CATCH UP I have, for many years, heard men and women of generally satisfactory mental stability forcefully announce within the hearing range of some who always remembers such statements – that, when retirement years rolled around for them “things” were really going to change.
Yes, in that oncoming day when retirement freedom takes over, all of this business rush and bother and excitement, and appointments and senseless trips to h here, there and everywhere,that constant rush of trying to keep up with life swirling around you endlessly – all such matters are going to cease to be! Retirement is going to be a a blessed time of absolute surcease from sorrow and aggravation of all kinds; those things everyone feels must be done; all that
Very few of you are going to accept much of that other than common hogwash of our times. None need to have it made any clearer as to who is trussed up on that spit and being laved and readied for slow rotation over a constant flame. Few are under any illusion that retirement lives on in traditional meanings. I am in a situation most would find to be unusual – some, even impossible. I have never, in all my working days - and nights – been employed by any firm - local, national or multi-national who had any authentic employment retirement funds arrangement whatsoever. I am forced, at this point, to admit that I did, indeed receive in my mail a check from the firm's Los Angeles offices six years after I ceased to be employed by the firm as a Technical Writer. There was a two line letter informing me that the check covered earnings from a “Profit Sharing Plan”. The check was for the three dollars and some odd cents, as I remember it.
The harsh reality of retirement will face current groups in a much different way than in the past perhaps. Much of the true joy of reaching retirement is to be found in the simple fact that you lived that long and became whatever was you thought you wanted to be some day. There will come a time when you will see names you have known of people you have and lived and worked with, slipping through the Obituary columns almost daily it seems. When you realize you are seeing such notices less and less retirement time is here.
A.L.M. February 8, 2006 [c415wds]
