Upon reaching 60

That's how old I am today.

When I was young.  I was about three when this photos was taken, maybe two.  My father was 36 or 37.

Americans like to debate at what age you are "old", with that benchmark, and the one for middle age, moving over the years to some extent.  Some go so far as to claim that the term doesn't mean anything. 

It does, as you really do become older and then old, at some point.

The United Nations categorizes "older" as commencing at age 60, something, given their mission, that would encompass the totality of the human race.  Some polling you'll see suggests that Americans regard it actually starting at 59 or 57.  Pew, the respected polling and data institution, noted the following:

These generation gaps in perception also extend to the most basic question of all about old age: When does it begin? Survey respondents ages 18 to 29 believe that the average person becomes old at age 60. Middle-aged respondents put the threshold closer to 70, and respondents ages 65 and above say that the average person does not become old until turning 74.

Interesting.

It is not like flipping a switch, and it doesn't really happen to all people at the exact same time.  I'm often reminded of this when I observe people I've known for many years.  Men in particular, I used to think, aged at a much different rate than women.  I knew a few of my contemporaries who were getting pretty old by the time they were in their 30s, and I know a few men in their 70s who are in fantastic shape and appear much younger than they really are.  I recall thinking, back when I was in my late 20s, that my father was getting older, but wasn't old, right up until the time he died at age 62.

Having said that, I’m often now shocked, I hate to admit, by the appearance of women my own age, again that I knew when they were young.  It's not like I know every girl I went to high school with, but I know a few of them, and some of them have held up much better than others.  In that category, some of my close relatives have really held up well.

Up until recently, I could say that I've held up well, but this past year has been really rough health wise. First there was colon surgery in October, followed by a prolonged medical addressing of a thyroid nodule which was feared, at first, to be aggressive cancer. Working that out is still ongoing, but that now appears much less likely, meaning that only half the thyroid will need to be removed.  

All of that has reminded me of Jesus' address to Peter:

Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John, Chapter 21.

Peter, by the way, was between age 64 and 68 when he was martyred.  St. Paul was over 60, it's worth noting, when he met the same fate.

It's been rough in other ways as well.  One thing is that, in spite of what people like to claim, your fate is really fixed by age 60.  You aren't going to leave your job as an accountant and become an Army paratrooper.¹ If you are a paratrooper, you're going to retire now, as 60 is the military's retirement cutoff age.  If you've spent decades in the Army, and retire at 60 (most servicemen retire before that), you aren't going on, probably, to a career you don't have any strong connection with.

In my case, as I started to type out here the other day and then did not, as it didn't read the way I really wanted it to, I can now look back on a long career, over 30 years, and largely regard it as a failure, even though almost everyone I know would regard it as a success.  I won't get over that.  I'd always hoped to make the judiciary, but I'm not going to, and there's no longer even any point in trying.  I'm reminded of this failure every time I appear in front of one of the new judges and see how incredibly young they now are, and also when I listen to suggestions that the retirement age for judges be raised up to the absurdly high 75.

At age 60, if I were to go to work for the state (which I'm also not going to), I couldn't really ever make the "Rule of 85" for retirement.  As a lifelong private practice attorney, I'm now actually at the age where most lawyers look at their career, and their income, and decide they can't retire, some retreating into their office personality as the last version of themselves and nothing else.  I'm not going to become a member of the legislature, something probably most young lawyers toy with the idea of.  I'm not going to become a game warden, something I pondered when young.²  I'm way past the point where most similar Federal occupations are age restricted, and for good reason.

This is, work wise, pretty much it.

I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

Hyman Roth, to Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, Part II ,

I'm also never going to own my own ranch, which was a decades long career goal.  I have acquired a fair number of cattle, but my operation is always going to be ancillary to my in laws at this point.  When I was first married my wife and I tried to find our own place, with she being much less optimistic about it than I. There were times, when the land cost less, that we could almost make, almost, a small place. We never quite did, and now, we're not going to.

Indeed, thinking back to St. Peter, I'm now at the age of "you can't", with some of the "can'ts" being medical.  I could when I was younger, but now I can't, or shouldn't.  Others are familial.  "You can't" is something I hear a lot, pertaining to a lot of things, ranging from what we might broadly call home economics, in the true economic sense, to short term and long term plans, to even acquisitions that to most people wouldn't be much, but in my circumstances, in the views of others, are.  Some are professional, as ironically it's really at some point in your 50s or very early 60s where you are by default fully professionally engaged, with that taking precedence over everything else, including time for anything else.

One of the most frustrating things about reaching this age, however, is seeing that you probably will never see how some things turn out, and you don't seem to have the ability to influence them.  I'm not, in this instance, referring to something like the Hyman Roth character again, in which he hopes to see the results of his criminal enterprise flourish but fears he won't live long enough to.  Indeed, I find myself curiously detached from concerns of this type that some people have.  I've noticed, for instance, the deep concern some aging lawyers have about their "legacy" in the law, which often translates to being remembered as a lawyer or their firm's carrying on.  I don't have those concerns, and indeed, taking the long view of things, I think it's really vanity to suppose that either of those wishes might be realized by anyone.

No, what I mean is that by this age there are those you know very closely, and you have reason to fear for their own long term fate, but you really don't have much you can do about it.  People who seem to be stuck in place, for instance, seem beyond the helping hand, and more than that, they don't really want, it seems, to be offered a hand.  People who have walked up to the church door but who won't go in as it means giving up grudges, burdens or hatreds, can't be coaxed in, even it means their soul is imperiled.  It recalls the last final lines of A River Runs Through It. .

I remember the last sermon I ever heard my father give, not long before his own death:

Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives, look upon a loved one in need and ask the same question: We are willing Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give, or more often than not, that part we have to give… is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us… But we can still love them… We can love—completely—even without complete understanding….

I guess that's about right. 

Footnotes:

1.  Or, I might note, a Ukrainian Legionnaire.  You are too old to join.

Interestingly, I recently saw an article by a well known, I guess, newspaper reporter who attempted to join the U.S. Army in his upper 40s.  He apparently didn't know that you are well past the eligible age of enlistment at that point.  He was arguing that there should be some sort of special unit made for people like himself, or like he imagined himself, well-educated individuals in their upper 40s.  Why should there be if you can recruit people in their 20s?

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

Linked directly in from Twitter's Old Ireland In Color.  Is it a sign of having a bad day to look at that and be envious to the point of "gee, I wish that was me?"

Moonlight Graham and other lessons. At some point, you are stuck in your career.

Archibald "Moonlight" Graham.

Maybe I don't watch enough television to catch them, or maybe the recent financial crises and the pandemic put the brakes on them, but there used to be a lot of financial planner advertisements based on the theme that you could retire into a new exciting career of some sort.  You know, you worked hard but invested wisely, and now you were a rancher in Monument Valley (where the locals probably regard you as an interloping menace).

M'eh.

Probably, the story of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham is more realistic.

