Endless Summer, Endless Vacation, and Retirement

I was ten, I imagine.  I think we had company, but my brother Dan and I had been excused from sitting politely, excused to play outside.  Summer was, more than anything else, playing outside.  And it was staying up beyond the 7:30 bedtime that our parents thought was necessary for us to be able to get up for school alert.  It was the Fourth of July.  We could hear fireworks north of us, and a few seconds after each big boom the dark sky would brighten.  We sat on the north-facing front porch, hoping one of the skyrockets would go up enough for us to see, high over the trees next to the Petropuolos farm and in the back yards of the houses along Scott Street.  Three houses down Pratt Avenue, the Duda kids were sitting on their roof.  They got away with things.  Their parents weren’t strict.  But seeing them gave Dan and me the idea that if we stood on the railing of the porch and held on to the rain gutter, we might be high enough to see something.  No, we didn’t fall, but no, we didn’t see anything either.  I tell the story because even as I ached to see the excitement in the sky that was promised by the sound of it, I ached because the Fourth of July meant that Summer was half over, that we’d be going back to school.  Playing outside and staying up late would soon come to an end.  That ache would remain with me, like ringing in my ears that I could forget or be obsessed by, but it was always there.

When I was thirty, the same aching was true with vacations, but now instead of a three-month summer to anticipate and mourn, we had three weeks.  We would pack up the

kids and our camping gear and drive south in the Fall, when the returning college students would have just returned to school and wanted nothing to do with parental types like me, counselors who they would seek a month later, after they bombed their mid-term exams for reasons of abuse of freedom, freedom I was struggling to enjoy.  I was struggling to enjoy it because for the first week. My work habits had to be broken, my sense of urgency, of efficient use of time.  Good lord, even my awareness of time was unnecessary!  Camping allowed us to wake, sleep, eat, and play when we wanted.  But for that first week, I seemed to be on the clock, compelled by responsibility.  And just when we were about halfway through the three weeks we had, I’d start feeling that ache, I’d notice the ringing in my ears; the dullness of realizing that vacation was halfway over.  A childhood phrase came to mind.  What a gyp! 

So I guess it is understandable that I would look at retirement as endless summer, as constant vacation.  Two retirees come to mind, people who were our age and retired early, who started us thinking about the nature of retirement more realistically. 

The first was a couple, who were “30-and-out” union workers who had taken union jobs right out of high school, who were eligible to retire at full pay at age 48.  They were sitting there at a family picnic glowingly telling us they were moving down to Florida to play golf.  I thought of the old people I’d met there on our camping trips, those times when we would through cities to shop for food, or to see parks.  It was so common that if we showed them any interest, they would talk and talk and talk, almost tripping over the words that had piled up in their lonely hearts, no one to speak them to.  I always felt bad leaving them, and I knew that I would not want to grow old so far away from young people, from kids.  It was sad but not surprising to us to learn that their early retirement has not made them happy, that now as we enter our own retirement, their 15-year head start has not lead them to joy.

A contrasting early retirement story is my friend Joe Walsh, who waited tables with me in college, who disappeared, as I did, into a life of raising kids and working, who showed up on campus one day at age 52, his relaxed strolling pace seeming incompatible with the cues of his expensive business suit.  We hadn’t see each other for thirty years, and were both grinning like kids, taking in the details of each other’s faces, finding there the twenty-year-olds we remembered with humor and reverie.  Joe shocked me by telling me that he had been given an early retirement by Ford, that after a very successful career that had taken him to executive levels of international work, they had offered him a package that enabled him to live without working for the rest of his life. Live…without…working…for…the…rest…of…his…life.  I don’t know if he noticed that whatever words he might have said after that went past me as I processed these.  I don’t know if he noticed my jaw drop, or otherwise detect the words in my mouth, another childhood phrase: What a DEAL!

So there was my childish truth.  Responsibility was a gyp, retirement was a deal.  I lusted in my heart for endless summer, endless vacation, and endless freedom from going back.  But Joe began, in the next moment, to step into a role that he served for the next ten years as a friend.  He began to teach me that retirement is more than golf.  When I asked him, there on the sidewalk outside the administration building, what he was doing with his freedom, he gave me lesson one.  He said that he was aiming at a balance of three things: some paid consulting, some teaching, and some pro bono work.  A three-legged stool, I thought, stable, solid.  For Joe, retirement was something to be planned and carried out with the same sense of purpose with which he had lived life, but now with a rebalancing, an increase in the nurturing aspects of himself that had previously been compromised by full-time work.  I was blessed to see Joe as a teacher.  He was very good, generous and inspiring and natural.  I was blessed, too, to see him give the best parts of himself, his calm, his logic, his warm humor and encouragement, to his work with the Homeless Action Network of Detroit, where he had joined me on the Board.  An early service day spent with our students at a local homeless shelter had taken root in Joe, and he had responded freely, generously.

After a year of retirement, I find myself seduced less and less by relief – the endless summer, the endless vacation – and more and more by Joe’s calm balance, of exercising freely those capacities that suggested who I could best be if I were, indeed, free…because I am.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.