I’ve thought of that weekend often as I’ve watched some of my colleagues become accomplished, well known, even famous, as they became people with power and influence. It’s interesting to see what happens as those you’ve known as ambitious kids age and prosper. The best are the ones who don’t forget the rungs on the ladder, who remember what it was like to climb, the ones who believe it is almost a moral requirement to be generous to the young, as Williams was to me. Sure, it can feel like being replaced, or embalmed, when the new generation of strivers shows up. But one of the best and most dignified opportunities to stay engaged in the world as you grow older is to give a hand to those who come after. Rise up, reach down. Of course, what that means is that at a certain point you have to step aside. Jump, or be pushed; it’s as simple as that.
I remember judging an award for reporters under the age of thirty-five some years ago, when I was a columnist at Newsweek and trying to decide how much longer to stay in the job. As I paged through the contest entries I couldn’t help noticing the dates. One talented reporter was born the year I graduated from college, another just about the time I arrived at The New York Times, one when I was covering City Hall, another when I was writing my first column.
Needless to say, this made me feel really old. But it also made me think about the conundrum the baby boom has created for our kids, and our country. Born between 1946 and 1964, boomers take up more room than any other generation in American history. And so, inevitably, we have created a kind of bottleneck, in the professions, in politics, in power. The frustration this poses for the young and talented should be obvious. In my personal life it was reflected indelibly on the day when, talking of the unwillingness of many of my friends to retire, my eldest child noted, “You guys just won’t go.”
When my parents were my son’s age, there was an orderliness to how one generation moved aside and another stepped up to primacy and prosperity. It was reflected in life expectancy, in the fact that most American males, those who comprised most of the workforce, lived only a few years past the statutory retirement age of sixty-five.
Even when I was the same age as my children are now, there was a natural transition from one generation to another. Every year a small group of reporters would retire and leave the newsroom, to be replaced by younger ones. (With the harsh insensitivity of youth I thought this was perfectly fine.) In many businesses this rite of passage is disappearing, and the number of people who work into their seventies and eighties has climbed steadily over the last two decades. There are some professions that still have mandatory retirement, but the number has dwindled. Forcing someone to retire at sixty-five simply feels different when life expectancy is eighty. How many stories have you heard about the guy who died of a heart attack three months after someone gave him an engraved watch and a handshake? What was with the watch, anyhow? Tick tick tick, nowhere to go, no place to be. One study showed that more than one out of every ten members of the federal bench is over age eighty. Another study may show why: more than nine out of ten district court judges die within a year of retiring fully. As Susan B. Anthony once said, “I don’t want to die as long as I can work; the minute I cannot, I want to go.”
The retirement parties I’ve attended always had an underlying pathos, the feeling that groomsmen seem to have at a wedding: thank God it’s not me up there. Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard who studies happiness, has said that one of the most traumatic experiences in the human span of life is unemployment. And retirement the way we once defined retirement is pretty much unemployment with a party beforehand. Everyone talks about it as though it’s this great luxury, this incredible gift, to do nothing all day, to throw away the alarm clock and the calendar, to make it up as it comes. They say that it’s such a shame that people can’t afford to retire these days, or not until they’re too old to enjoy it. But I’m not convinced. I remember the old guys who manned the chairs at the barbershop my father used to visit, and the stooped and ashen bartender at a place he took me for pizza when I’d been a particularly good girl. The older man who still worked behind the counter with his sons at the butcher shop where I bought meat when my kids were young wasn’t there because he liked getting the veal thinner than a sheet of shirt cardboard but because the customers, the banter, the outslicing the sons—that was his life.
For women today, retirement sometimes means being downsized from two jobs simultaneously. For years I was doing two full-time jobs during one full-time life. I took three kids in the car or on the train to school, ran back to the house, grabbed coffee and dropped into a desk chair, wrote until mid-afternoon, and went back to pick the kids up again. I basically worked as a mother between three P.M. and nine A.M., and as a writer between nine and three. Today I still write between nine and three, even though I am the parent of three college graduates who all have driver’s licenses and MetroCards and can get themselves wherever they need to go. At the same time that I am doing somewhat less in my work life, I am doing much less in my mom life as well.
But that doesn’t really have to mean less, just different. I had breakfast with an old friend, Michele Tolela Myers, who has been an academic, an administrator, and finally the president of two liberal arts colleges, Denison and Sarah Lawrence. If she wanted to write “The End” at the bottom of her résumé right now, it would still be very impressive. But when she was a young woman, balancing real life and big dreams, the dream she’d left behind was to be a novelist. And she’s writing novels now. Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of our longer life expectancy is that we have time for a half-life, a quarter-life, in which, if we’re courageous and strategic, we can make that sort of unrealized dream come true.