Anyone who has watched Field Of Dreams is familiar with it.  Graham, we learn, played but a single season in the major leagues and got up to bat just once.  After that season, he chose to leave baseball, knowing, the film tells us, that he'd be sent back to the minor leagues, and he just couldn't stand the thought, so he opted to move on, pursuing a career instead of being a physician, an occupation that he occupied for over fifty years in Chisholm, Minnesota.

Graham was a real character, and really did play one season in the major leagues and really did go on to a very lengthy career as a physician in Chisholm, Minnesota.   The film, however, is centered on regrets, and Graham plays into that.

In the film, and presumably the book, the main protagonist is an Iowa farmer who starts hearing voices in his corn field.  At first, the voices have him build a baseball field, promising "if you build it, he will come". The "he" turns out to be Shoeless Joe Jackson, famously banned from baseball due to the 1919 Black Sox scandal.  Jackson brings in the Black Sox, who in turn start holding games against another ghostly team, given as they're all years past their deaths.  The voice returns and tells Kinsella, the farmer, to "ease his pain", which ends up taking him on a cross-country journey in which he picks up a self urban exiled urban author, Terrance Mann, and a trip to a ballgame, at which they see the statistics for Graham.  They go on to Chisholm, Minnesota, to find that he had died years earlier, only to find Kinsella nocturnally transported back to the early 1970s in which he encounters the elderly Graham, who in reality died in 1965.  Graham declines to go with Kinsella and Mann, noting that it would have been a tragedy if he'd only gotten "to be a doctor for one day", his having become so central to the lives of the town's residents.

But then, traveling back to Iowa the next day, they encounter a youthful hitchhiking Graham, who goes back to the field with them and plays on the team of ghosts, apparently actually in reality regretting his having been deprived of a major league career.

The entire move Field Of Dreams is about broken dreams.  It's all about regret.  Every character in the film is full of regrets.  Kinsella regrets having departed company with his father, a former professional ball player, on harsh terms and not getting to apologized before he dies.  Mann, a disenchanted author, regrets not having meaningful writing to carry on with.  Jackson regrets having been banned from baseball.  All of them feature redemption in the form of a second chance at redressing their regrets.

I love the movie, and always have, but it's a dark film in some ways.  Almost every single character in it, no matter how cheerful they are, and they're all cheerful, is laboring under monumental internal regrets.  They're provided a chance to banish the regret, but only through Devine intervention, allowing a redress across time.

Field Of Dreams isn't the only movie that deals with regret, and even Divine intervention, but it's the only one that I'm aware of in which average characters are plagued with it and can only address it in such an intervention.  The closest portrayal of a similar topic of which I'm aware is It's A Wonderful Life, in which the protagonist is about to kill himself after years of hard work at a saving and loan business he was basically forced into due to the untimely death of his father.  In that film, however, a hapless angel takes him back through the lives of everyone he touched to show him how much worse the lives of those he impacted would be had he not been there.  Mr. Holland's Opus is another work that has a similar theme, but with no Divine intervention, in which the dream of the protagonist is shattered by a personal tragedy, but his work, opus, becomes a huge impact on everyone around him.  I like both of those films as well, but not as much, and frankly find them dispiriting for all of the wrong reasons.¹ I probably shouldn't, as the message of both is profoundly Christian and, well, perhaps this below best expresses it.

A film that takes a distinctly different approach from either is Will Penny, which is a great film.  In that film circumstances show an aging single cowboy, who has worked his entire life in that role, what life would have been like had he married and had a family that cared about him.  Right up until the end of the film it seems that, now that the opportunity seems to be unfolding, he'll take it, but as it turns out, knowing that it has in reality passed him by, he regrets his decision, but determines to ride off and live with it.  It's just too late.

Which brings me to this observation.

Recently, or so it seems to me, once you are over 50, and truth be known at some point earlier than that, unless your big planned career change is one involving only self-employment and doesn't depend much on your physical health, you're pretty much stuck with what you are doing.

The first time that really became evident to me in any fashion, oddly enough, was when I was in my 30s and practicing law.  My late mother had a friend who grew up on a ranch and had always wanted to return to his former life.  He'd had a long career as a banker, but now, in his 70s, he was trying to return with what was really a hobby farm.  He wasn't well enough to do it, and his wife was crippled, so their location out of town was imperiling her health.  My mother, who was extremely intelligent but often based her assumptions about somebody based on externals, kept referencing him as a "rancher", which he wasn't.  He was still employed at the bank, and it was a hobby farm that was failing.

He moved off of it soon after my mother first referenced him in conversation, and died soon thereafter.

Why, other than that it's always been obvious to anyone who knows me that my internal vocation is one that involves animals and wild country, she pointed that out, I don't know.  Probably as she conceived of him as somebody who had combined a city job, banking, with a rural vocation, "ranching" (actually farming), he was, to her, a model of what I could do.  My mother was always proud of the fact that I'd become a lawyer and quick to tell anyone that, even though its something I never bring up myself and tend to reveal, to strangers, only if asked.  That probably concerned her some as she wondered why somebody who had obtained such an admirable, in her view, professional degree would want to do something that in her personal experience was of a lower status.²  The point was made, as it seemed to make sense to her that a person could pursue agriculture as a hobby while admirably employed in a profession.

I viewed the banker as somebody who'd led an existentially failed vocation, banking, and was trying to make amends too late.

That's a pretty harsh judgement, but I've always been sort of "no quarters" in my view of some things, including myself.  Now, some 30 years later, I could easily say the same thing about me, and be quite correct.  I've had a long and respected career as a lawyer, which has not involved animals whatsoever, or wild country.  I've also been a stockman for most of that time, which does.  But my being a stockman is sort of a second activity, made possible as my in laws are the full time stockmen, and I'm part-time.  I don't regard that as a personal success, but a personal failure. There's no two ways about it.

For all of my time as a lawyer, I've dreamed of being a judge. That's the sort of dream that's puts you in Moonlight Graham territory as chances are, you aren't going to make it.  I first tried to make that switch when I'd only been practicing a few years, at which time, unbeknownst to me, experienced lawyers regarded that as impossible as you needed experience.

Later on I had the experience and applied several times, and passed by some as well.  I passed by one as I knew that somebody putting in was so close to an influential figure that he'd get it, which he did.  I hope that figure realizes that, even now, he's indebted to an accident of employment for his current position.  

The time I first came pretty close, I nonetheless didn't make it to one of the three finalist.  A friend did.  It was surreal, however, as I received calls from those close to the process informing me I should expect to be one of the three finalists.  I received direct information that I'd interviewed very well.  When I didn't get it, and another position soon came up, I was called by a host of individuals who were within the system and urged to apply, which I had not intended to do.  I did, and didn't make the finals again.

Over time, I've watched the process and realized that politics, which weren't really evident to me early on, played very much a part.  One Governor in this time frame had an expressed preference for appointing women, as he thought the bench lacked them and needed them.  Over time, it became apparent that women stood a much better chance than men of getting appointed.  Well, he's the chooser, so I guess he gets to choose as he will.

