Lost as to what to do, Stepping back to the bench, Leaving and coming back, and Cultural heritage. More conversations, was Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work. Overheard retirement conversations.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work. Overheard retirement conversati...: Now it's 67, after a certain age. . . for the time being.  Just like Wyoming judges used to have to retire at 70 and Game Wardens at 60....

I posted this just the other day, but since that time have heard two more conversations, both among fellow lawyers, regarding retirement that made me pause.

The first was from a lawyer I know well, well I'm related to him, more or less (it's sort of complicated).

Anyhow, he stated something to the effect that he'd be completely lost as to what to do with his time if he retired and therefore, implicitly, has no intention of doing so.

Now, it's not the case that this individual is 80 years old or something.  He's in his mid 60s.  But still, this is remarkable for a variety or reasons that I'll not put in here.

One of the most remarkable things about it is that an individual with a really lively mind, in an occupation that appeals to polymaths by it very nature, wouldn't at some point to want to leave it to explore other interests, while they still could.

It truly baffles me, but I hear that a lot.

Of course, some of that view is subject to a person and pressure.  At least, from what I've observed, lawyers who have that view are the ones who have a very limited number of things going on at any one time.  Lawyers who are extremely busy seem to be more inclined to ponder retiring, as they really can't look into things other than what their work demands.

I'd note that there's a legal journal out there that notes this view as a problem for the law.  Some lawyers get to where they can't leave it, as they're so dedicated to their work. But their work starts to decline anyway with advancing age.

Not related to this conversation, but to another one that I recently also heard, a lawyer I know whose just past his mid 60s and who has been talking about retirement for years, now says he wants to step back to a more advisory role.

The concept that this can be done is something you'd read in things like the ABA Journal.  Maybe some small percentage of lawyers actually can do that, but I think it's pretty small, and it also depends on what they did.  Litigators?  Nah, can't be done.

Again, it's interesting.  A person goes from wanting to step back, and just take life easy, to wanting to step back and let somebody else carry the ball and only be called in for special plays.  But once you are the quarterback, if you will, you probably are going to be hesitant to do that, particularly with an older lawyer, who will tend to criticize your decisions, if you are younger.  And lawyers who do only what they want to do, in litigation, rather than what has to be done, don't turn out to be that much help and people know that.

Which leads to another random observation.  A couple of years ago I ran into a lawyer who had switched from some sort of business law field into litigation, and into insurance defense litigation at that.

That's the hardest kind of law there is, and people don't get in it when they are old.  But he must have entered into it in his 60s.  He was good at it, I'd note, but I think that's frankly crazy.  It's also a little pathetic.

It's crazy for one thing in that it's one of the fields of law that's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the time.  Just at the time most people would actually think about retiring, that's effectively retiring into backbreaking work.  It's like giving up a seat in the construction company's front office to go dig ditches.

Of course, there are some people who like fighting or crave field excitement.  That's why you see old guys try to volunteer for wars in some instances, or policemen who have worked as bailiffs for 20 years ask to go out on the street.  They probably really love their occupations, but felt less worthy of them as they'd never been in the thick of it.  People who have been in the thick of it are less likely to feel that way later on.

And on another overhead item; 

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about becoming native to this place—

Wes Jackson, taken grossly out of context.

There's a fellow (I'm clearly not going to name him) whom I first knew when he was part of a professional firm years ago.  It was significant, to be sure, and therefore, he was also, as part of it.

He left it for some reason, I never knew why.  In the following period, he practiced his profession on his own.  He ran for office in that time period.  I might have voted for him, I can't recall, but he remained a pretty serious figure and I recall at least contemplating voting for him.

Then he left the state.

For decades.

Things happened in the intervening decades.  People died, people arrived, new political figures came and replaced the old.

He returned. But, as would be the case, he returned a couple of decades older, or more than that, than he'd been when he left.

A couple of decades in a person's life is a long time.  We sometimes tend to forget that.  

Returns from long absences are not uncommon in this region.  People grow up and move out, taking jobs in far off regions of the country, and then come back in retirement.  Others, like the fellow I mentioned above, grow up here, go to work here, and then leave for brighter horizons, or due to marriages, or due to family, or just because they've become sick of living in a place where life is always hard, and life here is always hard. And then they return, having secured their fortunes, usually, in the form of some sort of secured retirement.

Everyone once in a while, however, a person returns to go back to their original pursuits. That's really rare.  That's the case here, however, in the instance of the fellow I'm mentioning.

This nameless essay is about all sorts of these folks.

When you leave a place, you leave it.  Some of that place remains with you, but it remains with you in a way that's sort of fixed in time.  Ft. Sill is that way with me.  It'll always be part of me, even though I wasn't there for eons, but it is the Ft. Sill that existed in the early 1980s.  It's changed since then.  I know that from people who have been there since.  Yes, much of what makes Ft. Sill, Ft. Sill, still exists, but the Army of 2022 isn't the Army of 1982.  I can look back and still see it in my distant rearward looking mental view, but that view isn't the same, exactly, for those who are receiving artillery training in 2022.

Now, things would be much different if I'd never left Ft. Sill.  It'd all be part of my mental makeup.

When you leave and go to a new place, and stay there for quite some time, that new place becomes part of you significantly.  At some point, while the old place never leaves you, what it is today isn't.  Or, in quite a few places in modern American life, quite frankly, no place becomes part of you.  You aren't native to this place. . . . you aren't native to any place.

The fellow I started this essay off with is beyond retirement age, which makes this sort of a strange return in the first place.  He's not retired.  He's at an age where he really should be, truly.

And in the intervening years, he's lost his relevance, but doesn't seem to know that. Due to a recent event in which he participated, he really ought to.  You really don't get to spend half your life somewhere else, and then go back to where you were from, and pick up again and expect people to know or care who you are, or to treat you like you are thirty years younger than you really are.  You are an old stranger in a country which, as Cormac McCarthy reminds us, is "no country for old men", at least to the extent that you were a young man when last here, grew old somewhere else, and came back as though you never aged.

Back to my original interlocutor, the other thing he noted is that he'd be worried whether or not he had saved enough money to retire.

Knowing him, I'll bet he has.  As we are from the same extended family and share the same general cultural roots, we're in the group of, essentially, blue collar Catholics who ended up lawyers.

There are, frankly, a lot of us, and in many instances our parents weren't industrial workers either.  But we're drawn from the same pool of Irish, Italian, and South Slavs by cultural heritage whose ancestors never would have thought of going to university prior to World War Two, and who worked in industries or agriculture in one way or another that were pretty working class in some fashion.  He tends to bring that up, in another form, more than I do.

The reason that matters is that we all live pretty modest lives, so it's not like we're taking big fancy vacations or driving new cars all the time.  

It also means, however, that even in our early 60s we probably still have kids in college and, due to the history of our families, we expect things to fail.  There's going to be an economic depression. There's going to be hyperinflation.  Things are going to be bad.  It's just earlier to work until we're sure that we're safe, and that day will never come.