Living to the end of my working career and being healthy
and happy feels like a great privilege and victory. I expressed some of this in a poem I wrote
for Sandy on our 42nd anniversary, October 9, 2008. There is hard copy and soft copy around
somewhere. The poem is entitled, “A Love
Well spent.” We read about people every
day whose lives were cut short for one reason or another and, although I desire
to live a lot longer, I do feel like I have already won. Not everybody gets this privilege. Also, being in a happy, successful marriage
virtually all of my adult life (engaged at 21; married at 22) feels like I won
the lottery. So many people are in
unhappy marriages, or decide to end the marriage, or have a dear spouse die
early. I feel like doing a victory
dance.
Regarding aging, putting aside all the jokes and
complaints for the moment, life (at least my life) gets sweeter and more
precious as time goes by. We joke that
life is like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you get to the end, the faster
it goes. But really, life seems to fly
by at any age, yet is also seems to slow down after you physically slow down
and after you retire. The feeling brings
to mind something that was said way back when Bobby was playing soccer at
around age 10. Up to that age, the kids
all chase after the ball and follow it around the field, looking somewhat like
a beehive with the ball as the queen bee.
They run themselves to temporary exhaustion, accomplishing very little
else in the process.
But at a certain age some of the kids on the team start
to see a bigger picture and begin to anticipate what is going to happen
next. Instead of following or chasing
the ball around, they start to identify where they need to be next and move
there. As we were watching one such boy,
one of the dads with soccer experience said, “The game has slowed down for
him!” Even without playing experience, just from watching, I could understand
and appreciate what he was saying. I
hope others experience what I am enjoying about this stage of life: the game
has slowed down for me.
When I first
retired I had occasion to do some part-time sub-contract work for good
money. I did some, but I noticed that my
time was more valuable to me than the money.
In a sense my time was not for sale anymore. It was too precious to me. I wince when I hear parents tell their
teenage kids (as my father told me), “These are the best years of your
life.” I’m afraid a pimply-faced,
awkward kid with braces, not old enough to drive a car yet, bewildered by the
opposite sex, who doesn’t like high school, yet needs to contemplate finishing,
and then 4+ more years of college, will think, “If these are the best days of
my life; if life gets worse after this and stays worse than this, just shoot me
now.” When Ryan was 14 I was telling him
just the opposite. Hang in there; it
gets better and better! Fourteen is
maybe the most frustrating time of your life.
You are so close to being able to drive, but you can’t. And driving gives you such a sense of freedom
and responsibility…it opens so many doors, yet you are not there yet and must
wait. Time seems to just creep by as you
anticipate the next big thing in life, as it did for me near the end of my Pan
Am days.
When you are younger your time doesn’t seem that valuable
to you, partly because it seems like you have plenty of it. You don’t think about never being able to
get back the time you are giving away or selling. There are economic realities, too, of
course. During the first half of your
working life, you are trying to support a family and build a career that will
bear more fruit in the second half of your working life. It is worth doing. At the end of the second half, these factors
and motivations are gone. When I was in my early 50s I recall watching men in
their early 60s looking so forward to retirement. I did not respect that at all. I felt that retirement was a function of finances,
not age. You don’t quit unless you don’t
need the money anymore. I intended to do
so well in my career(s) that I would tell the government to keep their skimpy
little social security checks. Imagine
my consternation as I approached 65 to find my energy level and motivation
declining all on its own. I couldn’t
believe I was the same person. I recall
telling a colleague that I could feel myself slowing down, and that it was
bewildering.
I also recall watching Dad and a few other retired guys
combing a Florida beach with a Geiger counter, thinking to myself what a
hopeless, pathetic waste of time that was.
But early into my retirement, during a two-to-three year non-running
phase, I found myself going for long walks carrying a plastic bag, collecting
all the aluminum cans and plastic bottles that I came across. At first I gave them to my neighbor, who was
taking them down to the recycling center and making some money on them. But after awhile I decided to do what he was
doing and make some money for myself.
What started out as exercise, with “scavenger hunting” as a side
benefit, became the opposite.
After a time I started choosing routes for their
scavenger potential, with little thought to exercise. I would slow down and
cruise shopping center parking lots, public school playgrounds and even the
poorer neighborhoods where people were more likely to litter, or at least to
walk passed litter without stopping to clean it up. I scrambled down embankments where the effort
to obtain an object was far greater than the benefit. I finally stopped when I started jogging
again, but not until I was chased away from some school property as if I was a
beggar. That’s why we are advised to
“walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins” before we judge them – lesson learned! Or as one guy put it, “I learned that lesson
the hard way; I’m passing it on to you for free!”
I’ll get a few age jokes out of my system here: “You know you are getting old when your back
goes out more than you do!” “Every time a pretty girl walks by my pace maker
opens the garage door!” “At my age, ‘getting a little action’ means that my
laxative is working.” I think it was
George Burns who said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would
have taken better care of myself!” (He lived to 100 – my goal!). The Internet tells me that he did say, “I was
always taught to respect my elders and now I’ve reached the age when I don’t
have anybody to respect.”
