Places I Don't Want To Be

It's too hard to say exactly where you want to be when the world is filled with so much wonder, so much magic, and so much that could be magic if you just tried a bit. It may be a tad easier to say where you don't want to be even at the price of being judgey.

1. I don't want to be with people all the time and I don't want to be alone all the time. The perfect percentage varies from day to day, but I would say at the moment I'm in a 40/60 place, tending towards isolation, but I'm on a sabbatical, for God's sake. So wherever the place is, it has to have right Alone/People Mix. This social mix also involves excitement since there is a smaller tendency to get excited about things in the solitary world, while it is almost impossible not to get excited about a perfect performance or a discussion that moves the planet. So the excitement/peace ratio may be related to the Alone/People Mix. Future research is indicated.

2. The place I don't want to be doesn't have any water. While I am not too picky about the kind or quantity of water, it has to have enough for emotional impact. For a pond to offer peace, it would have to be . . . mmmm . . . 50 feet wide as a bare minimum, while a stream could be only 6 feet across if it were a happy gurgling thing. Perhaps I have not been sufficiently trained in the joys of deserts, but they are too barren for this ugly bag of mostly water.

3. The place I don't want to be is loud all the time. For whatever reason, I need to have some quiet in my life. The Airbnb we are renting in Cuba is in a lively district in Havana and is pretty loud. There is music of one kind or another in the streets until quite late and after that there are people who are having disagreements or small parties until dawn most days.

All of this is relevant because when I or someone retires, their geographic flexibility increases. Even if we stay in the same house, we may now get to choose where to be all day long. The park? The library? Out back by the pool? At some dive bar. Hmm. Dive bar: cool, quiet . . . but it would have to be by a pool! Let me know if you know of a Schenectady dive bar that has a pool.

Retirement in Cuba

Cuba has something like social security, but it is usually called a pension and it is loosely based on your employment. Women get this governmental pension at 60 and men at 65. All of the people I spoke with had the same feelings about the pension. They thought it would be very small ($20-50) and almost impossible to live on. Most imagined that they would have some sort of little job to actually give them the life they wanted. My interviews confirmed 2010 Cuban government stats that show a third of the men past retirement age are working and 3/5 of older people say they often go without 'necessities.'

To cope with this, a young man, Francis Luis, was prepared to scale back his life, but not work at all after 65. He had worked out exactly what his life would look like and how much partying he could afford. In order not to work any more, he was prepared to reduce his weekend fun to dominoes with friends and one drink. One drink a weekend. Francis Luis was 27 and I was surprised at the extent that a young man had worked out his future sacrifices. However, it did sound very much like a young man on a flight to Florida who was extolling the virtues of FIRE and the current sacrifices you would make for future independence. He talked about a scaled back partying in Manhattan in much the same way. Francis Luis was also working out exactly how his two month old daughter would be taking care of him in his living small dotage.

On item of a common retirement bucket list was off the table in Cuba though, and that was international travel. Everyone understood that to be simply too expensive and too complicated to make happen. We rode with a taxi driver who had paid $160 to apply to the US government for a visa on three separate occasions and had been turned down all three times. No refund.

Another factor impacting their understanding of retirement was housing. In Cuba, you rarely just decide to buy a house. Until a few years ago it was impossible. You live in the house your parents owned and it passes down through the generations. That is the house you will live in and the house you will grow old in. If you were fortunate enough to have a good house at the time of the revolution, your family was usually able to keep it. If not, o well. So growing old is going to happen in a very predictable place. You are stuck with you extended family and their habitation. Forever. I talked to a young man who was planning to move out for a few years when he got married, but he then admitted that he would move back in after a bit. When I describe the situation of being stuck with the family habitation to people in the States, many can't imagine a world in which relatives are inescapable.

We did pass by what we might a call a nursing home suspiciously close to the cruise ship docks that looked very much like one in America except all the doors and windows were wide open (no screens here) and it certainly seemed like any of the residents could walk off whenever they pleased without signing out or anything.

The political situation is more in flux than we are used to in the States, so there is a bigger sense of uncertainty about the future that is palpable and translates to feelings about retirement.

One attitude that I ran into in Cuba I have found everywhere in young people and that is one of dismissal. I spoke to several young men who just shook their heads and indicated that they just don't think about that thing. The attitudes were framed in confusion and annoyance about why anyone would be talking of such things. I have found this all over the world and I suppose if you had asked me about retirement when I was 18 you would have gotten the same. The idea that any of us would ever be that old is not a pleasant idea when you are 18 no matter what country you are in.

