Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Marty Goldensohn, 78, described the contentment that an elderly romance can bring. This week, Gerald Marzorati, 72, writes about the lessons he’s learned about a fulfilling retirement.
I learned the most important thing about retirement from a bunch of guys I never really knew. I met them fleetingly, 15 years ago, at a lovely little tennis club in Palm Springs called the Plaza Racquet Club. (Like so many venues I found wonderful, it’s gone now.) If you were headed to town for a vacation visit—which I was for the first time that March—you could phone ahead to Kurt and Ana Haggstrom, the proprietors, and for $20 they’d slot you in for early morning doubles with appropriately aged and similarly skilled locals.
These players were men in their late 50s, as was I. Unlike me, they were already retired. They’d worked for some of the big companies in the Midwest, such as General Foods and United Airlines, risen to VPs of one sort or another, then quit at 55 or so—left their companies with not-too-shabby pensions, sold their homes in Minnetonka or Clarendon Hills or some other heartland suburb, and bought condos in the California desert. They had glided into what Carl Jung called “the afternoon of life” (ages 56 to 83, he somehow calculated), and for them, it seemed just about perfect.
I played with them for three or four mornings during my trip, and afterward we sat for half an hour under a sun-shielding canopy, hydrating and shooting the breeze. To be honest, as friendly as these guys were, at first I found their lives somewhat remote and vaguely purposeless. I’d attended college in the early 1970s, and like a lot of my fellow humanities types, had read and was influenced by Marx’s newly translated 1844 Manuscripts—about the modern employee’s estrangement from the products and services he worked to provide—and Abraham Maslow’s ideas about self-actualization. Work was not going to be about getting hired by a corporation and climbing the ladder; no sir, not us. Work was going to be individually expressive, devoid of alienation, consequential. And we weren’t going to get a handshake and a watch at 55. We were going to work forever, meaningfully!
But of course we weren’t; not us journalists, anyway, and not most everybody in the so-called knowledge business. I’d spent my life as a magazine editor, and the 2007–2008 financial crisis had already made clear to me, by the time I’d found the Plaza Racquet Club, that print magazines were fading and the coming digital realm was going to be built and run by the young. What I’d given no thought to, until those Palm Springs after-match yaks, is what was to come next for me. I understood the financial aspects of retirement (I was going to be okay) and the inevitable age-related health stuff we all face as we age; in my case, there was heart disease in my family, which would later visit me, though a couple of stents and ablations appear to have done the trick for now. What I had no idea whatsoever about, though, was, come retirement, how was I going to unfold a day, and then the next one, and the one after that, and (hopefully) on and on. In my afternoon of life, what the hell was I going to do every afternoon?
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Author: Gerald Marzorati
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