Thoughts on retirement

My father was generally not one to ask for advice – certainly not of ME, the youngest of four children in a very busy and noisy and active household in which he was clearly the One In Charge. Rather, he was the one dispensing (almost always unsolicited) advice, or more accurately, indisputable edicts about what to do and when and where to do it. Ours was an old-fashioned (some would call “traditional”) set-up. He was the breadwinner and the leader of the household. Did I mention? It was a busy and crowded household. Along with my mother and three siblings, it also included various ancient Italian relatives, none of whom spoke English nor had anywhere else to live but the downstairs of our suburban New Jersey house. They, too, were under his iron-fisted rule. Now, I’m not trying to make out my dad as a mean-spirited ogre. He wasn’t. He was just IN CHARGE. Long cigar in his mouth, which naturally turned his face into a scowl, he was the one telling us what to do and not the other way around. And again, never, ever one to ask for advice.
 
Which is why, nearly 30 years later, I still remember the conversation we had in our kitchen one day, when I was home in Jersey for the weekend from Poughkeepsie. “Hey Pee-dah,” he growled in the Bronx accent never dissipated through the years. “Tell me about golf. I need to learn how to golf.” If it weren’t my father, the authority figure who commanded respect, I would have burst out in laughter -- and I nearly did! Golf? You! Pfffft. And asking ME about golf? Me! Pfffft. I don’t recall my father as being the most athletic dad in the world. Oh sure, he boasted about playing sandlot ball in Queens with a guy he used to call “Eddie” – the rest of the world would come to know him as “Whitey Ford.” And he wielded a mean hammer around the house, with a fierce woodworking hobby. So yeah, he was an “athlete” in his younger days (I mean, weren’t we all?) and he was active well into adulthood (he was no couch potato). But golf? Him! Not the most patient man, let’s just put it that way. If he ever golfed (and, he never did), I could envision him, after many bad shots, hurling his putter into some pond, with the club pirouetting through the air like an errant twirling baton, trailed by a stream of epithets in its wake. Yeah anyway. So why was my father asking me about golf? Well, he was nearing the end of his long career as a mechanical engineer, all with the same company. You wanna talk old-school, traditional? Save for a two-year military commitment, my father worked for the same company from the age of 18 until the standard retirement age of 65. He got the retirement party, the cake, the gold watch, the pat on the back – a cliché back then but more of a curious relic in this modern era of work (that’s another story). But, like many others of his generation and his ilk, retirement did not come with a handbook or a playbook. All his life, he didn’t have to think much about how he spent his days. Work all day, maybe a little overtime a few nights a week, fend for that big family upstairs and those creaking dinosaurs who spoke only Italian in the basement. A few trips to the lumberyard, tinkering in the woodshop in between, cigar ever dangling from his lips. Years go by pretty quickly that way.
 
But then, the nest empties. The relics in the basement inevitably die off. The kids grow up and move out and start their own families. The need for overtime ends. The 9-to-5 routine, eventually, ends. And then what? Golf? This was the existential crisis my father was no doubt facing, back in the early 1990s, when he asked me about golf. Me! About golf! Other than being a sportswriter and knowing the correct spelling of Jack Nicklaus, I knew precious little about golf. But I did know a lot about my father and I didn’t think it would be a good mix. Gently, I think, I told him so. He nodded, grudgingly giving me my due and tacitly admitting that his punk-ass youngest kid maybe knew what he was talking about, for a change. At that very moment, retirement was a befuddling – maybe even scary – proposition for the old man. The first year or two, if I recall, I think he struggled with finding a routine. But find a routine he did. His days filled up. My parents even did some traveling – not far, usually up this way to what used to be called the “Borscht belt” in the Catskills – before their health inevitably went into decline. Also, the house filled up again, usually on weekends, with grandkids. The woodworking continued for a while, again until the ravages of age and time diminished that too.
 
We live in a different time now. Retirement is not as clear-cut. It’s a little more of a fuzzy concept for most of us. Very few men and women work for the same company for 40-plus years, get the cake and the gold watch and (most importantly) the pension in perpetuity. In a few months, I turn 58 and will be embarking on my 32^nd year as track/XC coach at Marist. For those keeping score at home? Fifty-eight is not young, and 32 is a long time to be doing the same thing. I’m not expecting a gold watch; heck, I’m not even sure I’ll get to script my exit! But it sure was nice, a few weeks’ back at the conclusion of the MAAC outdoor championships, to be “celebrated” -- in retirement-party fashion – for my 30-plus years of coaching. The parents/friends who surreptitiously organized it had been planning something to honor my 30^th year, but alas that was scuttled in the middle of the pandemic mess. Somewhere in there, sitting at home walking the dogs, wallowing in self-pity and writing more blog posts than coaching practices, I started and finished my 30^th year of coaching. But there was no appropriate time or place to celebrate that milestone. And so, there was the very gratifying – if somewhat confusing – “celebration” at the end of my 31^st year. Again, it was really cool. I was definitely surprised. There were heartfelt gifts and many kind words – including from my own boss, Athletic Director Tim Murray. Yes, it sure had the feel of a retirement party. To reiterate, I don’t know how and when this long and blessed run of coaching will come to an end. But I will say THIS: At the time of the celebration, and now, retirement was not at the forefront of my mind. At that time, the next meet (IC4As/ECACs) was on my mind; wrapping up this recruiting cycle and starting the next recruiting cycle was on my mind; the 2022-2023 season, one in which our athletes can set more records, was on my mind. But, facts are facts, and I’m a lot closer to the end of my career than to the beginning of it. Some thoughts of “retirement” certainly do creep in – especially when I’m kindly reminded of (and honored for) my longevity. The end is near. And when it comes, will I pose some version of the “golf” question to my children, like my dad did to me? Heck, they already laugh out loud at what I say and what I do and what I wear – so I think I’ll pass on that. Hopefully, if and when the time comes, like my parents I’ll be blessed with 20-plus years more of life on this planet. And if that’s the case? It’ll be up to us to figure out how and where to spend the wonderful gift of time in those final years.