The more recent Governor has favored very young appointees and ones who had criminal law experience.  I'm no longer young, I'll be 60 next month, and I don't have criminal law experience.  Nonetheless, I put in one last time when I was probably 58.  Totally pointless.

Since that time, I've awkwardly appeared in front of the very young judge.  That judge may turn out to be great, but the judge confessed that the hearing we were at was the first of the type the judge had ever experienced, and the judge wasn't quite sure what to do.  I'll give that judge credit for that.  Not everyone would admit that.

Well, at 60, I'm not putting in anymore.  I'd have to retire at 70, and I'd never get selected.  Oh, well.

I'm not the only one in that position.  At least one other friend of mine has the same experience.  Whenever we've talked about it, we always express it in an "oh well", we didn't expect to get it anyhow, and we still have our careers.  But frankly, in my case, it's another career failure.  I'll go to my grave as a lawyer knowing that whatever I achieved, I didn't achieve what I'd hoped to, long ago.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Being almost 60, I'm at the age where law journals have articles that claim people like me can have exciting second careers.  What they always entail, however, is some lawyer who moved from litigation combat to telling his younger lawyers how to engage in litigation combat, or some lawyer who moved from a big first into one that his son or daughter has, to mentor them.  I guess that's sort of a second career, but it really isn't.  It's more like going from being the team manager to the pitching coach.  You are still showing up wearing pinstripes and a ball cap for the team.  And frankly for the overwhelming majority of lawyers in the current legal environment, where it's hard to find a younger lawyer to even hire, it's not realistic.

What's notable about those articles is nobody ever suggests that any of the lawyers that they reference really were able to make a radical shift in the field.  None of the Old Hands, for instance, went from practice to teaching.  They keep practicing. At most, you see some who went from litigation to transactional within their firms.

And that's about as realistic as that gets.  Not that such a transition is meaningless, a lawyer I knew personally who practiced into his 90s had done a similar thing at age 60, and just all of a sudden.  The same lawyer, however, had wanted to be a doctor but found his dreams dashed by World War Two, during which he served in the Navy.  Coming back, the lost years didn't leave him time, he felt, to do what he wanted to do.  Indeed, everything about his educational path changed.

What this does do, however, is point out the reinforcing nature of occupations over time.  When the ABA, for instance, runs articles about second careers for lawyers, it's acknowledging that lawyers are looking for second careers, and telling them to stuff it, they're lawyers.  Not that this is a surprise as after a person has been practicing for a while, and I'm sure this is true of every other occupation, you're defined in that role.  I've ridden up to cow camps on trail after having been in the field for days, dressed as a cow hand, and covered with grime, only to be identified as "oh, you're the lawyer".  People who know me only casually from work, when they want to chat, open up topics on legal themes, assuming, logically enough, that what I'd really like to do in the evening while enjoying a cocktail (or more likely a Saturday afternoon at the hardware store) is chat about the law.

Societal expectations, therefore, become reinforcing.  You may have a diesel mechanics certificate, but if your prospective employer finds out you're a 50-year-old lawyer, or 40-year-old lawyer, forget it.  You're not getting hired as a diesel mechanic.

Radical changes, unless, again, they involve self-employment, age out.  I knew one lawyer who became a partner in a small drilling company, but that was a species of self-employment backed by the fact that a collection of business associated had the money, along with him, to invest to start up.  Another who had worked for years in a bank, then entered private practice, did it only briefly before returning to the bank. The brief taste of practice was enough.  One I personally knew dropped out of practice to become a teacher, and one I sort of knew did the same, but they were in their 40s at the time, with time still being available to them to do that.  Probably in their 50s, they wouldn't have been hired.

As I mentioned outdoor professions, one thing I'll note is that the Federal ones have age caps, in some areas, the Federal Government being an employer that can still officially do that.  State ones don't tend to have official ones, but they do have unofficial ones.  Federal ones tend to be based on retirement.  If you can't make 20 years by 60, you aren't getting in.  

One that surprised me recently, quite frankly, was the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.  Its age cap is 55, which is pretty old actually for entering military service, but it's only taking veterans (and only combat veterans, it claims).  Ukrainians men are liable for military service up to age 60s, but Ukraine isn't taking in any old soldiers from other lands.  That probably makes sense, really, as you don't know these guys and can't really vet them much before they show up.  Some vets of other armies, such as my self, are in pretty good physical health and probably could endure a combat environment just fine (maybe), others have grown sick, tired or fat, and couldn't.  There's no point in investing in somebody, whose going to die of a heart attack one week out.

Still, it's interesting as there are so many Western army veterans who trained to fight the very army the Ukrainians are fighting, more or less.  We didn't, thank goodness, fight them in the 80s, and we're not going to be fighting them, it appears, now.

Interestingly, the Canadian Army takes in older enlistees now.  I don't know how old, but the cutoff age is something like 57 or 58.  But those enlistees have to make it through basic training in the Canadian Forces.  Apparently Canadian soldiers are part of the general Canadian government old age pension system, and the Canadian government figures they can get a couple of years out of any who make it through basic, which is probably about what they get out of an average enlistee anyway.

As we live in the age of certification, many jobs that were open to people 30 years ago, when I first started practicing law, have had the doors slammed shut if you don't have perfect certification.  I know of one such field that loosely interpreted its certification requirements 30 years ago and now very strictly construes them. 

Added to that, of course, is the impact of income and influence of disbelief.  A professional changing jobs may be enamored with the idea of it, but it's pretty likely that his family, most particularly his spouse, isn't.  That's also why most of the real changes, such as for example the instance I know of in which a lawyer became a fireman, happen pretty early in careers.  Most professionals don't make the loot that people think they do, particularly when they start out, unless they're recruited into a really high test outfit.  Indeed, the one fellow I know who fits that description looks so stressed all the time, I wouldn't be too surprised if his heart just burst out of his chest in a deposition, and he died on the spot.  For most younger lawyers/doctors/accountants, etc., they're not pulling in the big bucks early on.  At that point, obligations aside, they can make a change as they aren't going to be hurt on a day-to-day basis much.

Obligations, however, change options enormously.  Student debt keeps a lot of people in jobs as they have to pay for their educations.  By the time they have the debt paid off, chances are they have a family and a mortgage, and that keeps them in place.  Most spouses have a low tolerance for dropping family income enormously and while early on couples may endure hardships bounded together by true love, later on the spouse who isn't proposing to drop household income will regard it as insane, bound down by practicalities and perhaps duty to the offspring of the marriage.  Shakespeare claimed that "conscience does make cowards of us all", but debt and expenditures have a big role in that.

So too has the return to long family ties of the pre World War Two era and the insurance system of the post World War Two era.  Couple of the 50s, 60s and 70s pretty much saw their children blast into independence as soon as they were 18, and more than a few families didn't feel the slightest bit of guilt about basically kicking children out into the cold world once they were that age.  It was quite normal.  Now it isn't, but then it really wasn't before 1940 either.  Be that as it may, that has brought about a return to the situation in which the family bread winner retains some financial responsibility all the way into his kid's late 20s, which not only means late career, but it can be career extending, as people can't quite what they are otherwise doing.  I know that I wanted my father to retire when he hit 60, and he wouldn't.  But I'd been paying my own freight by that time, at least partially, for quite a while and knew that I could pull it all.

