Retirement, as in quitting employment or business and enjoying one's golden years at ease, is a fairly new thing in Western civilization or, for that matter, any civilization. Throughout most of human history, people were required to work until they couldn't - which, in many cases, meant until they died. If one grew too sick or infirm to work, they were dependent on grown children or grandchildren to care for them in their declining years.
In fact, my mother used to jokingly cite what she claimed was an old Irish tradition in which the youngest daughter in a family was expected to remain unmarried and childless, to care for the parents as they grew old. Our youngest daughter, who is approaching 30, remains unmarried and childless, but we're not laying that burden on her.
Yet.
Retirement means different things to different people. My paternal grandfather retired after a long career as a Ford mechanic, and enjoyed his senior years fishing, working in his wood shop, and spending time with his sons and grandchildren until he died at 91. My maternal grandfather loved farming and brought in his last crop of soybeans, sweet corn, and popcorn the autumn before he died at 78. My father retired from 30 years at the John Deere Tractor Works, which overlapped his years of farming. When he came home from his last day at John Deere, the family was there to greet him. He took off his watch, handed it to me, and never wore a watch again in the almost 40 years he lived after that. He stayed busy with his 60 acres of hardwood timber in Allamakee County, adding on to their house, doing the stonemasonry work he was fond of, and painting. He lived to 94.
The key to a healthy and successful senior life seems to be keeping busy.
Now, I told you that so I could tell you this.
We have, in the United States political world, two excellent examples of how one can age. Those examples would be the two guys who have been trading the Oval Office back and forth for the last few years: Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
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Joe Biden (age 82) is the very picture of a man who is aging poorly. In a sane universe, he would have been forced into retirement years ago. His appearance is not good; he appears drawn, tired, and from what a couple of medical professionals have told me off the record, heavily medicated. He shows all the signs of advanced dementia; problems with word-finding, sudden spurts of unfounded anger, inappropriate physical (and sometimes sexual) gestures, and inability to maintain voice tone - the back and forth between angry shouting and creepy whispers. The years of his presidency were carefully stage-managed to limit his exposure, to conceal his failings, to hide his condition. The people who perpetrated this fraud on the American people should be called to account for this, but I think we all know they probably will not.
Donald Trump (age 78) is pretty much the opposite. While he is (he admits) carrying some extra weight, he is active, he is dynamic, and he is decisive. Even people who disagree with him agree he can make decisions and act on them. He seems tireless; rumor has it he sleeps only in short bursts, and his social media activity (mean tweets!) would appear to support that. He plans, he acts, and he surrounds himself with people who plan and act. His physical thing is golf, and he's reportedly pretty good at it. Perhaps his best moment in the one debate he had with the befuddled Joe Biden was in response to Biden's claim about his gold handicap, when Trump quipped "That may be the biggest lie you've told yet. I've seen your swing."
Back to my Dad: a few years after he retired, he developed the habit of reading the obituaries in his little local newspaper. He once told me how sad he found it that men he knew from John Deere, men his age - Dad would have been in his early 60s at that time - retired and, as Dad put it, "sat on the couch with a six-pack and never got up," and died of a heart attack in five years. Keeping busy is important.
Aging doesn't necessarily mean failing. If Donald Trump's advent and the comparison of him to Joe Biden has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that. A sense of purpose is vital throughout life but even more so as we age. President Trump certainly has a sense of purpose, that purpose being setting our country to rights. Age doesn't always mean incapacity, and while many enjoy a leisurely retirement, others of us just keep cranking. Keeping busy, whether it be with work or a vigorous hobby, seems to be the key.
As for me: It’s been a great ride so far. I’ll continue to push ahead as I always have; an intelligent person, after all, should be able to live 1,000 years and never run out of things to do. I have every intention of living forever, and from my point of view, I will. And I'll never go back to my old jacket-and-tie, corporate consulting life; that much, I have retired from. I love where I am now, in Alaska, and I love what I'm doing now - writing for all of you - and I intend to keep doing it as long as I draw breath.
Hang in there, folks. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
