How Being Retired is like Being Back In High School Again

In 1946, the year the first baby boomers were born, the average life expectancy was 66.7 years. You didn’t have much time to cram it all in, or even think much about your options before it was all over.  Immediately after high school, my father enlisted in the service, met my mom, got married, worked until the day he retired, bought an RV, and worried about his finances on a daily basis until the day he died in 2010.  That was what you did back then.

I went to college, got married, had a kid, got divorced, worked in the restaurant business until I met my second wife and had two more kids. I became a professional photographer, got divorced again, retired at 49, and took up yet another career as an artist before meeting my third wife.  Two years ago, I became a whitewater raft guide and a ski instructor at the ripe old age of 58.  My kids are grown, my mom has settled in a house near my brother, and I have at least another 30 or 40 years before I even start to slow down. Every yardstick my parents measured their success and progress by has absolutely no value to me as a guideline for what comes next, because no one in history has ever been where my generation is at before.

We are like the freshman class on the first day of high school, watching the “senior class” for clues on what to do and how to act.  The trouble is,  none of us want to be like the senior class, because there is a twenty year age difference between us. I have friends in their fifties who recently gave up everything they owned to buy and RV and hit the road. He is a doctor and she is an administrator, and after both lost their jobs, they decided to travel the country in search of seasonal employment to make ends meet.  Half the people they’ve encountered so far are in their seventies and half are in their fifties.  The seventy year-olds are living off social security and retirement savings, but the fifty year-olds are on the road out of necessity.  Some have lost everything in this new economy except their RV’s, and the only work they can find is temporary.  Others are on the road because after a lifetime spent pursuing a dream, they want to actually LIVE instead of just thinking about it, and do it now, before its too late.

 

But with thirty or forty extra years on their hands, it seems a great big question mark is hanging out there.  What do we do next?  Every phase of life up until this point has had a purpose, a routine, and map.  Someone else has done it before us,  so we know what to do when we get there ourselves.  The seniors know more than the juniors, and the juniors know more than the sophomores, and if we want to be cool like the upperclassmen at fifty, then we need someone to watch, so we know what to do next.

Well we have some ideas about how to do that,  starting with the turquoise 1969 Dodge Travco we just bought that will become the headquarters for  a new TV series we plan to launch about baby boomers this spring that you will DEFINITELY want to stay tuned for.

Because if there’s one thing we know for sure, its that we ain’t your grandma’s AARP!

The Importance of Adventures Both Big and Small.

I come by my wanderlust naturally.  I remember hearing stories growing up about how my grandfather would come home from work back in the 1950’s and find a note pinned to the front door of the house.  My grandmother would find a house she liked better while she was out running errands, rent it, pack the old house, and move in with the help of my mother and her brothers in the space of just a few hours.   When I was a kid we moved every four or five years like clockwork.  I started fifth grade one year at one school and ended it nine months later at a school across town.  I hated it at the time of course, because I was always the new kid in school, and every time we moved,  I would concoct an elaborate plan to start fresh with a different accent, or a different name so I could at least be the most interesting new kid at school.

Moving frequently however provided me with a burning desire to see something different as often as possible that has stayed with me all my life, and working as an artist for most of the past fifteen years has sated that wanderlust pretty nicely.  Shortly after I began working as a full time artist and was exhibiting art  all over the country, I developed a passion for two lane highways through the middle of nowhere, and would often find myself, on the top of a mountain in the days before GPS and cell phones, wondering if I had enough gas in the car to make it to the next station, because the gypsy in me would suddenly decide on a whim to take the path less traveled from here to there because it looked “shorter”.  I cut across New Mexico from Cuba to Los Alamos once because  it looked like it would save me at least another 100 miles on the road, and while the scenery over that mountain pass was sublime and I saw my first herd of wild elk, I also coasted into the next gas station on fumes.

With the economy still struggling to recover, and little time or money left to travel they way we used to, Michael and I have gotten creative in our approach to our frequent adventures.  We joined a group of about two dozen motorcycle riders on vintage bikes last fall for the first annual Kickstart Classic.  The ride began in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, and wound up in Rome, Georgia at a motorcycle museum/repair shop and grill known as Panhead City.  We were balloon handlers at the Macy’s Day Parade thanks to cheap airfare and a friend who traded us points at a Marriott Hotel for some artwork, and last week, we headed out for Pigeon Forge, Tennessee with the “circus”  (we have three dogs; a bossy 2 year old Shih Tzu we rescued from a snow bank, a 6 month old Pit Bull/Pharaoh Hound mix who’s turned the inside of our truck into a giant chew toy, and an ancient Pharaoh Hound who can’t hear, can’t see and can’t control his bladder) for a relaxing getaway.