Or so I thought.  He probably didn't think that, making him an example of somebody who probably was looking at things just the way I do know, right up until he died at age 62, having never retired.

Insurance is another matter.  In the American system you can go on Medicare at age 65, but prior to that, health care is your own problem, and it's expensive.  It interestingly gets expensive for most people right about the time that you really need it for the second time in your life, the first time being when women are of child bearing years.  Switching from one job to another, where health insurance is covered in one, and isn't in another, is pretty hard for most people. Quite a few people keep on keeping on for years until they qualify for Medicare.⁴

And self-determination, which a lot of us aren't that good at, plays a major role.  You are always faced with decisions when they come up, and you make them, usually, on what is important right then.  Personally, the door did open for me to an outdoor career with an agency right after I had become engaged.  It involved a massive income drop and a very uncertain future, as it started off with a temporary position. The responsible thing to do, it seemed to me (and it would seem to most) was to forego it, which I did.

Twice wars came up after I had left the National Guard, and in both instances I tried to get in them.  That has something to do with being trained to fight.  In the first Gulf War I made contact right away with my old Guard unit, but it wasn't called up as it had just switched from heavy artillery to rocketry and wasn't combat ready.  The second time I contacted them as well, and then a Colorado infantry unit being deployed, but the first one wasn't called up, and the second one didn't need any artillerymen.  As the wars dragged on, it just didn't seem like there was a real reason to join, and I didn't.  The door, however, was open in that second instance and I didn't walk through it. At some point it slammed shut due to age, just has it has now for the Ukrainian forces.  Немає (no) you are too old, age cap at 55.  Будь ласка? (Please?).  Nope, but here's some equipment we need you can buy.  (Seriously, they suggested some sort of optical equipment, or a drone.  I dread to think how much a drone might cost).

And so, the lesson's learned?

Édith Piaf famously sang Je Ne Regrette Rien, but if you look at her life, I'll be she did, and plenty of them.  Not that she's a model of an average or even somewhat typical life.  Moonlight Graham probably is in many ways, which is probably why the character appeals so much.  Maybe everyone watching Field Of Dreams feels that way a little.  Maybe not, but I'll bet plenty identify with that character more than any other in the film.

I don't know if most men really lead lives of quiet desperation, but I do suspect that a lot of people highly respected in their careers have unresolved paths they didn't take.  That doesn't mean that they didn't enjoy their careers.  It may mean they have large or small reservations about the paths they took.  I can't even begin to count how many times clients and litigants have told me "I wanted to become a lawyer" (or, pretty often, "I wanted my son to become a lawyer"), followed by a "but".  I've known professionals who didn't follow up on professional sports opportunities, who had been in military service and then gotten out, who had left farms and ranches, or who had thought about becoming a Priest or cleric, and didn't, all to some element of regret.  Indeed, with big callings, like the Priesthood, it probably downright haunts them.³

For those who recall it, people may imagine themselves singing Je Ne Regrette Rien, or maybe the defiant My Way, but Truckin is probably more like it.

The other lesson may be that the common American claim that you can start off doing one thing, and do anything else, is a lie.  

If it's not an outright lie, it comes with an expiration date.  Once you are 50 years of age, you are doing what you are doing, most likely, and you won't be getting out of it any time soon, if ever.

And this:

Well, you know I... I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases - stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish, Ray Kinsella. That's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

Not without Divine intervention, there isn't.  And even as the movie portrays, decisions made in the past cannot be undone.  Graham reconciles it with 

Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.

My wife sometimes makes the same point about my career, with "all the people you've helped".  But then, this too:

 We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, "Well, there'll be other days." I didn't realize that that was the only day.

Footnotes

1.  I'm afraid that I'm an oddity with some films this way.  Shane, the classic Western in which the protagonist comes back out of retirement in order that besieged farmers aren't run off by cattlemen, is an example.  I know how the film ends, but I always hope that the cattlemen will win, and the wilderness they represent preserved.

2. My mother was not from here, and didn't hold farmers and ranchers in low esteem, but rather held professionals in very high esteem.  Her family had members who had been doctors, lawyers and engineers and she regarded this as having achieved a certain status.  A lot of people of her generation viewed the professions that way, and frankly, quite a few people still do.

She also tended to view being a lawyer as proof of high intelligence, which it really is not.  A Democrat, she'd frequently give a reason to support President Obama as "he's intelligent. . . he's a lawyer".  President Obama is intelligent, and he is a lawyer, but in reality, there are lots of fairly dim lawyers.

3.  Indeed, that's one of the ones that's most openly expressed.  I've known lawyers who, once they know you fairly well, will discuss having been in the seminary, or who wanted to be Priests, and it's a different conversation.  It's always pretty clear that they're downright haunted by their change into the law, no matter how much success they may have had in it. Conversely, I've known one Priest who had been a lawyer and at least one who had originally intended to be, who had no regrets whatsoever about their change in paths.

Of interest here, there's often an age limit to attempting to revive a vocational call.  Canon Law in the Catholic Church sets no age limit to becoming a Priest, but many dioceses do, and for good reason. Training a Priest takes nearly a decade.  While I can think of stories of some "older" men becoming Priests, in reality, they were middle-aged men when they started off.

Likewise, there's a limit on trying to become a Catholic Deacon, a vocation that's spread enormously in recent decades.  In our Diocese, the provision is:

The minimum age for a single man to be ordained to the permanent diaconate is twenty-five (25) years old, and thirty-five (35) years for married men. Maximum age to enter the Diaconal Formation Program is fifty-five (55) years (age 60 at ordination), unless the Bishop allows an exception. 

Sixty is surprisingly late, quite frankly, and I wonder if this has been recently moved as I thought the age limit lower, although not much.  Be that as it may, I know this only because at one time our African Parish Priest sent out letters to several men whom he thought would be good Deacons.  I was one.  I was flattered by the letter but knew I wasn't called, but I did pray on it.  I'm not called, working on my own defects is a full time enough job as it is.

4. The combined impact of insurance and family responsibilities in the current era is enough, in and of itself, to quash a lot of late career transition dreams.  Before Medicare, many people are hard locked into careers due to the need to keep their insurance.  Changes in the law, over time, have also meant that parents pay for their adult children's insurance well into their 20s.  Changing careers that involve insurance disruption is darned near impossible for many people.

And it likley would be for me, after my health issues of last year and their carryover inot this year.

Related Threads:

These things I'd do differently, maybe. (Or maybe I really wouldn't).

How the heck does a person figure out what to do?

Foothill Agrarian: Once a Sheepman...

Foothill Agrarian: Once a Sheepman...: Photo by Marie Malloy - taken during lambing 2022! Last week, I completed a survey about sheep production that asked, "how long have yo...