Alcohol and the Caribbean

Why? Really. What is it about the Caribbean that requires so much rum? Democrats, Communists, and whatever passes for government at all those little islands, all bow to the cultural imperative of cheap and pretty good rum. Communism is not above moralism but not on this issue in Cuba. Quarts of rum that were formerly called Bacardi are now available every few yards on the streets of Havana for about $7.

While in Cuba, both Abby and I have consumed more hootch than in the preceding year. It is difficult to resist $3 mojitos with mint picked within the hour, muddled to perfection. The mint, I mean. Then there is happy hour (lasting 2 hours from 4-6) where the drinks are half price. It's a sin not to have two or three. And did I tell you they are not stingy with the rum? Just keep nodding as they pour.

I can only imagine that tourists spend more when we are drunk, or at least stay where we are to eat and sober up. This does not explain the local bars where the same thing is going on, tho.

And it's the rum thing! They do have disturbingly cheap scotch, but I never saw one poured. My venture at a Dry Vodka Martini was a complete failure, tasting fruity in some way that violated human decency. Rum went into everything. A Cuban coffee was coffee with, of course, rum. Rum on ice cream, over flan, rum flavored peanut butter (now I'm just making things up, but it's because, you know, rum).

Traveling with Progeny

Sooner or later, your children become adults. Mostly. It is not unusual for these little angels to revert to 8 year old terrors even if they are fully grown successful adults when they are in your presence. If there are more than one of the adult children in the moment with parents, it is almost inevitable that reader's theater of family scripts will be presented again by all sorts of allegedly grown up people powerless to act their age after some time in the old system. Forgotten bickering will appear. Rivalries no longer relevant will raise their ugly heads. Whining will commence. Authoritarian tones will surface. Ancient teasing will successfully annoy victims. And all this is just from the parents.

Travelling with progeny usually means that you are trapped in close quarters with them for hours at a time. Inevitably in my family, veiled and generally good-natured complaints about very old injustices arise. For instance, I made my kids be completely quiet for one meal on Sundays every week. The adults would talk and there would be no children chattering, no hand signals, no sighs or facial exaggerations. The adults would have a discussion and the children would be, for just a few minutes, seen and not heard. At the time, this was not a terribly controversial discipline, but today's values are completely child oriented and give my kids new cause to roll their eyes at how they were raised. So when I travel with progeny, topics of justice, development, responsibility, and authority are always in the jury box and I am usually at the defendant's table. Once I get used to this, the trial goes much more smoothly. I sometimes plead guilty just to be able to enjoy the trip.

On Not Knowing (Internet Down!)

A part of our addiction to the internet is the idea that any hole in our knowledge can be patched quickly and authoritatively with a fast consult with the web. The Cloud of Unknowing is only an unnoticeable blip when we can know any bit of news, any point of history, and any number of life within just a few seconds. Until you can't.

When I traveled in Zambia and South Africa, there were a very few times that I wasn't in contact with the Truth Above for casual curiosity as well and keeping the wheels of the organizations of my life turning. Not Cuba.

Cuba has internet, sort of. You pay for wifi access on an hourly basis, but even then many of my cherished apps and websites don't make it through. News articles of certain topics will not make it through. Things about Russia? Sorry. Unless you figure out that VPN thing.

Complex apps or mass email servers do not work at all. My blog website does not load in the best of times. Who knows why?

Facebook, on the other hand, always makes it through, with occasional delays on pictures. Even when it appears as though there is no connection, Facebook gets through. Neither I nor my Google son can figure this out. I am able to post birthday wishes for peripheral friends, but not make important email distributions. I can't help but wonder what kind of deal Facebook has with the Cuban government. I'd love to research that with a Google search, but of course . . .

The impact of not knowing what is going on when you are used to knowing what is going on is a dim sense of anxiety that you will miss doing something you should do because of facts unknown to you. Many of us pride ourselves on knowing what is going on, trained by urgent notifications from Google, Facebook, and our newfeeds. We will one-up each other no matter what else is going on. At meetings, I will get notices from other folks at the meeting(!) asking if I saw that the President of Marist College had been fired, or something like that.

