Living the Dream

I've been thinking quite a lot about retirement lately. The idea, as hinted at in the previous post, was once you were settled with a single company, you would accrue all the pay and benefits possible, and be vested, and at the end of your service you would retire with a nice fat pension. I had been hoping for something like that when I had taken a permanent full-time position with a pharmaceutical company in the late '80s . My wife and I had a child and we had bought a house. And two years later I was laid off. The game had changed and the rug was yanked out from under my feet.

The following incident occurred on the Sunday morning after Christmas in 1970. I was 18 years old and heading to the bus stop to catch the next bus into New York and meet my 16-year-old girlfriend who lived in The Bronx. It was about 8:00 in the morning and the streets of the town were empty. I walked past Mr. Dahl's house as he was stepping out his front door. He vaguely knew who I was, but he liked to talk and he must have decided that I would be his captive audience. Mr. Dahl was one of those men of the old school, who didn't leave the house without wearing a gray jacket, a vest and a tie, and a homburg, and who spoke in a breezy jazz-age language, replete with double entendre, that was sometimes difficult for a young 60s kid to decipher. But I liked Mr. Dahl, and even though I wanted to catch my bus, I lingered and listened to him talk, occasionally nodding my head, or asking him a question. It wasn't really a conversation; it was more about my bearing witness to his verbal stream-of-consciousness. Eventually the conversation veered to the subject of retirement, an idea or stage of life that, at 18, I knew little of. Mr. Dahl had worked for one company (insurance or finance) his entire life, and he'd retired from the company when his time had come. He had looked forward to retirement for years so he could be with his wife all the time. And then, without warning, Mr. Dahl started to tear up. As it turned out, his wife had died within the first year of his retirement and he'd been alone ever since. "Jesus," he said, "You work so hard, and the one thing you hope for most, to be with your loved one, is taken from you. It's not fair," he said, and then he began to cry. And I had no idea what to say, other than "I'm sorry." I saw a man's life story cling to this one theme. Our talk had hit hit a dead end. Mr. Dahl needlessly apologized. He was OK, and I soon left to catch the next bus.

My girlfriend was unhappy when I showed up late, but I had felt that my lateness was excusable. Mr. Dahl was old and lonely (it was the Christmas holidays after all) to the point where he felt the need to unpack his tired heart to an 18-year-old kid, to anyone frankly who'd been walking past his house and had the time to hear his story. And I had grown a little in that half-hour pause---the future would likely not be what you imagined it to be, and my life has borne that out. Even so, we cannot help ourselves from envisioning a happy and easy ending from a present vantage. It doesn't hurt to dream, but maybe we should keep a healthy grain of salt on hand and embrace the unexpected.