Reflections on 2022

The human heart plans the way, but the LORD directs the steps.

Proverbs, 16:9

2022 won't go down in my memory as a good year.

The Fall of 2022 saw me in the hospital three times, one of which was for several days, all of which were for surgical procedures, one major and two minor.  The result of the first one was to move a chunk of my colon, after which I learned that I barely dodged colon cancer.  And I do mean barely. 

God's providence, as Pope Francis has stated, is always one step ahead of us.

I got in that situation by basically disregarding the advice on getting a colonoscopy, getting mine a full decade after they recommend you start getting them. That sort of thing is typical for me, but it nearly got me killed.

At the time of writing this, I'm still waiting to find out what's up with a thyroid nodule.  I've had two fine needle aspirations and still don't have a diagnosis, other than that something is odd about it.  The material has gone out for a genetic analysis, which will determine whether or not it's something to worry about.

The doctor feels it probably isn't, but she doesn't sound reassuring about it.  I strongly suspect that it probably is, so 2023 will probably kick off with another surgery.

I'm in pretty good shape overall for somebody who is nearly 60, and who will turn that age, God willing, in 2023.  So all of this has caught me by surprise.  I didn't expect it.

I also didn't expect surgery to take so much out of me, but it did.  I was beat up for weeks.  My digestive track still hasn't returned fully to normal, or at least to the status quo ante, and I don't think it's probably going to.  This isn't like a huge disaster, but it is different, noticeably so.

I was tired for weeks after the surgery, and punchy too.  I didn't really realize how much so until some time later.

One of the things about running a blog is you get to know some people whom you know only through that.  Two of those folks came in with well-wishes when I was ill, which I appreciate.  One of them, however, who was a well known outdoor writer, died very shortly after his last post here, which was one of those posts.  It sort of punctuated this in a way.

Everyone else in the family is healthy, and I'm grateful to God for that, although COVID 19 visited the house.  My wife fell ill with it, even after being fully vaccinated.  That cost her a vacation with her brother and our sister-in-law.

Being laid up interrupted by hunting seasons enormously.  I didn't draw for anything other than elk, but I did get out for general deer with my daughter.  We got up on deer right away when some inconsiderate person drove right through where we were hunting, costing us some good bucks.  No deer for 2022.

I went out elk hunting on the first day, which was right before surgery.  I was tired and lethargic going out, which I now can look back on and realize that pretty much described me for all of 2022 before surgery.  I didn't see anything.

I got out the last Sunday as well. Felt better, but saw nothing.

Just two days out of a long season. Post surgery, restrictions kept me out of the field for a long time.

That also meant that I missed most of the waterfowl season, and indeed, when I started back up, as I had missed so much, it felt like the season was starting.  Of course, it was not.  I missed sage chicken season for some reason as well, maybe working cattle.

All of which means that in some odd ways, 2022 was more about my office job than ever.  I worked like a dog, even working from home the Monday after I got out of the hospital, but for some reason, I really have less to show for it this year than I should.  Or that's how I perceive it.  A post surgery outlook, perhaps.

I didn't work cattle hardly at all this Fall, same reason, which emphasized the indoors again.

An odd thing for me has been the various references people have started making to retirement.

I'm not old enough, on the Social Security scale, to retire even at the early age, and I won't be for a few years.  All of a sudden, however, people are asking me about it and I don't know quite why.

One reason may be that when I came into the practice of law, I rapidly ended up in the litigation major leagues.  Lots of the lawyers I worked with were young then, which I guess I didn't appreciate, but htey were older than me.  This has been a common experience in my life.  I graduated high school a year younger than most people, and I've often been the youngest person in any one group.  Added to that, I've tended to appear younger than I really am for almost all of my life.  

Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained by a life that is just.

Proverbs

That's no longer quite as true, although men age at remarkably varied rates.  Up until going into the hospital it seemed very much still the case, although over this year my facial hair, in my case expressed by my mustache, which I try to keep bushy, and my sideburns, which I try to keep short, have gone white.

And I mean white, not gray.

That's going to make you look a certain age, no matter what.  Some men would shave it, but I've been wearing a mustache now continually since 1988, and off and on before then, so I'm not.  And every once in a while I'll mention shaving it and my wife, who has never seen me without one, will object.

It is a shock, however, when I see my firm official photo.  All my hair was dark brown then.  The hair on my head remains brown, with gray mixed in, but my facial hair is white.

Added in that, however, I think is this.  I've often been the youngest person in a group, as noted above, which means the rest of the group is older.  All the guys I graduated with from high school were a little younger than me.  When I started working, a lot of the lawyers I knew, worked with, and became friends with were several years older than me.  They weren't old, they were just older than me.

At that time, somebody graduating from law school sometime in the first half of the decade prior to you seemed like a long time.  Graduating in the late 1970s even more so, and it really is.  But for those from the early 80s, if you were 1990, that isn't really that long of time, except at first.  Over time, it isn't, and those people begin to pretty much figure you are their contemporaries, and vice versa, which you basically are.

A couple of years ago, one lawyer I worked with a fair amount over the years pulled up and retired to the southwest.  Another that I'd worked with much more, and whom I'd become friends with, fell ill, retired, and died nearly immediately.  He wasn't that old, just in his 60s.  I'd been all over the west with him on cases.  A mutual friend of both of ours, who is a good friend of mine, is getting ready to retire.  A judge I worked with as a lawyer up and retired.  A lawyer I worked against a fair amount had a heart attack and died.  A couple of longstanding business contacts I am close to retired.  A lawyer that I'm pretty close to and have known my professional career is fighting a serious disease.

I feel like I'm The Last of the Mohicans.

Or maybe Will Penny.

Anyhow, you get the point.

Perverse speech sows discord, and talebearing separates bosom friends.l

The violent deceive their neighbors, and lead them into a way that is not good.Whoever winks an eye plans perversity; whoever purses the lips does evil.

Proverbs.

The events of the year oddly worked into this.  You wouldn't think that the background noise of the times would impact you personally that much, usually, but they do, and often heavily.  The state went into the 2022 election so dedicated to Trumpite populism that it felt more like South Carolina in December 1860 than Wyoming in, well. . . ever.  Views circulated in the state that I've never heard before, with some of them bordering on the unhinged.  Candidates were elected who seemed to be Berserker mad at the entire population of the country and who were ready to dive into the population, broad sword drawn, until they emerged screaming on the other end.  

It was weird.

In that atmosphere, we elected a Secretary of State with thin connections to the State and a Congresswoman who has long connections with it, but whom will start off as a nullity and whom I predict will forever remain there.  The entire time, large percentages of the state, including many people who have not lived here long, looked back romantically on a state history and culture that never ever existed.

So here, I feel like Sitting Bull.

It was not only weird, but for a native, downright depressing.