Travelling without the Library in the Sky also makes it hard to figure out the 'objective' worth of something. How much should I pay for a Cuban cigar from a street vendor? Trick question! street folks selling cigars are selling cheaper knock offs that you shouldn't buy at all. Even considering the value of location and a general desire to help folks out, not knowing how badly you are being taken is disturbing. Why doesn't this bother me for prescriptions in the US tho?

Anyway, as a person of faith, a little humility about our knowledge base is a good thing. Imagining that we (or that the web) know everything and that everything is fixable is not simply empty optimism, it is an arrogance that leads to disappointment and abuse of power.  

On Being Comfortable

There was always air conditioning in my life. When I was young, we had fans in the bedrooms and a massive window unit in the dining room that cooled most of the common areas of our house in northern Illinois.

Cuba is hot as hell for several months of the year. It is fairly hot and very humid for my sabbatical outing and not a great deal of air conditioning. We are staying at an airbnb that reverses my childhood situation: ac in bedrooms and fans in public areas.

I do not enjoy being hot. I get achy and grumpy. But I am not the only one. We took a tour of Havana in a classic convertible that seemed like a good idea when we booked it, but it was hot! The driver was a bit sensitive to the heat too and when coming to a stop at an intersection would look for a shady spot, changing lanes to get into the shadow of a building in a way I had never considered or seen before. "Shade!" he would proclaim as he found it. When we got out in a large public square, he found the shade of a lamppost to stand in while we were busy being tourists. Walking down the street during the day, the tourists can be spotted walking down the middle of the street without regard to the sun while the natives have always cased out where the shadows are and are walking there. The longer I stayed, the more I saw people simply and naturally staying out of the sun whenever possible, even for the smallest amount of shade.

When I complain about the cold and snow of NY, please remind me of the grumpy hot that we are avoiding by living up north. It is much easier to fix the cold with another sweater, then when you are in tropical urban heat when isn't much to do about it. Not even three mojitos do the trick. I hear. 

I should find some application to how this affects retirement. But I'm too hot.

The Internet Is Wrong

Old news can be just plain wrong. When it comes to Cuba, things change all the time but the Internet is not very good at dating it's information. Not only are original articles dated in tiny print at the top, if at all, but articles are very often quoted without attention to the date of the quote. For instance, certain regulations about getting to Cuba published by the State Department get changed with administrations and with the whims of the current narcissistic President. These changes may or may not make it into travel sites that proclaim with great confidence that they have the information you need for Cuba. It was not unusual for us to find two or three completely different directions for how to deal with the categories of how you can get there and how to document than intention. As it turned out, it was much easier than we expected, but we were armed with letters and itineraries no one even tried to look at. So right now, in our experience, for the moment, with out particular itinerary, (Mid June 2019) flying and travelling in Cuba is as easy as going to any other country, except for the major pain the currency and no credit cards are. Your mileage may vary. Which is my point.

Of the many ways in which the internet is wrong besides getting to Cuba I could address, I suppose I should say something about retirement in this regard. Like investment advice in general, there is a vast array of people making money with completely different approaches. Let the record show that there are also people losing money with different approaches. Like so many things in life, the particular details of an individual's situation make it very hard to generalize recommendations.

When I started teaching speech and preaching, I had a neat curriculum of accepted practices and generalizations that worked most of the time. But even when the tried and true worked, it rarely was exactly what an individual speaker needed to be a great communicator. The longer I taught speech and preaching, the more I relied on coaching individuals on how to change the thing they really really needed to fix to get out of their own way. With this learning in mind, and after talking to many people of different stripes about their plans, the same issues apply to retirement. Not only will some information about the market or about Social Security or about health care be out of date, it may not apply to your situation even after you find the latest best information.

This may suggest, like public speaking, the need for coaching, but be sure your coach is up to date on the facts and your particularities which are listed in another posting.

Depressing Retirement Limericks

Note: Limericks as a genre are not noted for their discretion. These have been edited for general audiences in ways that will be apparent.

There once was an old man named Dick

Who got increasingly sick
Of young girls who sputtered
When his first name was uttered
So retired, he used his last name which was . . . Johnson.


There once was an old guy named Frank
Who had lots of dough in the bank.
He only thought numbers
And now his mind slumbers
And all of his checks are quite blank.


I asked a young widow named Honey
How is was that she had so much money.
She wiggled her rear
And said in my ear
“Pick old men and act like a bunny.”