I had always had the energy, motivation, self-discipline
and willingness to “go the extra mile” for as long as needed. As discussed in more detail elsewhere, in
the Army I was willing to go to trainee leadership school and be a platoon
leader at 17; I was willing to apply myself and win the physical training (PT)
test; I made the extra effort and earned the expert badge in the light machine
gun; I completed jump school in order to get the extra $55 per month, most of
which went into my Soldier’s Deposit Account and enabled Tom Harris and me to
buy a car in New York and drive to California.
I worked full time and went to school full time for six years. I passed the CPA exam based on self-study,
while most others took expensive prep courses (Most popular at the time was the
Becker CPA Review Course), and many never passed the exam at all. I gravitated toward what was known then as “The
Big 8” CPA firms, as opposed to the smaller and less prestigious local and
regional firms.
While applying myself in the San Jose office of Arthur
Young & Co (1973 – 1980), I coached youth baseball and soccer and joined
the YMCA’s “Indian Princesses” program with Michelle and the “Indian Guides”
program with Bobby. These are for 1st,
2nd and 3rd graders, so ages 6, 7 & 8. Michelle would have been 6 in 1975, and Bobby
would have been 8 in 1979. I started
running in 1978 and completed my first marathon in 1982. I finished my last marathon in December 1986,
the same month that I became interested in multi-level marketing. For the next ten years I worked full time,
primarily as a consultant/contractor, while simultaneously devoting many hours
per week to building a distributor/consumer organization, and I kept up my
long-distance running, though not at the marathon level.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself slowing
down. I still enjoy exercise, but I love
sleeping in as long as I want every day, sipping my coffee for an hour or so,
having no real agenda. I can’t believe
this is me! And Sandy is handling it
pretty well, considering that she loves routine and is having her routine
disturbed by me being around too much (“underfoot”, “in the way” etc). And we
miss the extra money that made life a bit more carefree. But she and I have worked out solutions to
much more difficult sea changes than this.
We can handle this.
My Army discharge paper (Form DD14) indicates that I
weighed 194 pounds during the discharge process in October 1964. I probably had a few pounds of clothes and
boots on, so maybe 190. I joined a
health club shortly after arriving in California and starting to receive pay
checks from Pan Am. I paid off the first year’s annual fee in the first six
months, and basically stopped going to the gym after the payments stopped. I continued to carry too much weight until I
discovered running in 1978. It started
with a book I received through the Stanford Mobile Library program, written by
some of the staff of the Stanford Heart program.
I remember that the first chapter presented a realistic,
frightening scenario about a 48 year old man dying of a heart attack and
leaving his family with no father figure and no breadwinner. The scenario included a description of the
fear and regret that the man felt about leaving his wife with children to
finish raising, of not being around to help with grandchildren some day; and
the fear he saw in his wife’s eyes. Later
the book presented a chart of 5 or 6 risk factors that included smoking, high
blood pressure, fatty diets, salt intake, excess body weight and the like. It allowed the reader to calculate his own
risk factor score, plus showed the changes he could make to reduce his risk
factors down to safe levels. I liked to
tell people that the book was the perfect combination of information and
inspiration for me, including the numerical chart presentation that really
spoke to me.
I quit smoking in July 1978, started jogging in September
1978, and quick drinking alcohol in December of that year. I remember calculating that the combination
of burning an additional 2,000 calories per week by jogging (20 miles per week
@ 100 calories per mile), plus eliminating about 3,000 calories per week (20
drinks @ 150 calories per drink) represented a 5,000 calories per week
swing. Knowing that a reduction of 3,500
calories per week = one pound per week, I could see that it would not take long
to lose 25-30 pounds. On top of this, I
was motivated to try dieting one more time, believing that this time I would be
able to keep it off through running, rather than eventually and inevitably
putting it back on: get it off through dieting; keep it off through running.
So 1978 was a watershed
year for me. The “last straw” on the
drinking came when I listened to an audio tape of myself from the night before
and did not like the person I was hearing (me!). I thought:
What a jerk. Is that how others see me? That’s not the person I want to be. It certainly is not the person Sandy
deserves. We were at the next door
neighbor’s house. Sandy had gone home to
bed, which was a fairly typical pattern for us on the weekends. In fact, I think all the wives had gone to
bed, and it was just Tom Phillips, Al Wilks and me.
I don’t remember the
specifics on the tape, except that I was asking for a cigarette, and Tom was
saying that he had run out. (Al didn’t
smoke). I urged Tom to go home and get
another pack, but he said that if he went home, he probably would not come
back; he would go to bed. So I didn’t
smoke. I had quit in July, so this was
about 5 months later. Tom told me the
next day that he actually had some cigarettes with him, but he wanted to save
me from myself and not encourage me to start smoking again. I was very grateful and appreciative about
that. What a fine line we walk in
life! If I had gone back to smoking, I
probably would have given up on running (the two are pretty much mutually
exclusive); I would not have lost weight, and probably would have continued the
drinking. It would be pure speculation
as to what my life would have turned out to be under those circumstances, but
probably not one I would be proud of or happy about today.
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