Indeed, in spite of my Sioux reference, a better analogy is that this must be what it was like if you were a Westphalian of my age, but in 1932.  The country you were born in, for all its faults, is now gone and completely unrecognizable.  The past decade has been a mix of extremes on all levels, cultural and political, and a big section of the country is now supporting extremism for reasons that are hard to grasp.

Well, here's hoping 2023 is a bit better.

How much better to get wisdom than gold!

To get understanding is preferable to silver.

Proverbs.

"If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt."

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Fr. Joseph Krupp.

Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.

I didn't take much time off last year.  And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.

That's not really good.

I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself.  And I do this every year.

Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.

All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%.  You become less efficient, for one thing.  And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.

Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way.  We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch.  That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality.  It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.

This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing.  I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there.  Everyone was doing the same thing.  I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years.  Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.

Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead.  Others have moved on long ago.  New faces have come, of course.

Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off.   If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.

This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off.  We took, of course, Boxing Day off.

Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off.  With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have.  I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.

What was I thinking?

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off.  And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much.  On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon.  I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.

On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting.  Conditiond were great.

I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap.  It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.

I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.  

Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet.  That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system.  You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did.  It's been great.

This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week.  Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.

It turned out great.  I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't.  Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.

Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't.  I may take some time later this week, however.  

It's been a really long year.

Foothill Agrarian: Waiting for Clarity

Foothill Agrarian: Waiting for Clarity: Now that irrigation season has been over for nearly 2 months, I’m back in the habit of walking (or jogging VERY slowly) several mornings a w...

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

We noted earlier this week the passing of Tom McIntyre.

One thing that I've noted in particular is this. This is how this is captioned on Stephen Bodio's blog, a link to which appears to the side here:

Thomas McIntyre, 1952–2022

1952 to 2022.  Seventy years.

1952 strikes me in particular.  I wasn't alive in 1952.  Indeed, my parents hadn't yet met in 52.  My mother was living in Canada and my father was going to school in Lincoln, Nebraska.  They'd meet and marry about six years later, by which time my mother had left Alberta to attend to her sister's wedding in Colorado, and had taken a job here on her way back north.  My father had served in the Air Force and was back out and starting a career here in town.

I'd come along in 1963.  So there's an eleven-year difference in that.

But there's a nine-year difference, almost ten, between my wife and I. About the same span of years here.

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Psalms, 90:10. 

I'm 59.  

Mr. McIntyre made it exactly to the Biblically referenced number of years. That number doesn't amount to, I'd note, a indication that the inspired writer was promising that God was going to terminate your life at that point.  No, rather, it indicates that even at that time it people lived just about as long as they do now.  Indeed, what's noted is that life tended to be hard and people tended to die around age 70, maybe 80 if they were of strong constitution.  Elsewhere, an upper maximum life span of 120 years is mentioned, which in fact does correlate to the rare examples of extreme old age.

Somebody I know well, and have for over 30 years, is very ill.  It came out of the blue from nowhere. They're only slightly older than me.

Yesterday, a lawyer I've practiced with for nearly 30 years called and spoke to me.  He's had a heart attack and is retiring.  After that, a lawyer I know elsewhere in another city was learned to be retiring.

A month ago or so a practicing lawyer I know, probably in his late 60s, died suddenly.

The point?

Well only this.  Financial planners may tell you to keep working forever, but you aren't going to live that long.

I've long said that after men reach age 30, they're living on borrowed time.  Up at my age, that becomes increasingly obvious for anyone who has eyes to see.

A declining population of veterans

It occurred to me on Veterans Day that, when I first went to work where I still work, in 1990 (or actually 1989), there were seven lawyers, of which four were veterans.  I became the eighth, and of course was also a veteran.

Now, of us seven, I'm the only one.

I'm the only one, in fact, in the entire office.  Over the years, in addition to the lawyers, there's been two staff members who were Marine Corps veterans.

As noted, now it's just me.

On the sick list.

This has been my view for the past several days.  It's a view of the mountain, between the parking garage and an administrative building belonging to the hospital.

I took the photo from here.

I'm out now.

I was in as I had a robotic right colectomy.  In other words, I had a large (very large) polyp in my large intestine that had to be removed.  I learned this was there when I went in for a colonoscopy, which I wrote about (in its entirety) here:

On modern medicine

As I wrote here the other day, I went in for a colonoscopy.

I'm almost a decade past the point where you are supposed to get one.  Just too busy, I guess, to have made it in back then, or in between, when I should have.  Having said that, a couple of my contemporaries I know very well only made it in recently as well.

In my last post on this topic, I discussed the statistics of colon cancer.  What I learned in my colonoscopy was that I have a polyp that was too big to be removed, and now I'll have to have surgery to address it.

The doctor is nearly certain that its not cancerous, but it has to be removed.  He also basically indicated it would turn to cancer if it wasn't removed, at some point.  Not yet, basically, but some day.

Which puts me in that statistic in a way.

Lesson learned.

Another lesson learned, however, is that this also puts me in the class of people who'd die early on for sure but for modern medicine.  A sobering thought.  We all imagine ourselves living until 102 worry free, but that isn't the case for most of us.  Lots of us make it further now than we would have, thanks to modern medicine.

This was the following surgery.

This turned out to be a bigger deal. . . a much bigger deal, than I wanted to admit it was.  In my mind, I wanted to pretend that it would be in and out, or at least I'd be out by Friday.  Nope.  I did get out on Saturday, but I'm feeling rather beat up, and it's clear that it's going to take several days to get back to normal.

Army with two IV hookups.  I had two, as I was so dehydrated when I came in they had a very difficult time finding my veins.

I am on the mend now, however.

A few observations.

Colonoscopies have been around, but they didn't become common until 1985 when Ronald Reagan had one which saved his life.  The screening recommendations came into effect in 1995, after the death of my father, who had one when he fell extremely ill in the early 1990s.  While it was probably unconnected, there was some suspicion at the time that a severe infection in his intestine was moved around by the scope, leading to the infection to spread.

As noted, in retrospect, that's probably not what occurred.

Anyhow, whether from that unhappy event or just a family reticence to seeking medical attention for anything, I ignored the current advice which is to go in for a scope at age 50.  You really should, and my failure to do so caused me to end up with this, probably.

That's the first observation here.

A second one is this.  It's interesting to note, I guess, that if I hadn't had this, I probably would have died from this right about the same time my father died from something sort of related, if not perfectly.  So my life has probably been extended by modern medicine.

The boyfriend of the sister of a good friend of mine died from colon cancer, I'd note, and it was a very bad way to go.  He'd been a tobacco chewer, and that may have caused it.  In my case, I don't use tobacco, so that isn't it.  Maybe genetics is.

The night before the procedure, as a distraction, I finished watching Father Stu, the cinematic treatment of the life of Father Stuart Long, who was born the same year I was, but who died of a terrible disease in 2014 which robbed him of his physical abilities.  He had been a boxer at one time, and was quite athletic.  There was some thought of not ordaining him at all, because of his affliction, but the Bishop of Helena moved forward as he sensed himself receiving the message that there was power in suffering, and he should be moved forward.  At his ordination, Father Stuart stated: "I stand before you as a broken man. Barring a miracle, I'm going to die from this disease, but I carry it for the cross of Christ, and we can all carry our crosses."

