What follows is a long reflection, something I wrote in a flurry several years ago, to help me make my decision regarding retirement.  I forgot all about this writing until I found it today, being more than three years since I retired from the world of work.

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Time, Retirement, and the Flow of Assets

For a time, I did not work or earn any income at all. That was when I was a baby up until I was ten years old.  My earnings during these years came in the form of memories.  Time was laid out in seasons of playing on the summer grass, rolling in the winter snows, batting balls, throwing footballs. What joy was mine that I did not then realize – chickens in the coop, worms in the back field, delicious apples for the picking, grapes from my grandmother’s vines.  Hers was a big old house with a certain dark and warm closet that held fresh eggs mother sent me to fetch. We had that whole small town block to ourselves, us kids, mostly my cousins, who lived within the borders of State, Alice, Westover, and Wadsworth streets. At five years old I walked to kindergarten by myself (five short blocks) even through the snow drifts of a Michigan winter. The only monetary assets I acquired in those lean years came from the tooth fairy and from whatever coins I found that had fallen into the deep recesses of the couch from out of my father’s pockets.

At ten years, I moved my childhood from the sacred confines of our small town block to the our bright Broadway called Newman Street. I took my first job, shining shoes and sweeping floors, at Schreiber’s Barber Shop, for $2.50 a week. With it I bought happiness – candy from Dimmick’s Drug Store, two doors down. At the time, my Dad worked for O’Conner’s Pendleton Shop, just up the block towards the dock on Tawas Bay, while my mother managed the Mill End Store, just across the street, where could be procured an eclectic mix of dry goods, from boots to fabric to fishing poles. We all walked home from our labors, just six blocks away.
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At twelve, I began to deliver the Bay City Times, riding a Sears’s bike, on a long route with thirteen subscribers, from the pick-up point at Hennigar’s Men’s Shop (also on Newman Street), along the waterfront through East Tawas, and ending far out on Tawas Point road where the rich lived. I did not deliver to them however. I believe their newspaper deliveries (the Detroit Free Press or News) must have been special delivered to their beachfront homes from the lucky guys who had those preferred routes.  I did not mind. My dad was a union guy and we weren’t so keen on cozying up to the rich and famous. How little I knew then. My less well-heeled customers paid me in quarters and dimes. One left my payment in a bowl in the front parlor. I walked in, took the money, and never saw to whom I delivered the evening news. How could I know then what those quarters and dimes and nickels would mean to me? With them I opened a savings account at Peoples State Bank (underwritten by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) on the corner of Newman and State streets. Newman and State streets! They formed the great financial intersection of my young life. I was born and raised on East State Street. My livelihood was earned solely on the two block length of the heart of Newman Street. I was on my way. It was 1965.

I began my vocational life in earnest when I took a “stockboy” position at Mooney’s Ben Franklin Store where I spent my High School years stocking shelves with toys, cosmetics, candy, beach balls, and, in December, put together samples of artificial Christmas trees. That wonderful institution anchored the north end of the most affluent block of Newman Street. After school on Wednesdays and into Wednesday evenings, I took in stock from the huge Ben Franklin truck that arrived from Bay City, boxes sliding down steel rollers in the alley at the back of the store. I unpacked the boxes and verified their contents. Always the same, week after week. Up the block, my Dad was doing the same, only his inventory consisted of beautiful Pendleton Woolen Mills shirts, colorful globes, and barometers encased in woods of cherry and maple. Mom, across the street, along with her cadre of women, were busy unloading boxes of this and that and who knew what from week to week?  At Mooney’s Ben Franklin, I swept the floors, washed the windows, and, on Saturday mornings, drove to the dump in old Mr. Mooney’s red International Scout, out past G’nath Hill, on the way to Silver Valley.

These years follow me wherever I go.  All of the income I earned at Mooney’s was properly identified to the Social Security Administration. I can look it up online now and see it, that bit of my future assets in seed form, growing from those days more than 40 years ago. I began to learn the value of money, what it could do, other than buy happiness and candy. At the end of those three years, with $600 earned at Mooney’s Ben Franklin and stashed away at Peoples State Bank, I was able to put a down-payment on a pretty little 1971 clementine orange VW SuperBeetle! Three years later, living in Las Vegas by then, I had an encounter with a 1952 Dodge pick-up truck, or was it a Sherman Tank? Being my fault completely, I traumatized the owners but did little to damage that truck. I could not afford to fix my VW and drove it seven more years, looking like a freakish monster deformed beetle! As it was, I could only afford my rent and groceries from the something more than minimum wage I earned working at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, running tear sheets to Skaggs Drugstores and the Dunes Hotel on “the Strip.”