There now is a con man named Stan
Who has a retirement plan
Consisting of selling
And even compelling
His friends to buy gold in a can


An old man named Jeff had conspired
To work long and not be retired.
He never did save
And thought himself brave
Until he got ill and got fired.


A smart man named Jim and his wife
Killed themselves throughout their life.
They scrimped and they saved
And denied what they craved
And both died quite young from the strife.


There once was a gardener named Sue
Who planned to retire and start new.
She ripped out her plants
And took a new stance
She now stays inside and sniffs glue.


There once was an old man named Billy
Who got increasingly silly.
He wrote awful poetry
Constructed quite shoddily
And wasn’t able to rhyme either.

Retirement as Going Home

Most of us weren’t born where we work. For the most part, there were many years in which growing and learning is what we did, along with loving our family if we were lucky. I suppose education was a kind of productivity, but if so, the product was us, not some external commodity. Some of these years were idyllic. Unless we had some kind of nightmare of a childhood, most of us can remember moments of paradise in which we chased after fireflies or tumbled down a hill in a big box, or simply ran through a field in delight. We can remember long summer days when there was nothing we needed to do and yet each day seemed so important. Deep in most of us is a nostalgia for these divinely innocent moments that we seek to recover in religion, art, sex, athletics, or any number of spiritual disciplines. Sometimes, when I talk to people about their retirement, they transform before my eyes into a twelve-year-olds talking about their plans for the best summer ever. Their particular plans vary depending on the particular joys of their childhoods, but retirement often seems like a grand desire to return home, to find the place of safety and joy and freedom after years of living by others’ goals and schedules in the occupation we call employment.

My childhood was filled with leisure and unprogrammed time. When I wasn’t playing in the darkening grass with the dozen or so co-conspirators of my neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois, I was spending a summer doing not much at all with my mom in a trailer in the most perfect place ever in western Michigan. It had a perfect shallow stream and a beach and watchtowers and a lighthouse and dunes for miles and miles and you could walk for hours and no one would worry about you or even notice and that was just ok. My three siblings were older, so it was often just me wandering contentedly over the sands. Although my life is now made up of many meetings and public presentations, there is a part of me that is joyfully alone on a beach someplace. It’s beyond the dualism of introvert/extravert, it’s the remarkably different neural pathways that make up ‘me’ all at once. And as shallow and embarrassingly nostalgic it is, there is a part of me that wants to go home to that primordial pleasant place. Of course, that particular place in Michigan isn’t there anymore the way I want it to be, so it has that sad nostalgia for me that is a dark brew and only lukewarm.

This desire for homecoming is why farmers talk so differently about retirement. They were often born on the job. Their idyllic moments were a part of their contract with the land that fed them. I have met many farmers who talk about wanting to farm until they die. They live their nostalgia and so feel no need to return to some other place.

Not everyone found the rewards of leisure as a youth. For some of us, the joys of productivity and pleasing our parents by cutting the grass were strong elements of ego development and instrumentality. For these folks, good retirement has strong components of keeping busy and being productive. When these things are thwarted for reasons of health or economics, these folks may fall into depression, unable to satisfy the primordial imperative.

So how can this idea inform our decisions about retirement? Well, we can understand the 'going home' component so that we don’t try to recreate a scenario that is founded on a world that doesn’t and perhaps shouldn’t exist anymore. We can discern and distill the settings that created and nurtured us in the best ways and translate them into a new milieu.

For better and worse, we cannot change who we were. We can, however, like God does, pluck the divine sparks from the air of our life and use them to build a warming fire for the evening coolness.

Poem: You Are Never Ready

“You are never ready.”
That’s what I heard.

You are never ready for how
   Marriage
   Children
   Miscarriage
   Death
Changes your life

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I'll say it clear
I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
I've lived a life that's full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way

And so we improvised
Since we weren’t ready
We did it our way
Because there was no other way

We narrowed our brows
And looked determined
To be prepared

For anything

But weren't

And now for the final act
We make up numbers for the money people
Who want to know exactly what we can tolerate
We make up blueprints
But have misplaced the ruler

And after all the talk
And all the numbers
And all the stories
We
Still
May not be
Ready

O
Well

Metablog

For most of my life, once a week I had to make sense of something. Once a week I preached to people who may have been listening to me for years. Like a teacher, it was my job to come up with a new memorable experience, but unlike teachers, the curriculum was less determined and the content expected to have more impact. I enjoy preaching and cherish the sub-processor of my internal CPU that is dedicated to amassing illustrations and approaches for the following Sunday.