I note that here as the movie concluded with comments from Father Stuart himself noting that he felt his afflictions were given to him as a gift to overcome things that were a barrier to his union with Christ.  I sort of feel that way about this too, albeit very minor in comparison they may be.

I'd also note, in thinking about it, that this relates back to the purpose of this page, which is ostensibly research for a book.  One of the characters in that book is in his late 40s when the tale takes place, which oddly enough is about the age I was when I started this blog.  Anyhow, that character, perhaps the central protagonist, would be recognizable in lots of ways to people who know me.  Which also means, if I follow that through, he's likely a character that would have died a pretty bad death of disease in his early 60s, a very common experience at the time.

Modern medicine.

Long suffering spouse.

 

Mid Week At Work. Overheard retirement conversations, random emails and musings.

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.  Now Game Wardens can stay until they die in the cabs of their trucks at advance old age, although few stay that long, and the state legislature would like to have judges stay on the bench so long, Judges who were serving at the time of the writing of the Book of Judges could still be on the bench.

Back in June, the parish priest as the parish where I normally go retired.

He was the priest at the Newman Center for most of the time I was at the University of Wyoming, and then twice here locally.  He must be 70 years old, but he looks remarkably fit and vigorous, and indeed almost exactly the same as he did 30 plus years ago in his late 30s and early 40s.

Not too many people can say that, although a fortunate few can.

I note this as in the last few months I've been overhearing a lot of comments on retirement, observing a few folks I know who retired, and receiving emails on the topic as well.  And in the news, of course, we have the proposed Pine Box Amendment to the Wyoming Constitution, which I posted about in the current election thread:

Proposed Amendment B.

The amendment summary that will appear on the ballot states:

Currently, the Wyoming Constitution requires Wyoming Supreme Court justices and district court judges to retire upon reaching the age of seventy (70). This amendment increases the mandatory retirement age of Supreme Court justices and district court judges from age seventy (70) to age seventy-five (75).

The actual text of the amendment provides:

Article 5, Section 5. Voluntary retirement and compensation of justices and judges.

The sales pitch on this is that many highly qualified jurists are forcibly put out to pasture to do something else in their lives rather than remain on the bench until they're taken out in a body bag.

Okay, that's not quite how it's put, but that's basically it.  Added to that, if they die before the state has to pay them any retirement, the state saves some cash.

It's been interesting.

A young person that I know, in her early 20s, stated to me "what does a priest do in retirement"?  It's a good question.  I don't really know, but the few retired priests I've known sort of continued to serve as priests. They're not relieved of their obligations to say Mass.  For the most part, what those priests seemed to do was to move into a rectory and serve Mass, and hear Confessions.  I guess what they're relieved of is their obligations to run a parish, which no doubt are pretty significant.

One Priest I know, who reached retirement age, did not.  He was Nigerian and returned to his home country.  Before he left, he told me that Priests in Nigeria do not retire, they serve until they die, which was his intent.

The Wyoming Supreme Court and the state legislature, some of whom are late Boomers, maybe the majority of whom are late Boomers, are endorsing the view that they can continue to serve five years past their physical deaths.  

That's an exaggeration, of course, but as I've written about before, the assumptions that a person can work in a position of public trust until they go from the bench to a pine box and not suffer in their work in any fashion is foolish.

It's also, in my view, more than a bid arrogant.  Shouldn't these positions be opened up to people who are closer to the average demographic of the state and nation?

And do they have no other interests?

I worry a bit about that, as I've seen at least two ancient lawyers seemingly age past the point of their actually having any other interests. They didn't want to go to court anymore, but they seemingly had nothing much else to do. They took annual vacations, but otherwise came into the office until they died.  This is all the more interesting as neither one had started off to be lawyers, so the old fable that "I've always wanted to be a lawyer" that some lawyers lie about in order to convince themselves that giving up a chance to be a minor league baseball player or something made sense.

Another lawyer I know who is old enough to retire, but who is in good health, keeps on working a full schedule.  I note this as our lives intersect in some odd fashions, one of which is that he also had agricultural interests.  His father was a rancher and his sister married a farmer.  He told me that at one time he imagined himself sort of retiring to the ranch, but just before his father had a stroke and then died, they sold the place.  He seems set on being a lawyer until he dies, taking off sometime for nice biannual vacations.

I'm like my father in contrast.  I just don't take vacations, which is a very bad trait.  Maybe that's why retirement as a concept is on my mind, as I don't take much time off for myself, so I think I can catch up on that once I retire.

In overall contrast, one lawyer I know who has eased into mostly retired has in fact taken up some of his longtime activities in earnest.  I sort of regard him as a model that way.

Another lawyer I know pretty well who is far too young to retire, but has it on his distant radar screen (let's say he's 50), has all sorts of retirement plans, most of which involve being a globe trotter.

He is, however, obviously not a physical fitness bluff and hits the dinner table more often than the gym, which is to say he hits the gym never.  I don't hit the gym either, but up until this year I was in pretty good physical shape, maybe a beneficiary of genetics in that fashion.  I hate to say it, and I don't know how to say it to him, but my guess is that he'll die before reaching that age.  He speaks longingly and optimistically about what he's going to do, but there are things you have to do that, one of which his good health,¹

I've noted here before, my father enjoyed good health right up until he didn't, and he died at 62.  His father died at 47. Neither of them retired.²

A lawyer friend of mine and I have enjoyed good health up until this year, and we've both had scares in recent weeks.  I'm not going into it, but I'm in the category of having dodged a bullet, maybe.  Had I not, I would probably have been dead within a few years.

Of course, life is fickle, and you really never know when you are going to board the barque across the River Styx.  Just yesterday, an old Guard friend of mine let me know that a guy we were in the Guard with died following a surgery that was supposed to have worked well.  He was only about 65.

Leaping back up, my unhealthy friend also has a very large family, which is his right.  There are certainly people with very large families that retire, but he's looking at a long list of college tuition payments, the first of which he just started and the last of which isn't anywhere near to commencing.

We pick our lies and take what that means, but some people don't seem to realize that.  I.e, having a giant sized rib for lunch might not be your best option.

All of which gets to the topic of being able to afford to do that.

I married later than most men do (I was 32) and so we started our family late.  My wife comes from a ranching family and while we've been very frugal, working to get her over the agricultural concept of money, which is extraordinarily short term and which features the concept of constant loans as normal, has been difficult.  And a diehard absolute dedication to our children, now in their 20s, that she has, and which is common to mothers, is highly exhibited.  All this means that while we haven't done badly, we haven't done as well as we could.

Maybe, however, we just don't know what that means.  One of the blogs linked in here, Mr. Money Mustache, strongly takes that position. Lots of people can retire who don't, as they don't grasp they can.