We stayed in an inexpensive hotel that allowed dogs, and spent about 15 minutes turning our room into a palace with some things we’d brought from home;  a featherbed, flannel sheets, extra pillows,  candles, wine, with a cheese and crackers plate, and extra towels.  We let the dogs run around in a park across the street from the hotel, then loaded everyone up and went exploring.  We went to Knife City and the Lodge Logic factory store, then gorged ourselves on all you can eat sushi.  We also brought a DVD player and watched a movie called 50/50,  and after sleeping  late the next morning, had breakfast at the Old Mill Restaurant before driving through the Great Smoky Mountains Park back to Cherokee, and Bryson City.  It wasn’t the  most exotic getaway in the world, but we came home feeling rested and ready to tackle the world.  And it didn’t cost a fortune.  Just some planning and ingenuity. A stay at the Hyatt wouldn’t have been much better.

And any adventure, no matter how big or small, is a great adventure to have.  I plan on making them a part of my life until the day I die.

Would Someone Please Tell Me What’s So Great About Being Young?

I’ve been reading Huffington Post 50 blogs lately and I’m starting to notice a trend.

First, there was the swan song to the passing of youth marked by the writer’s decision to retire her sexy underwear for “granny panties”. I have been wearing granny panties for as long as I can remember. Bikini underwear are way too uncomfortable, and thongs were out of the question, and besides, I always thought lingerie was a form of discrimination, if for no other reason than the fact that men wouldn’t be caught dead in the stuff.  I still think  men love lingerie because they don’t have to wear it, but that’s just me.   Wearing granny panties meant I never had a panty line.  I never had a man refuse sex with me because I was wearing them.  And since they are bigger than a shoestring, they never ended up wedged between my cheeks. Setting fire to my underpants and setting them off to sea as a symbol of my old age would be pointless in my case because I actually love wearing comfortable undergarments and I don’t care who knows it.

Then there was the homage to Meryl Streep as the oldest woman ever to appear on the cover of Vogue Magazine at the advanced age of 62.  Now, I have to admit that it never really occurred to me that magazines rarely feature anyone over forty in advertisements until I flipped through a recent copy of  Vanity Fair and realized there wasn’t one single model over the age of 20 in a magazine targeted to a demographic at least three times that age.  Lincoln has at least made a stab at marketing to baby boomers by casting Mad Men’s John Slattery as their new spokesman.   Lincoln says they chose him for his “authentic, real world appeal”, but since Slattery’s built his entire career on being a cold fish, that’s exactly how he comes cross in these ads. If you want “authentic, real world appeal” then get Meryl Streep to hawk your cars and see how fast they fly out the door.  Especially since baby boomer women are the fastest growing segment of the fastest growing segment of the population.

It seems everything about boomer blogs is about what we aren’t anymore.  We aren’t young, we aren’t beautiful, we aren’t sexual, we aren’t thin, no one markets to us, we aren’t represented on TV proportionate to our numbers, we aren’t the center of the universe anymore and we hate it.

But as far as I see it, boomers aren’t really doing anything about it either.  I work nights at a local college and the kids I work with  to love make a point of my age.  The adults in their lives are either professors or parents  who are self-conscious about aging  and these kids know it, but I don’t let their comments get to me because I’m not concerned about aging.  I’m smart enough to know that aging is ts inevitable, so why not make the most of it and besides, these kids don’t know anything.   One girl thought the Ten Commandments and the Constitution were the same thing.  She doesn’t know who the Marx Brothers are,  who Fleetwood Mac is, and she’s never seen Casablanca. Now, the world will go on if she never discovers these things, but what bothers me, is that she isn’t the least bit interested in knowing about them either.   One kid in particular likes to go on about how ancient I am on a nightly basis, until I told him not that long ago, I may be old, but I can still kick HIS ass. When he puffed up at me and said, “I don’t know about THAT” I said, “well I do, because girls fight dirty”, a sentiment I might add, that the swim team girls on work-study instantly echoed.

I don’t get what’s so great about being young and I really don’t get what’s to be gained by wringing our hands over the fact that we aren’t anymore.  The number of people over the age of 100 is expected to reach 3.8 million people within my lifetime, so at 52, I am hardly “old”.  I am just beginning to hit my stride and there isn’t enough time in all the world for me to accomplish all the things I want to.  So all you boomer bloggers; stop telling me what I am not anymore, because baby, I am just getting started.

We’ve Got the Keys to the Kingdom, So Why Aren’t We Using Them?

It’s no secret by now that the baby boomer “generation”  is the largest population segment on the planet, and its growing by 8,000 people a day.  But no one knows what to do with that information.

Least of all the baby boomers themselves.

When I began researching the boomer phenomenon, I kept getting this image in my head of people gathered on the lawn of a large estate, where the doors are unlocked and the gates are wide open and nobody leaves!   People my age don’t want to admit they are over fifty, and while I get that most of us are a long, LONG way from “old age” , I also think that by refusing to embrace the inevitable changes coming our way – changes, I might add that are extraordinary – we are also refusing to embrace a period in our lives that is, and will be, absolutely incredible.

A few years ago, when I was going through my old photo albums to find pictures for a blog to celebrate turning fifty, I was struck by just how beautiful I really was as a young woman.  I’m not saying this to be egomaniacal.  I’m saying it, because it was the truth.  I am 5’9″ and, at the time, weighed about 135 pounds.  Still too “fat” to be a supermodel, but I filled out a bathing suit nicely.  I had chestnut hair, big green eyes and a smile that could stop you in your tracks.  I remember opening the door to a delivery man one day, and literally taking his breath away.  I am sure I did that more than once in my lifetime, and it still makes me smile to think about it now.

