OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Anchors aweigh

My mother is thinking of retiring.

Next year, maybe, she says. She's made no decision. She's probably been thinking about it for a while.

I tell her that sounds great, if it is what she wants to do. This is what I say while deciding what I really think. My role in these dramas is like the movie version of the mafia consigliere: I'm counted on to give disinterested advice to the family. (Which they are free to ignore.)

But as I run the data through my mind, it's not long before I decide that the obligatory answer is also the correct one. While she likes working for the law firm--where she's extremely well-treated by the partners, who allow her lots of vacation time and generous bonuses--her biggest reason for staying is that it is something to get her up and out of her suburban house and into downtown Savannah five days a week. She enjoys being in on all the courthouse gossip.

But she's not working because of the money. And she's not just going to sit in a room if she retires.

She will be 84 next year. She would like to travel more than she does. Maybe in a post-covid world she could spend six months in Louisiana; my sister and brother-in-law in Chauvin have built a little suite onto their house for her. She has a granddaughter and close friends in Shreveport she can stay with.

And there, she's three hours from Little Rock.

She'd only need a base in Savannah, a room of her own, she says. She could arrange that. Her sisters and their families are there, along with her other daughter and son-in-law, another granddaughter and her great-grandchildren. She would want to be there a lot too. The way I imagine it, Mom would be bouncing around the country, revisiting places she's lived and loved, checking in with family and friends, then lighting for a few weeks to rest her wings either in one home or another.

And, I remind her, we have a room for her too. And granddogs.

There's no reason it can't work. Mom is in good health, she looks at least a decade younger than her age, and she has no trouble driving or otherwise negotiating the world. It wouldn't be the worst way to wait out the end of the world.

Karen and I sometimes joke about what our options would be if we got caught up in everything that's sliding sideways. Or maybe it's not a joke, maybe it's just being prepared. In Emily St. John Mandel's recent "The Glass Hotel" (which may be the best novel I've read this year that I haven't reviewed) there's an older couple, Leon and Marie, who, having lost all their savings to a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, travel around the country in an RV, picking up seasonal work at warehouses and Costcos.

"We move through this world so lightly," Marie says at one point, while, recovering from a 10-hour day, they sit in a campground outside of Santa Fe, watching the sun set behind the mountains. Leon at first takes this as a comment about humanity in general, about how little mark we make on the planet, but then he understands she is talking about them specifically.

"In their late 30s they had decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease he had always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he'd found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn't mind being a little more anchored to this earth."

I don't think Leon and Marie's predicament seems so bad; if you've got violet mountains, a cool night, a place to sleep and each other, that's enough. I ride past the RV park and think we could do that--a couple pairs of jeans, an iPad, dogs in the back, and Karen and me in captain's chairs, dividing the driving, doing laps around the continent.

Mom is alone, but she's not really. She's got a network, she knows people everywhere. She's got her anchors. Maybe she'll go from town to town solving crimes and breaking hearts.

I might be among the last generation of Americans who might reasonably expect to retire someday, although I don't expect to. Lots of people have been predicting the end of retirement for years, largely because the old model hasn't been applicable for awhile. We're living longer and aging differently. People in their 60s look like people in their 40s did a few decades ago. And most work now is not physically taxing. Most of it is brain work.

When Social Security was first implemented, they called it "social insurance" because it was a sort of insurance protection against outliving one's productivity. There's a reason they set the age to start collecting benefits at age 65; the average lifespan was 63. Back then, 65 really was old, and retirement wasn't a choice for most people. If you lived long enough, you eventually reached a point where you could no longer work. Only a relative few really got to enjoy their retirement. For most, "golden years" was a cruel euphemism.

Our economy is different now; unskilled jobs that used to allow for middle-class existence have either evaporated or become much less remunerative. You used to be able to work in a store and provide for a family; now you have to work two retail jobs to rent a one-bedroom apartment.

People are coming to grips with the idea that their kids are never going to be as financially secure as they were; young people understand that, even with their expensive educations, they're unlikely to achieve anything like the economic wherewithal that their parents' generation took for granted.

I imagine I'd never retire. Not voluntarily. They might kick me out. The newspaper industry could capsize. (I have priced RVs. I think we could have a nice one.) But I'm not going gently into any good night.

It's not because we can't afford it. I used to think I'd never be able to retire comfortably, but the truth is I could stop tomorrow and I'd be fine. We keep things simple, we don't owe anybody anything. Money trickles in from this and that.

And a lot of us have learned in the past few months is that there are a lot of things we can go without. Most days now I wear clothes without buttons. I might not shower until the afternoon. I could adapt to a simpler, "lighter" life.

A job can be a kind of encumbrance too, a sort of anchor. And I don't mind it.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

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