Now, there’s no point in idealizing this. For every dream deferred and then pursued, there’s someone whose dream was to work in perpetuity at a job as out of reach as youth. For every person who gladly continues to work, there is another forced back into a workplace he thought he’d earned the right to leave, dragged out of bed and into the car by a sharp drop in savings or pension. For every person who believes she’s gotten a chance at a third act, there is one who feels cast aside.
As a fiction writer, I know that one of the key questions of the form is “What happens next?” When Charles Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop was being released, chapter by chapter, in serial form, crowds famously lined the waterfront in New York to shout at a ship arriving from London, “Is Little Nell dead?” But it’s not only in fictional plot that the question is central but also in our own lives. What happens next? Over the years academics have measured the transition from child to adult by five markers: finishing school, moving out of your parents’ home, becoming financially independent of them, getting married, and having kids. One of the biggest differences between my father’s generation and that of my children is that fifty years ago the majority of men and women had checked off all those milestones by age thirty, while today the number who have done so by that same age has dwindled significantly, in young men to below a third. My parents at twenty-five were married, had two children, and owned their first home courtesy of the low-interest mortgage my father earned through his stint in the military. At twenty-five my husband and I were newly married; we bought our first home a year later but wouldn’t have our first child until we were thirty-one. At twenty-five my children envision both marriage and home ownership in the future, perhaps a somewhat distant one. Many of the big things haven’t happened for them yet.
For those who punched all those tickets early, a different problem arises, not of maturity postponed but of maturity unvarying. One problem with aging is that we fear nothing much will happen next, that the plot points have passed. At a certain juncture, the hand you’ve been dealt is the entire deck. Some of us will marry again, even have second families. But while the early decades were punctuated with graduations, weddings, promotions, relocations, there comes that moment when all we can do is redecorate. If nothing happens in the story of our lives, is it even a stor
y at all? Or what if the only things that happen are bad things, one loss after another?
Take away work, and for many the vista can be grim. That may be why the old retirement model of the lounge chair and the golf cart could be gone for good. Women may provide an alternate model of a more active and involved retirement that is more consonant with the way we live now. Those women trying to balance work and family have been agitating for years for part-time and flex-time work hours; what better arrangement for older workers who carry institutional memory but want less of the load? Those women who decided not to work for a time after their children were born often used their skills for volunteer projects; what better use for the talents of those of us who want to be busy but don’t necessarily need a salary?
During our lifetime, women’s lives have been about redefinition, over and over and over again, while men’s lives are still often about maintaining the status quo. But aging is not a status quo situation. It seems that men may have to learn to live more like us, particularly in their later years. No doubt some will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into our newly configured world and out of their linear thinking in which a person climbs the career ladder until he dies, will have to be persuaded that a lateral move may be satisfying as well as necessary.
We all need a Plan B. I know this very well. I’m a person who is never going to be playing golf. My prejudice against golf is one of those silly unreasonable prejudices that all of us acquire from time to time, that are really an attempt at self-important self-definition. Sometimes these prejudices are destructive, like unreasonable dislikes of ethnic or racial groups. Sometimes they’re pretty benign, like saying you aren’t willing to taste raw fish even if it’s billed as sushi. Bait, my father calls it, but he’s a pretty unadventurous eater: steak, spaghetti, grilled cheese sandwiches, Tastykake cupcakes. The only weird food he eats is something called scrapple that you fry up for breakfast.
My father doesn’t play golf, either. He mainly reads now, although he used to fish. I used to fish, too. But even though I like to fish, I couldn’t fish full time, couldn’t pack it in and go down to the beach and surf cast in the mornings and then while away the rest of the day at tackle shops and marinas. I’m happy to settle for less, but not for nothing at all.
About a decade ago a financial guy had my husband and me lined up on the other side of his desk, and he asked what our plans for retirement might be. I imagine Gerry had the same look on his face that I had, the look usually described colloquially as “being hit over the head with a board,” because the financial guy said quickly, “Oh, you’re those people.” Yep, we are. You know those mellow young people who spend months taking trains across Europe, knock around wondering what they’re going to do next, hopscotch from one thing to another, unapologetically seeking passion, direction, vocation? We were never those people. In my case, I suspect it’s part of my essential metabolism. One of my favorite photographs was taken when I was about two years old. There’s a lot to love: my mother’s old-fashioned swing jacket, disguising what from personal experience I suspect is a baby belly; my father’s sharp young fifties’-dad look, complete with professorial glasses; the fact that I’m wearing those matching wool leggings with my dress coat that were de rigueur and uncomfortably itchy. Daddy is holding my brother Bob, a sack of flour in a blanket, while my mother is bent slightly with her arm outstretched to pull Anna back into the Happy Family formation. That little girl is taking off. It’s a still photograph, of course, but you can almost feel it—places to go, people to see, legs to pump, legs probably less than a foot long.
