Last one at the dinner table

Two years ago I retired from teaching.  My original Social Security card lays in the left side drawer of my writing desk.  The ballpoint ink of my signature as a fifteen-year-old is still blue.  My signature has matured, but I can remember signing the card.

Officially, I’d been a college professor for 26 years.  Before that I worked as a grad school teaching assistant and an English instructor in Poland. I worked in libraries, bookstores, and nursery schools.  Along the way odd part-time gigs kept me going---serving as a Shabbos goy in a private home, an office assistant for an auctioneer, typing bills of lading in a shipping office out on a pier in San Francisco.  

More than forty years of work life passed in the blink of an eye, as the cliché goes. I was stunned when I reached “my full benefit age”---that foundational concept of the Social Security Administration.  

What hit me hard was how little life was left to do anything else.  Twenty-five years remained if I matched my mother’s life span.  She lived to 91.  Fewer years if I lived as long as her mother, my grandmother, who lived to 88.  I call them my hardy matrilineals. Less time left than the “blink of an eye” I’d just lived through.  

Time to go.  Now. 

Unfinished goals that still nagged me---a second promotion, a monograph in my field---what did they matter now?  More money, more points plotted along an academic career graph. Did I want to spend my only years of life left on them? 

I re-focused fast.

Since then I’ve settled into what we call retirement. I’ve pondered the language. In Jane Austen novels it meant to withdraw from social life, to live in seclusion.  Or to be diffident and quiet.  As in, “she’s a very retiring person,” or she lives in the country “in retirement.”  

When Germany pioneered modern social insurance for workers in 1889, we got the notion of retirement from paid work.  Historian Richard Gabryszewski narrates a video about the development of social insurance behind our Social Security system.  You can find it on the SSA website. It’s a noble story and I love it.  I’m proud to be a part of a history that (if we skip the workhouse era) includes Aristotle, olive oil, Frances Perkins, and FDR.

 

Thanks to them all, my monthly social security benefit slips silently into my checking account.  I have time to write, to cook and to garden, to read.  Few dates recur in my calendar---yoga classes, the dentist, the financial planner, and the doctor.  There’s time to understand point and figure charts, to practice long form tai chi.

All in all, my transition has been successful.  My daily life habits are comfortable. As I say, I have settled in.  Or so I thought.

One day last year, making the bed and gazing absently out the unwashed windows of my now mortgage-free house, a surprising thought surfaced from my subconscious. It flickered, illumined, and then slipped below again. 

The thought is hard to re-capture, but the gist is this.  So much of the advice elders dinned into my once youthful and compliant head seems irrelevant now. Family expectations and exhortations (and the views and values they rested on) aimed at girding me for the precarious path to a future successful adult life. 

My elders worried, I suppose, that I might not make it to this point.  Their worry has long since been laid to rest. What remains of their counsel has transformed completely, or just fallen to the side, shards of another era. I made it. Here I am.  Except that I’m someone else.  

Why would this thought emerge now?  

I think it has to do with the irony of retirement, maybe its paradox, or even its subtext, as the literary say.  

This is pretty heavy. I’m writing an essay to try to figure it out.

My parents and grandparents were well-meaning and I don’t fault them.  They wanted happiness and security for me. They survived the Depression and World War II.  We lived together, three generations. They told their stories around our dinner table:  a job lost in New York City and pushing a Good Humor ice cream cart, dismissal from college because of debt, surviving in the Pacific during the war, a paralyzing stroke and no medical insurance, having to sell the family store and move in with relatives.

I was the only child and much beloved, listening at that table.  I absorbed these family tales.  Accounts of disaster seemed normal to me.  My elders’ history was so real to me that growing up I thought everyone had these same stories.  

My parents had scrambled on to the widening ledge of 1950s prosperity.  Their expectations for me centered on college, the education that history could snatch away at any time.  By 1959 I was on the march in my blue blazer, plaid skirt, and the Spaulding shoes of my Catholic high school uniform.  College meant the liberal arts---English and history, Latin and the classics, modern languages. Fields like sociology so popular among my girlfriends were beneath consideration.  (If I’d had any aptitude for math or sciences things might have been different.) 

Other family expectations remained hazy: a good marriage, dignified work (no real professional career), travel, maybe some artistic or creative pursuit.  By my senior year in college, I suspected that---unlike belief in education---these expectations were shaped by social convention. With no immediate prospects of attaining any of them, and graduation imminent, I began to question my life. 

I embarked on my belated rebellion.

It wasn’t hard. The upheavals of the 1960s spurred me on.  I’d missed civil rights---a bit too young. One day my English lit professor stopped his lecture to explain Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement.  I went to anti-war rallies and sat in at sit ins. Women’s issues burbled below the politics. 

I sleepwalked through some of the counterculture’s colorful enthusiasms---pot and music. Concerts at the Fillmore auditorium conveniently combined both.  The movement years waned.  Institutions I’d been raised with papered over their gaps and fissures, and hobbled on. I graduated from college but was never the same.  

I wrestled with mistakes of judgment (a difficult marriage). But the education thing perdured---a word that age and time teaches you to love.  In midlife I plunged into grad school and completed a PhD. Through dogged determination and fortuitous circumstances, I got a faculty post, and then tenure. I supported myself, raised my son, cared for my aging mother, and paid off a house. 

Academe became my home, the source of meaning and a livelihood. I hung onto it tightly, clutched it as sure and worthy.  

When I retired, friends asked about my plans. They chirped excitedly about travel and  volunteering---eager to offer ways to fill time once hogged by gainful employment. Bring satisfaction and value to retirement, people said. Give back, do more, keep active.  

That’s where the irony came in.  Other people’s enthusiasm was unnerving.  After decades of marching through education, work and profession, this pressing you to do something else disconcerted me.    

I panicked.  Untethered from a job would I drift into dissatisfaction and depression? Had I misjudged the whole 25-year rest of life thing? 

It took a year to accept this irony of retirement---that no one wants you to withdraw into quietness at all.  I’ve pretty much let that go.  My time obsession has shifted into its sister dimension.  It’s become more like space left to me---open and uncluttered, airy and agnostic.  I am learning to feel free, perhaps for the first time since adolescence.  I can explore again, without the anxious anticipation of adulthood. 

And there’s some work only I can do---understand how people and experiences changed me. I ruminate about my elders’ ideas of a successful life, chiseled in hardship and the demands of inherited social convention.  Maybe this is why the notion of their expectations surfaced in my mind.  It illumined something---that I’ve long been someone else.  It’s a paradox of retirement that now I can love my elders again, though their advice seems antique and their wisdom has transformed or just fallen away.

If there’s any subtext to retirement (a risky proposition), maybe it’s something structural.  If another phase of retired life follows this one, I won’t be surprised. But for now it’s time to get on with this inward journey.  

In dreams and in my mind’s eye I see those elders who drilled their exhortations and expectations into my young self.  Now I have the ridged nails, the crinkly skin, and the sinking chest of my hardy matrilineals. I wish they had told me more about their lives then, lives of middle age and old age, though I wouldn’t have understood.  But it’s alright.  I talk to them again.  

I’m the last of those around my family dinner table.
  

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