That is litany enough – a taste of what was to come.
What I did not know then, I now know.
I had begun to count my life’s time as income earned or assets gained.
What I’ve added to assets, I’ve subtracted from time – shall I call it life?
Was it worth the cost? Now we shall see.
Now, I must reverse this equation.
I must subtract from assets gained and spend it on time.
What time I have left that is not retirement.
It is life itself, no less or more than the life I have now.

Will my early retiring (at 62) anxiously follow me?
Like a fearful shadow, not following, but pulling at my every step;
offering strange fears that I will live too long
with my stream of assets fast diminishing?
Will another year in the field of work remove that fear?
No. It will make little difference
except on the projection sheets of a certain Mr. Carroll.
If I work another year will it be, “Now, if only I worked one more…”

It is abundance, we say, of grace poured out, flowing.
What more is there to acquire?
We may make do, over the years we have, of a diminishing capacity to acquire
but what is there to acquire as we age?
Travel perhaps. To see exotic places,
acquire experiences of the new or the old.
We have different tastes and tolerances in this regard.
We will make our decisions.

If we lived still in Seattle how many years more would I work?
This is a question without meaning, a rhetorical question.
We do not live in Seattle anymore.
It is one of many questions, like forks in the road.
It is absurd to ask it or make part of the equation.
It is long gone and I will not go back there
physically, emotionally, or rhetorically.

What other things should I let go of, what questions, what roads?
Would another year increase my “high three?” Indeed it would.
Would it be worth that cost?

The pros and cons. I could list so many and I thought I would
as if I could make of my life some project of data analysis.
Determine the risks, add them up, calculate the costs, set a course, stay true.
But, I have no idea of all the costs ahead, financial or otherwise.
Life isn’t so clean or calculable.
Even if I did add it up, I wouldn’t stick to a course
set a year or twenty years in the past.
I know I’d still want to move as I have moved,
which, while conservative, has not been without creativity and risk.

Enough with asking questions. Declarations are what I need.
I want to retire next year. There it is!
I want to be done with work I do not enjoy.
I want to be done with this commute.
I want to begin my new life, our new life,
whether I know how I will live my days or not.
I do not want to worry about money though I will.
Working another year will not change that.

I will rejoice if I reach tomorrow
not less or more than if I reach my ninety-fifth year
and so begin to fall off the dreadful edge
of Mr. Carroll’s down sloping chart.
His chart is not my future and I will not let it be.
There are many more things to look at, to see
in whatever days I have before me.
I’ll start with my wife and my family.
They mean the world to me and they are my enough.
They cannot be charted or spread-sheeted.

There are words for me to write,
pieces of wood to work, cut, shape, finish,
run my hands over.
There is a work I have to do
though I do not know what it is yet.
I may need that extra year just to sit and let my future come to me,
lay herself before me that I may see her loveliness.
For I say I believe that the Spirit is blowing madly about.
I will, if I have the days, enjoy campfires and ocean shores.
I’ll experience suffering and decay
of my own body or of my family and friends.
Another year of work will change none of that.

I do not know what this stress is doing to me.
I try to think that it is not stress and that I am handling it very well.
But, I feel my blood pressure rising in too many situations.
I wish I could let the circumstances go that bear my stress
but that is not something I have ever successfully done.
I feel fortunate to have come this far in the world of my work
for which I am not entirely suited.
I’ve been faithful.  Whether I work another year will not diminish that.
Twenty four or twenty five years? Ridiculous!
I do not wish to let assets be the determining factor
or the reason for this decision I must make.

Let Mr. Carroll do his work.
We must do ours.
We must consider who we are, our souls, our beliefs,
and trust them above all else.
Trust that our goal is not to live long and spend down our assets,
but rather to live well, age gracefully, grow wiser,
and to know when to let go when our bodies say they are ready.

Our choice might go awry.  What then?
Another unanswerable question.
There are so many ways it could go awry –
sickness, longevity, financial or ecological disaster.
Let me count the ways.
Will another year of work make the “awry” go away?

Have I made of retirement a god,
an insatiable god who can never be pleased?
Punishment for leaving early.
Punishment for working too long
past the time when my vocational desire
is no longer matched by my desire for the last stage of my journey?

Let others take my chair in the workplace.
I’ve made the mark I will make there
and will leave with the respect of my peers
all younger, moving, striving, up and up – poor them, I sometimes think.