There are two ways that kind of hyperdrive kid can go in later life: either her push-push finds no place to put itself and drives her wild, or it finds an object and the object finds her back. I was lucky to go the second way, hectoring an editor into giving me a copy girl’s job, making a world out of words.
I had lunch with a young reporter one day, and her description of her week was like Proust’s madeleine, or a whiff of the cigars my father once smoked. In an instant in my mind there was a world complete: the editor, the assignment, the subway ride, the street full of strangers telling the story or turning their backs at the sight of the notebook and the pen, the subway ride, the phone calls, the story, the editors, the truncated version on an inside page. Lather, rinse, repeat the next day, and the next, until the bottom drawer of my desk was lousy with notebooks with random scribbles in different colors of pen. The very notion gives me a shot of adrenaline. And then I feel exhausted. There has to be a middle ground between bouncing around Brooklyn looking for old Dodgers fans for a feature story and tormenting my children with text messages because I’m unemployed. Maybe the new model for retirement is some middle ground.
Certainly for many of us the old model just won’t suit. Until recently, given the male monolith in the work world, retirement was a guy’s business, and no matter how people pretend otherwise, it was grim. My experience is that guys like routine, and most of them had it: shower, shave, dress or uniform shirt, briefcase or tools, car, office, work work work, home for dinner. To suddenly expect such a man, after forty years, to putter around the house and flip the channels from his comfy chair borders on sadism. It’s also no fun for his stay-at-home wife, who had her own routine: dishes, vacuum, coffee, sandwich, telephone, Oprah, cooking. A big bestseller at flea markets is a plaque that shows what that kind of woman thinks of her husband’s retirement: I TOOK HIM FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, BUT NOT FOR LUNCH.
In the face of this, many of my fellow boomers have vowed to fight aging, and downsizing, to the death. I take their point about experience and wisdom in the workplace. I joined the entire nation, the day that Chesley Sullenberger landed a passenger jet safely on the Hudson River, in thanking God that a man who had been flying for a lifetime and a crew of veteran flight attendants had been working that afternoon.
But there’s another side to that equation as well, and younger workers see it, and resent it, and for good reason. If no one steps aside, there is no room for advancement. The pipeline is clogged and sluggish without the vitality that new blood brings. It’s particularly glaring when this generational stall happens in the news business, which constantly remakes itself in the image and likeness of the world. What an incredible time it was to grow up in that business! My first stories were written on typewriters, with carbon paper, my last with a computer that emailed my copy to the desk. I called in breaking news from phone booths; one of my young colleagues just showed me a story she’d written with her thumbs on her BlackBerry. It was a good story, too.
I was bereft when Brenda Starr, the flame-haired comicstrip character with the starry eyes who convinced me (incorrectly) as a child that newspaper work was glamorous, handed in her notebook and passed out of existence just as she turned seventy. But I accept that journalism will have to keep changing as the world changes. It’s not like the old ways were so wonderful: read the Times, or any local daily, on microfilm from the fifties or sixties, and you will immediately see how narrow daily journalism was, how boring the writing, how in the tank for business interests and political authority it could be. There is nothing quite as tedious, or as useless, as ritual recitations of the good old days, which in many ways weren’t.
Our lifetime has been such a time of change, in the economy, in education, in politics, in the work world. But no one seems eager to change on an individual level, to make way for fresh perspectives and new ideas. That linear path, the ladder, emphasizes stability, but too often at the expense of innovation and mobility. Since the day the youthful John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address, when I was eight years old, people have been quoting his saying that the torch had been passed to a new generation. But torches don’t really get passed very much; people love to hold on to them.
We give way to the young not simply because it is right but because it is both inevitable and desirable: Dickens to George Eliot, Faulkner to Philip Roth. Something in the human heart, something we try to quell when i
t interferes with our own comfort, nevertheless calls out: Next! That’s what I heard when I was judging that contest, when I read those young reporters’ stories. It was a message delivered without rancor or contempt, the same one I’d heard from my own son: It’s our turn. Step aside.
Mortality
At first it was just a dress. I bought it one day in late August at the little dress shop I like near our house in the country, the one where they know I’ll never wear cargo pants or anything with sequins. It was black, and well cut without being chic, made from one of those new miracle fabrics that never wrinkle even after three hours of riding with your torso in the half nelson of a seat belt. There’s a certain sort of dress you find in fashion magazines that’s kind of nothing, really; the editors get two pages out of showing you how to dress it up with a belt and a brooch or dress it down with boots and a cardigan. This is that kind of dress. It took me a couple of days to realize it was something else as well. It was the perfect funeral dress.
We all wind up there eventually, first in fits and starts, then precipitously, so that the memorial services and shiva calls and sympathy notes begin to blur, to seem like some continuous loop of murmured condolences and black clothes. LIFE’S A BITCH, says the T-shirt, AND THEN YOU DIE. So glib, because that’s not the problem at all. Life’s great, and then you die. And, perhaps as important, the others do first.