In that context, I've tended to find that for men in my situation, I'm ten years older than Long Suffering Spouse, the latter personality resists the older retiring.  We're past that point now, really, but it had been a pretty clearly on the horizon of resistance for a long time.  In most relationships like this, with ours being no exception, the older person gets the larger income and that means a lot.

I'm not, I'd note, of Social Security retirement age, either.  So this is more than a little hypothetical.

A good friend of mine who is a lawyer constantly talks about retiring, and then doesn't.  Recently, he's been expressing the concept of stepping back into lesser roles.

This is interesting.  When a person finds that there are aspects of his work that he doesn't want to do, but he'd like to keep doing the ones he does as a retirement plan, he better be working in a field that accommodates that. Law isn't that, at least by my observation.  You are in, or you are out.  It's not like you can decide to take a lesser role as a football player, for example.  Law is sort of like that.

Still, I see a lot of lawyers go into their late 60s and then their 70s still practicing, which is the point of the proposed Pine Box amendment to the Wyoming Constitution. It's interesting.  Some do seem to have stepped into some sort of genteel role, others not.  

I've tended to notice that family businesses tolerate the stepping down role better than others. Farms and ranches often are, for example, and some small stores are.  Before the complete corporatization of the economy, that might explain why these lines of work were so admired, really.  They were part of life, with life predominating.  Now your role as a consumer does.

Which might be part of the current war against retirement.  It's interesting.  Everyone in the larger society wants you at work.  I've noticed this on a few things recently.  It seems no one wants people in the US to retire. Ever.

Indeed, I saw this entry on Reddit the other day.

This is a rant. I’m sick of all the articles with the same message: work, work, work and never stop. The biggest reasons are: you want that “full Social Security benefit” at 67, (but hey why not hold off until you’re 70 and get even more?) The other reason is “healthcare is expensive”. The push from the media outlets telling us to keep working is essentially propaganda. Instead, why isn’t anyone lobbying for us to fight for better? It’s complete bullsh*t. “ If you run out of your own money, SS alone isn’t enough to live on.” Well I’m not planning to live out my life on a cruise ship FFS, just staying put in my own little house. I’m sorry I live in a country that lets poor people die. Is it too much to ask for our government to provide a decent pension and healthcare to it’s oldest citizens? Nope. This is how it is and rather than try to get the government to fix it, just keep working until you die. BTW I rage-retired 2 months ago, at age 61, due to burn out and I’m living on my savings while my 401k hopefully recovers a bit. But, it was always my plan to start collecting Social Security at 62 (even though my own Financial Advisor is against it) because my mother died at 51 and my father at 69. If I wait I may never see a penny of SS. I know this rant won’t change anything. I just felt like screaming into the void.

And then there's this item that was run in the online version of the ABA Journal. 

A funny thing happened on the way to my retirement

Some items from it:

My attorney friend Ron Taylor, the former general counsel of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Texas, once advised me not to retire from something “unless you have something to retire to.” That struck me as a truth, and I am fortunate to have other passions to pursue; for you see, my mistress, the law, gave me the freedom to develop them without totally giving her up.

And;  

While many senior lawyers are resting on their laurels and leaving the legal profession, I’m still going strong after more than 41 years of practice as a civil defense lawyer, defending companies in mass casualty high-exposure cases. As I approached my 65th birthday last year, I struggled mightily with how to end my 41-plus year romance (43 including law school) with the law and the law firm, Wilson Elser, I have loved for 30 of those years.

When considering retirement, you can stage and prolong and enhance your career in the process, but to do so, you must first understand that in some ways, retirement for lawyers is a misnomer. It can perhaps better be framed as, “What do you want the next stage of your career to look like?” Retirement is an intensely personal matter, and the answer to this question depends on your interests inside and outside the law and what you want to do now.

At the core of this process is the ability to allow yourself to step back from what you were doing before in order to make more time for other things, such as your outside interests and hobbies. This is an opportunity to rebalance your life and to give you more time to do things outside the law while extending your career inside the profession. Work less at what you were doing before and do more of what you are passionate about. In other words, mix them up to suit your new reality. This can and should be a win-win situation.

The law as a mistress line is a common one among lawyers, and it isn't used in a complimentary fashion.  "The law is a jealous mistress" is the line, and what it means is that the law takes up your time to the exclusion of all else. She won't let you hae any other interests.

The advice Ron gave the author essentially was to marry the mistress, I guess.  Or sort of. That author seemed to be one of the balanced lawyers who was able to do other things.  I'm much less so.  Anyhow, when I read this line, I'm always reminded of the lines spoken by the wounded bandit in The Professionals, about how "the Revolution" goes from being a great love, admired from afar, and pure, to a jealous mistress, to a whore.

Not a pleasant thought.

Anyhow, this is an example, I think of society, which in the 1930s through 70s asked you to look forward to retirement, now wants to keep you from doing it.

"What do you want the next stage of your career to look like?”³ 

Indeed, society wants you at work no matter what you do. Thinking about retiring?  Hang on a few more years.  Thinking about staying home with your infant?  Let's warehouse the little non-productive snot in a daycare.  Thinking about staying home with your elderly parent?  Let's put the used up geezer in a "home".  Pregnant?  Let's kill that drain on society before it's born and takes you out of the workplace for a few weeks.

Footnotes:

1.  This puts me in an odd position, as I tend to be pretty honest and when I can't be, I tend just to hold my tongue.  But when somebody who eats three gigantic meals a day and is extremely overweight tells you about their plans to travel when they retire, if you know then, what is your obligation?  Do you say, "Bill, if you don't keep eating the cheesy entire walrus lunch special, you are going to stroke out and never retire?"  Nobody wants to hear that, but maybe you should.

2.  My father was at the point where he wanted to retire.  He just didn't make it.

3.  This fellow, fwiw, recommended the following:

Take your own deposition to gain clarity

Where do you begin? I took a novel approach—I took my own deposition! As a trial lawyer I’d taken thousands of depositions in my career but never one sitting across the table from myself. Lawyers are great at asking questions—after all we are trained in the Socratic method—so why not make a little exercise of taking our own depositions regarding this important decision? The goal is to “know thyself” and what thyself wants to do next.

Questions to ponder:

• How much longer do you want to work?

• Do you have any unfinished goals or projects you’d like to complete?

• What alternate legal work matches your skills and abilities, such as alternative dispute resolution?

• What legal topics interest you that you’d like to know more about?

• What bar activities would you like to pursue?

• Are there any pro bono projects that interest you?

• Would you like to teach law students?

• How about that book you were going to write inspired by your legal experience handling cases and closing deals?

There’s an incredible wealth of possibilities.

In cross-examining ourselves, we can arrive at clarity as to what comes next. You’ve given most of your life to the law, so put your experience to work for you. Make a plan based on your answers to your own personal deposition and follow it into your transition.

This cannot help but bring to mind the scense in the early Woody Allen film Banana Republic in which Allen, who accidentally ends up a Central American revolutionary, ends up subjecting himself to a devestating cross examination when he calls himself as a witness in his trial.

Related threads:

Overheard on retirement