I also thought I was as plain as the day was long.  I never wore sexy clothes because I didn’t think I had the body for it, I hated to be photographed because I was convinced I didn’t photograph well.  My hair wasn’t straight, my nose wasn’t right. And when I look at those pictures now, I realize that because I didn’t embrace who I was at the time, for better or worse, I lost out on how much bigger my life could have been at the time.  I regret limiting myself when I was young, because I didn’t want to be who I was.  I am seeing that same phenomenon now in a HUGE segment of the baby boomer population.  Someone posted a comment on facebook after I wrote my first blog, asking why I wanted to focus a new business on “old people” . I wrote back and said, “this, from the most active and engaging man over fifty I know?”.

What is so wrong with being over fifty?  My uncle is 62 and he’s about to debut his first rock and roll CD.  He’s wanted to be a musician all of his life but it wasn’t until his kids moved out of the house and got married that he had the time to pursue his first passion.  He’s also a painter, which is an avocation he set aside  to raise his family as well.   He sold two out of three paintings at a museum in Vermont recently, and now he spends his days working on new oil paintings when he isn’t in the studio, recording new songs.

We’ve got the keys to the kingdom and we need to use them to embrace who we are. We have the power, but most of us are so afraid to admit we are  over fifty that we are like those folks who have the freedom to leave the estate, and the fear of what might be out there if we do.

I don’t want to spend my “middle years” like a woman I know, who built her entire life around the fact that she was both pretty and petite.  She LOATHES being “old”, but aging is as inevitable as the fact that she will never be any taller, and she doesn’t wring her hands about that.  She’s made her life small because she doesn’t want to be who she is.

I don’t get the chance to do this again, so I want every moment of  it to count.  I didn’t do that when I was young, and since I am going to die someday whether I like it or not, I am taking the keys to my kingdom and walking out the gates into an amazing new day…..

And So It Begins……

When I was twenty years old, and a junior in college at Oregon State University, I thought I knew everything.  My history professor James, who was all of forty at the time, told me over drinks one night, that the assumption was thoroughly appropriate for my age.  “After all”, he said, “the only time in my life that I ever knew anything was when I was twenty.  It was only when I got older than I realized, I didn’t know anything at all”.  I remember feeling rather smug at the time, which really only proved his point, because I felt as if I DID know everything, and with the certainty of someone who is too young to have the sort of life experience to realize just how little I actually knew, about anything, really.   When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine being 52, and now that I am 52 I can’t imagine what was so great about being 20.  Oh sure, I don’t stop traffic anymore the way I used to, and there are parts of my body that have gravitated to new locations, but when the host of THE AMAZING RACE openly marvels that a farm couple in their fifties made it more than halfway through last seasons show without an oxygen tank and a wheelchair, I figured it was time to make a stand in favor of getting older.

EVERYTHING about being older is better than I could have ever imagined it would be.  Because it finally occurred to me….I didn’t have forever to do this anymore.

I didn’t have time to judge people.  I didn’t have time to waste.  I didn’t need to be self conscious about my body anymore.  It was my body and I needed to learn to love it, because I was never going to look like a supermodel. Even though I may never be a gourmet cook or learn how to speak Mandarin Chinese like a native, who cares?  As long as I am willing to try,  then what possible reason do I have NOT to do whatever I damned well please?

I am 52 years old, and my signficant other is 58.  We find ourselves marvelling at the youth culture, if for no other reason than the fact that we find it incredible that ANYONE under the age of forty thinks anyone over the age of forty is boring.  Michael has been a dive master, a jump master, a motivational speaker, an artist, a whitewater raft guide, a welder, a carpenter, a contractor, a rough neck, a bartender, a restaurant manager, a ski instructor, a marathon runner and a commercial photographer.  At 56 he was the Rookie of the Year and at 57, the Raft Guide of the Year, at two different raft companies between 2010 and 2011.

I worked in the film industry for twelve years before becoming a gourd artist, a painter, a handbag designer, and, when the economy went in the toilet, an inbound sales agent, a telemarketing recruiter AND a virtual assistant for a cookbook author.  Against all odds we managed to land a permanent home loan modification from one of the most intractable mortgage companies on the planet, and even though we aren’t where we thought we would be at this point in our lives, we  still spend our weekends roaming the North Carolina countryside on the back of Michael’s 1988 Heritage Softtail when we aren’t rafting the class three and four rapids on the French Broad River.

In the past two years, we’ve sent in audition tapes for the Amazing Race, Survivor, Expedition Impossible and Project Accessory, and even though we still believe reality TV stardom is in the cards for both of us, the idea that, at 52 and 58 we are obsolete members of this society makes us both laugh.  Because if 50 is the new 30, then people, you all need to get the hell out of our way.  Cause we plan on passing all you suckers, straight on by…..