So much energy in thinking about letting go.
So much anxiety in thinking about holding on.
Is it all driven by assets, as if they were the bright and shining star?
My limitless horizon backed against a hard wall?
Instead, they, these blessed and damnable asset, are a wild dog on a leash.
I try to hold them at bay and hope they don’t lash out at me.
They do not have to be.

What then are these assets? Whom do they serve?
Assets – such a sterile and uncompromising concept.
What if I treated them as an organic part of my life –
breathing, growing, entropic, changing?
They are, after all, part of my own work, mind, muscle,
perseverance, loyalty, anxiety, one day after another
showing up and offering such skills and words as I possessed.
Anger too sometimes, irritation, frustration, boredom.
These are the parts of my assets.
Perhaps they need a name that fits their worth.
I will call them gift, portion, share, abundance.
They are ours unless they are gift I give to my beyond.
The name must be one that tells of how I do not own them,
do not possess them, nor they me, indeed, they do not,
except that I act, too often, as if they did.

In me there are small and frightened synapses,
tortured hard and dark veins of anger that feed upon fear,
of things that never were nor will be.
I am so afraid of my own self in the day just beyond me,
when I will not have enough, not have strength.
Maybe now is the time to say to the assets,
“You are not the master of my fate.
You are part of my life, an important part
but you are not worthy of addiction, fear, submission, or exaltation.”
This may be the very time to break the illusion of accumulating more and more.

This is a life decision, a spiritual decision,
a decision borne of the Spirit.
I must continue to believe that,
in everything and on all pathways,
we are held by the Spirit of the living God,
the final arbiter, the source of all assets.
Not Mr. Carroll or his projections.
Not my own ability to make a decision
or to be or not be selfish about what I do or do not want.

There may be another work to do.
What might it be?
This is my lifelong unanswered question.
What do I desire?
To create. That is what there is and little other.
I have a something in me that wants to be –
a word, a craft, a gift above all.
I have a gift, something to give the world –
My family, community, my own soul.

Creation may be the only way for me to stay fully alive, forever.
Not longevity, but generativity;
Arising each morning with a task,
to have in mind and body an appointment with my soul’s task.

It is time and space to give expression to my experience
for how many years I may be graced to have.
How much money is needed for the creative task?
Very little, something other than financial assets,
rather, assets gained by the heart – days in ecclesia
hearing the sublime gospel,
early morning prayer, in the quiet of the seasons;
running in the cold Carson City mornings before work began.
Tedium of work, physical labor, tending the garden,
tending my body, caring for my truest assets –
of flesh and blood, of wedding band, of an Audrey,
and a Roland, of course.

Many are the assets that cannot be measured –
acquired through confusion, failure, expectations thwarted,
all forming a dark and formless cache of my true life.
Loss of friends, betrayal of loved ones,
time wasted that cannot be regained.
Painful memory assets, unforgotten, the weight of darkness
all portions of my life’s acquired assets.

Where might I find these assets on Mr. Carroll’s chart
that shows just when I ought to begin worrying
that I will no longer have enough?

Ah, but I do not feel old as one who “retires.”
It is a word with power, misused,
given too much out of place
saying something about one part of my life
as if I were retiring from life itself.

What else might I call it?
What would help me to break the simplistic
lifelong held spell of this time which comes for some of us?
Transition, passage, threshold?
So formal.
Perhaps I will keep moving
one day to the next, open my eyes to see.
What do I call that way of being?
Aware. Mindful.  Awakened.

I feel no older now that when I earned my first Social Security income,
at Mooney’s Ben Franklin, in 1968, when I was a teenager.
How could it be, that more than forty-five years
do not possess a weight dragging at my body?
It only goes to show, as if it needed showing,
that work and time are not at all the same.
I am something other than what I do or did for a living,
or how much I made in a year or have made through the years.
Some income I’ve saved, and some I’ve spent wastefully.
Some I’ve used to see the world,
some to fix the car or buy the groceries.
Some is gone and some is left.
If I could weigh it all, what was and what will be,
would my past outweigh my future
simply by virtue of number of years, or income earned?
Rather, our life is one weight.
With each day’s passage we shed some of it
and, if it feels heavy, it is an illusion.
We lighten our load with the passing of time
until we reach our last day.
Then, we are a feather blown aloft
so light we are from having spent the last of our assets –
given away all our days and all of our selves.

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Portland, Oregon – December 23, 2018