Grounded and Graying...GASP!

Mile after mile I had to fight the urge to just turn my head left and gawk!   I had flown down to Tucson to visit my uncle in the hospital there, and after lifting his spirits I was driving his car southwest to his house for a night’s rest.  I grew up near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, waking each morning to the sound of the jets warming up, and fell asleep watching them line up in the sky to land.  It would be a decade before I would actually fly on one, but my imagination soared for years of my childhood.  These silver birds were a symbol of freedom and adventure for me.  Here in the Arizona desert, their silver was oxidizing to dull gray in sand-locked formations, wing-tip to wing-tip, nose to tail, mile after mile.  An unceremonious chain link fence, gray like their wings, completed the picture of uselessness and decline.  In Detroit I saw miles and

miles of decaying buildings, but there seemed to me more sadness in this, because these abandoned hulks used to fly.

There is an aspect of retired life that is akin to Arizona’s aircraft graveyard.  Those of us who are free to stop working are free.  But our freedom is bought at the cost of programmed usefulness.  In working life, days and weeks and months go by and just by the sheer pile of work, some good is accomplished.  We warm up our engines in the morning because we must, and sometimes we feel joy in it.  We leave the house on time, generally, or maybe earlier when things are really hopping.  We go from appointment to appointment, or move from project to project, just as active planes are flown from city to city, maintained at the gate with the same kind of expediency that we have lunch at our desks, or in the car running to a meeting.  And then it all stops. 

I’ve heard stories of guys at Ford World Headquarters who kept coming back to work after they retired.  They’d shaved and dressed in their suits and came to the office, walking around with their cup of coffee, looking for conversation, offering advice and assistance.  My transition was different.  I was relieved to retire, to stop the endlessness of the demands of the working routine, despite the goodness of the work and the goodness of the people.  I don’t know why it was easy for me to wake that morning after retirement and not do what those guys at Ford did.  I felt like a kid on the first day of summer.  There were so many things I wanted to do. 

For us, there was the immediate project of packing up and moving.  Moving was a lot like my job.  There were always a number of things demanding attention, and days and weeks would go by with little rest . . . and a feeling of accomplishment.  Maybe that’s how it is for those grounded planes.  Maybe there is some kind of decommissioning, some preparation for that move from O’Hare to the desert.  Maybe there is some sense of lightness in that last flight, with all that working stuff removed, the galley cleared out, the passenger and luggage compartments vacant.  Maybe there was a long list of things to do there in the desert, cataloguing or oiling or preserving, preparation for this new life, this static life, this half-life of waiting for . . . what?  War?  Disaster?  Some fourth-world country that needs big gray birds?

I feel more balance now.  I can look into Kathy’s eyes more often.  I can reflect on a life of usefulness and impact, and spend time with feelings of gratitude, rather than squeezing them into the time between sitting down at my office desk and turning toward the computer screen.  I have time to work with wood, and to allow my Mondays to begin to occupy my mind with preparation for Tuesday evening’s work with my homeless friends.  On these fall mornings I can delight in doing stretches in front of the wood stove downstairs, watching its kindling warm the logs I’ve cut and split now that I have time.  And I can enjoy this time at my keyboard, writing because it gives me a sense of flying, of having some purpose, of picking up what passengers and luggage would be served by a short flight, away from the desert, high over the chain link fences and the gray geometry of uselessness.