with friends, commisserating with your pal while your wives are at the beauty parlor, Spring Break visits from children and grandchildren, book groups.



And life is simple. In a condo, you aren't burdened with either the maintenance of a yard or a large home. You have a only a few rooms; you are comfortable, but overladen with possessions. The kitchen is small, so meals are simple. The fish and produce are fresh. A meat or fish cooked on the community grill with a salad and some bread just about does it.



There are dark sides to this dream. Not all of the elderly, not by a longshot, in places like Florida live in condos in restricted retirement communities. Many of them have to continue working, and so you see an unusual number of elderly working in Panera, in the grocery stores. Though you may be at the laundromat because your condo is under construction, there are plenty who do their weekly laundry there. Also, even if you live in a condo or town home with all of the organized social life and amenities, you still must grapple with the fact that the social mix changes year to year. Some people never come back, aren't physically able to. Come in as a young retiree and you will be shocked at the community turnover during a 10-year period, after which you won't be a young retiree anymore.



3. Arguably, a blend of Option #1 and #2 seems ideal. But think about the financial situation you'd have to be in, not only to own two homes, but also to have that portion of your retirement tied up in extremely unliquid real estate. If one of the two dwellings were not passed on to you, you'd have to have quite a chunk of change.

And, maybe, at some point, going to two places each year becomes as much of a routine as going to one place.



If you think that I have figured out my own plans, you're wrong. It's something that I've grappled with more and more each year, as I head to Florida for a getaway at a free, mother-in-law-owned condo in a retirement community where I get closer and closer to fitting in quite naturally. Florida is a fun place to go--sea, sun, sand, fish, wonderful produce, casual living, a recurring newness with each visit. But I've never been there for longer than two weeks, and usually during the summer when the town is less crowded because most retirees return north for the summer.

Still, what I do know is this: whatever choices we make about retirement, we need to make them long before we retire, perhaps long before we are ready. The money and the dwellings have to be in place. Or at least the money for the dwellings. And, to some extent, we really can't change our minds year to year. Maybe the best plan is to have one place, as a base of operations, so that from there we can go wherever we want to, or wherever we can or can't afford.



Retirement seems like a dream to many, but nothing could be more dependent on practical considerations. That you don't really want to think about.

Rehearsing Retirement, Pt. 1

Townes Van Zandt--"No Place To Fall" (mp3)



Among the many ironies concerning retirement, perhaps the greatest is that even though people will talk about wishing they "could retire right now" all the time, retirement is really something that they don't want to think about.



Count me as being no different. When I ponder retirement, and, at the end of a summer when part of me really doesn't want to go back to work, I'm not really talking about actual retirement, I'm talking about being much younger than retirement age and not having to work. The immediate attractiveness of the concept of retirement is the notion of not having to work while still at an age where you can take full advantage of life and (potentially) the entire world. But I'm talking about a pipe dream.



The reality is that you don't just decide that you are retiring one day and then stop working the next. You have to rehearse it. You have to think it through in your head. Otherwise, it will be nothing at all like you want it to be.



My father retired at age 58. And even at that point, he had left the corporate world a few years before in order to pursue his dream of owning his own business, in his case, a racquetball/fitness club in Pittsburgh with tennis courts and Nautilus machines and a bar and a "healthy" restaurant, with an outdoor pool and snack bar to boost the summer months. He ran the club for a few years, bought out unproductive partners, and then sold the whole thing for a nice profit before the bottom dropped out of the racquetball craze of the lat 70's.



Think about it: my parents retired when Ronald Reagan was President. My father is in his seventh presidential term of retirement. Those are a lot of unencumbered years.



I can't help but to reflect on that as I creep ever closer to that magical age. Retiring then has allowed him, so far, 27 years of retirement, including 17 with my mother before she succumbed to ovarian cancer. It is hard to look at his decision and not to celebrate it, to realize, once and for all, that retirement is a decision about time, not money. Some of us don't see a way to separate the two.



