What is your definition of retirement?

No one would ever describe me as a retiring personality and I certainly can’t imagine doing it in the other sense of the word. Just today I read in the New York Times’s special section on the body that some scientists think aerobic exercise keeps Alzheimer’s at bay — certainly mental exercise should. I guess the key is both. I know too many people who became cranky drunks and died not long after their daily routines were broken by "retirement." I don’t have a routine — I work at home at all hours, I have multiple "jobs" — but I can’t imagine not being actively engaged in something until the day I breathe my last. Both my parents are long past retirement age, but my father goes to his office every day and travels frequently tending to his various projects and passions. My mother is like the little Dutch girl of my increasingly benighted hometown — I think she thinks if she takes her finger out of the dike, or quits her multitudinous civic projects, the whole place will finally go completely to hell. Or maybe she’s smarter than that and knows that if she quits, it is she who will fall apart. Either way, they are my role models. My paternal great grandfather still took his daily walk to the bank — to do business — when he was 100. I am hopeful — and busy.

“Retirement?” What’s that? I haven’t the foggiest idea. Never considered such a thing, never really prepared for it, am not preparing now. I like to work. I want to go out with my boots on! But if I had to, maybe I could go over to the beautiful Actors’ Home in New Jersey and contemplate my next life.

Where the salaried go to die.

Retire? What!!?? What a group of grizzled die-hards to ask that question to. We will all go down kicking. It’s irrelevant what we do so long as it’s engaging and creative and productive and we’re learning in the doing.

Retirement to me is more or less equivalent to death. I don’t want the responsibility of running anything anymore and sometimes I find myself longing for less involvement with so many things, but, as long as I’m well, I feel obligated to contribute as best I can to what I believe is important. When we spend some winter weekends in Florida and I meet people who live there full time playing golf every day, I ask them questions about day-to-day life in retirement, as an anthropologist might when trying to get information about the way of life of a primitive tribe in Africa. Alas, the stories aren’t nearly as interesting as the anthropologist would uncover and can be told in very few sentences.

I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I think I’ll work to the end. It’s the way I imagine it. I could, however, have a brain hemorrhage and BE retired, but in that case I wouldn’t know I was retired so I’m not sure it counts. I don’t look forward to rest. But I look forward to pleasure. I also look forward to being mildly retarded and thinking the butterflies are talking to me. I think I’ll be 90 then. Once I knew an old nun who was mostly wheelchair bound. She was irascible. When she was pushed through large crowds, she’d hit people with her cane when they got in her way. I thought, “Oh I want to do that.”

Being free to tell the rest of the world how to behave, which, come to think of it, is what I do on the job.

You’ll find the answer to that in my private journal. Look under: “REALLY BAD IDEA.”