I am now in that sabbatical place where I am not preaching every Sunday but I am doing the blog thing every day or two. While I think of a sermon as a meal, with different courses and sauces, a blog post typically is smaller in length, scope, and impact: more of a late afternoon snack. I design sermons to have lots of room for listeners to find their own perspective on large issues, while the blog has fewer mythic properties.

A blog posting for me is at once more and less satisfying than a sermon. A good sermon throws away many good and interesting elements. As literary cognizoti have said, for a fine piece of writing you have to “kill your darlings.” A blog post is a darling. It’s a tidbit of opinion, a witty angle that may not profit from development at all, an isolated observation, a shiny grain of sand on the beach of human knowledge.

So dear readers, I offer my ambivalent apologies for posts you may find more like one smoked almond rather than a meal of fancy rice, steamed broccoli, and swordfish with bourbon sauce. Now I’m hungry.

Two Rocking Chairs on Mars

Sometimes, when I do a little talk during a wedding I am officiating, I talk about the distant future of some young couple. I paint a picture of both of them sitting on rocking chairs on Mars, holding hands and looking back at a rich life. It’s a pretty picture that brings a smile. But retirement and being a couple is not always the easiest thing. The idea that two people would decide to retire at the same time and then agree on exactly what they wanted to do in that retirement is not usually the way it goes. I know a few couples, usually teachers, who pull it off quite well, but they had years of figuring out how to be together all those summers.

My wife, Abby, is quite a bit younger than I am so I am looking at a couple of decades of being retired while she is not. Some time ago, our vision was that when I retired she would take two years off and we would do something adventurous, like tour the country in an RV, which seems to be the current retirement adventure people talk about. Since then, Abby got a job she likes and the talk of taking two years off has subsided, as well it should. By the time she retires, I will be be too old to tie my own shoes, let alone travel to a retirement village on Mars.

Although my case may be extreme, it is not unusual in principle. There are millions of couples in America with complicated spreadsheets about who does what when for their particular wherefores.

Couples are used to negotiating the normal business of life together: Where will we live? How many children will we have? Can we afford to buy a new car? In my chatting with folks, however, I found that people talk more about how to decorate the living room than how they will be spending their golden years. I wonder why that is. Fear of conflicting visions? Lack of clear individual intentions? Procrastination about a distant reality? We know that people often don’t plan the financial dimensions of their older years very well. Perhaps this is just more of the same.

Tampa Breakfast

At the Sunday morning breakfast cafe of the Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa, a couple hundred people in various stages of homelessness line up for a huge breakfast and often to get help with certain problems. There are phone chargers (a problem when you are homeless), barbers, and folks to help with identity cards and food stamps. It’s fairly good-natured, with clients greeting and helping each other in ways that they can. Roger Copp, a great friend of mine, has been helping some of these folks with housing or food stamps for years. I chat with people about retirement while they wait to talk to him about food stamps.

My first interview victim has trouble focusing in general but the idea of retirement just stumped him altogether. When I used the word he got a faraway look in his eye and I got the sense that this idea had little meaning for him. He couldn’t really even answer questions about it, it was so foreign to him.

My next interviewee was an older, affable fellow named Nathaniel. Like many, he was happy to talk about his life. He makes about a thousand dollars a month from social security when he is settled enough for them to find him and when someone doesn’t steal his card and benefits. I asked him not about retirement, since I learned that in this room the word doesn’t have much value. I asked him if there will come a time when he was going to be able to kick back and take things easy. “Ain’t gunna happen.” was his instant reply.

For most of these folks, life was not going to get much easier. For one reason or another, they were going to be working the streets and the system the rest of their lives. I would find this completely depressing, but most had a kind of shrugging fatalism that enabled them to carry on. I’m not sure I could do it, and for that reason have a respect for people that don’t have many hopes for a better life, but who put one foot in front of the other every day anyway. It’s easy to be a person of faith when things are going well, but these economic refugees in this churchy breakfast club have an ordinary determination that judges my comfortable trajectory.

For a few, though, things might change. Roger says 90% are pretty much stuck in the situation they are in. He says he is most rewarded by working with the 10% who need just a little help to get their life back together and find reasonably stable bed and board. These are the folks who profit most from his help and who represent the redemption that the church folks gather in the sanctuary later to listen about.