I also realize full well what a luxury that is. But, and here is the point, it is a luxury that he planned for. My father never made a tremendous amount of money, nor did he inherit all that much from his parents, a steelworker and his immigrant wife. But he always had the goal, and when he was able to step away from it all, he didn't hesitate.



I contrast that with friends of mine who won't even look at their 401K balances, who won't take an active role in fine-tuning the maximization of their own money.



Maybe it's teachers and the way our profession seems to shelter us from the real world, but I really think it's America right now. We feel like there are too many things beyond our control or at least there are just enough of those things that lead us to shut down and to give in to the abstract forces that we think have complete control of our lives.



Nothing could be further from the truth. If we don't take control, it isn't ultimately money that we are giving away--it's time. It's the time that money can buy. Yeah, the Beatles were undoubtedly right that money cannot buy love, but money can buy time in any number of significant ways. Whether you are buying years of freedom or years of health, you have the discretion, if you work at it, and yes, if you sacrifice, to step away on your own terms.



Because retirement is the last stage of life, it isn't something that we want to ponder in realistic ways. It's too easy to see the Hollywood version or to want to jump into the billboards we see on the drive down to Florida. Having made that drive many, many times over the past 26 years, I know what is behind those billboards.



NEXT TIME: What I Learned In Florida And How I Learned It

Stranger Than Fiction?

Frank Black--"Los Angeles" (mp3)

I saw a man I knew last month. He was at the bowling alley, actually just a lane or two over. I did not speak to him. I have known him for over 25 years. At times, he has been very important to me. In very tangible ways, he has been a mentor. There is no anger, no bitterness between us. In fact, there has hardly ever been a cross word between us. But I didn't speak to him.

He really wasn't bowling very well (not that I displayed the skills of a champion), so there wasn't even cause to congratulate him across the lanes. We never even made eye contact. But that isn't what this is about.

I am writing this play. It uses my basic work setting as a foundation. It is also inspired by aspects of people that I know. And in this play, I have used him, this man, to suit my purposes, and those purposes, quite frankly, involve him dying in the 2nd Act. The circumstances of that death are unclear, but it is very, very clear that he is dead.

So, imagine my surprise. To see him up, walking around, still doing quite well was, to say the least, disconcerting. I think he was joking with his teammates and drinking beer. I think he had a special shirt that he wears for bowling. I had no use for that. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't say, "I thought you were dead." How would that go over? I couldn't ask what he's been up to. That didn't fit, either. He wasn't supposed to be doing anything.

And so, I ignored him and went back into my play, stalled as it probably is until Spring Break when I can think for long stretches of connected time.

Take this little scenario, if you like, as some kind of convoluted allegory for retirement and what happens to those who do. That was not my original intent; I was just trying to work through something in my head.

But.

There are two things that I am pretty certain happens when you retire: a) you become what you once were, or b) you become what others want you to be. I am thinking from the perspective of the place where you once worked. As in, when your name comes up, it is in connection to things that you said or did years ago. Or, you may serve some institutional purpose by becoming a narrower version of yourself. You might be held up as a paragon; you might be thrown out as an example of an employee gone wrong in any number of ways. You probably won't be seen as both simultaneously.

But you do not become what you are. You can't. Because what you are doesn't fit.

I mean, you can't just bust back onto the scene and yell, "Hey, I'm doing great, having a great time, living a really meaningful existence now that I am away from the rest of you and the petty contraptions of this place where I once worked." How would that go over?

And so, the fledgling playwrights and the cynical bureaucrats have taken control of you in your retirement. And you probably don't even know it. But it's probably better that way. While you cavort about in relative freedom, parts of you are trapped forever, or maybe not forever, just until they are forgotten altogether.

If you're wondering why the classic Frank Black song accompanies this post, listen to the words and it becomes simple: "I want to live in Los Angeles, but not the one in Los Angeles." That says it all, doesn't it?