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I'm Not RetiringMarch 18, 2006 Last night I went to a celebration for my barnmate, who just retired after umpteen years of teaching school, mostly second grade. Now that I'm in my fifties, I know plenty of people who are retired. Hardly any of them lie around the house and do nothing: many go on to new jobs, part-time or full-time, paid or volunteer, or even second careers. Long time ago, in my D.C. days, one of my Friday-afternoon-process-the-week drinking buddies was retired. He was barely 40. I was about 30 and this was a whole new concept: the only retired people I knew then were my parents' age. He'd been a career noncom in the U.S. Army, retired as a sergeant major with considerable experience in journalism, and had recently gone to work for USA Today, which was just getting started. At first I was jealous: a pretty good pension from one job, pretty good pay from another, no kids, and only 40 years old? The fly in the otherwise tempting soup soon became obvious: to get to this enviable position, he'd had to put in 20-some years in the army. The army itself wasn't the scary thing; nor even that some of those 20 years had been served in Vietnam. Nah, the deal-breaker, the condition that made me suspect that I would never have a pension to call my own, was the idea of putting in 20 years at the same job, any job. At the time I was working for the American Red Cross, where you had to put in 10 years before you were vested in the retirement system. I lasted 4, in three different offices, and would have gone bonkers if I'd tried for 5. Can't remember when I first heard of "going postal," but it made perfect sense to me: put in 30 years in the same job, any job, and insanity was almost inevitable. Since my Red Cross days, I've had two jobs that I loved. I lasted four years as book buyer for D.C.'s feminist bookstore, Lammas (R.I.P.), and didn't make it to a third anniversary as features editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times. Both jobs were challenging, the work was important, and they involved being on-on-on all the time. Time came with both when I knew it was time to move on. In the first case, the move was literal, back to New England, and you don't know how many months I fantasized ways of both moving and keeping the job, or at least keeping the job open in case the move didn't work out. In the second case, burnout had a lot to do with it, and the burnout had a lot to do with the, ahem, shortcomings of the work environment. Conditions weren't going to change, I didn't have the skills or the influence or the will to try to change them; I'd done, and learned, all I could. I left. For one year early in my worklife I had a terminally boring job: the work was boring, most of my co-workers were boring; one of my bosses was pleasant but dense, the other smart but malevolent. The big bennie on that job was that I could get 7 1/2 hours' worth of work done in 3 or 4, which left me plenty of time for reading, writing, and doing community organizing by telephone; all I had to do was look busy. Up to that point I'd just assumed that I could subsidize my real work -- volunteering in various feminist organizations and, eventually, writing -- by working crappy 9-to-5 jobs. That year I learned the hidden costs were too high. My who-cares, just-get-by attitude wouldn't stay in the office: I caught myself sloughing off in my feminist work as well. Spending 7 1/2 hours a day in the same office with half-dead, unmotivated, bored and boring people sapped my energy. Outwitting my bitter boss was fun at first, but as I learned more of her story -- a not uncommon one for women a generation older than I, of being passed over for promotion after promotion because she was too smart, too qualified, and therefore too threatening for the guys doing the hiring -- I realized There but for fortune . . . So for a long time I've tried to live a life that I don't need vacations from and won't want to retire from. This is good, because I can't afford vacations, and as for retirement -- surely you jest. I'm still headed in the right direction, I know that much, mainly because I've become pretty good at recognizing the signs when I take a wrong turn. B'lieve I'll run on, like the song says, see what the end's gonna be.
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