Retirement is a weird word. It evokes the twilight of life, eating dinner at 4 pm, shopping at Costco. I’m now done with the 9-5, which makes me look back. I’m thinking about what I’ve accomplished, what I’m letting go and wondering what the next chapter will bring.
When I was growing up, I wanted to be Mary Richards: an independent career gal with great clothes and a cute apartment. I’ve had some cute apartments, a few memorable outfits and independence galore. But my so-called career has mostly been a meandering path of least resistance.
As I look back at my various jobs, I remember a book from college, “Work,” a novel by the fierce 19th century feminist Louisa May Alcott. I was already a fan of the writer, having read “Little Women” about a thousand times in my childhood. I fancied myself an independent Jo, though I was actually much more an Amy—I would have cheerfully burned anything of my sisters. But reading “Work” in my English lit. class resonated. I, like the heroine Christie, had declared my independence from my family and was launching into supporting myself. But I was shocked (not surprised) by the amount of misogyny and degradation Christie faced as she slogged through jobs such as washerwoman, governess, seamstress and actress. If I had been holding a sign while reading that novel, it would have said “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit!”
I still have my copy of “Work” and leafing through it, I see I had underlined just two sentences. The first was: “With everyone I helped my power increased, and I felt I had washed away a little of my own great sin.” Ugh! WTF Louisa! That is so 1850s! Doing good erases our bad “sin”? But I believed it then and I believe it now. I call it karma.
My first job with regular hours was in Indiana the summer I turned 14. I was a mother’s helper to the Neals, a family with four girls under 10, including an infant. I worked from 10 am-4 pm, Monday through Friday, and sometimes stayed in the evening if the parents went out. The dad was very handsome with thick sandy-brown hair; the mom Molly looked tired and soft with baby weight. My friends and I wondered what he saw in her. My memories of that time include the baby’s room covered with a cheery blue gingham wall paper (they were so desperate for a boy) and ironing the dad’s shirts in the sweltering dining room, the stink of his baked-in pit BO wafting up in the steam while Molly took the girls down the street to the neighbor’s pool. By the end of the summer, I had saved up $150, which I spent on school clothes in September. I ran into Molly a few years later—she was divorced; apparently her husband cheated on her and turned into the unattractive one.
My high school job was candy girl at a repertory movie theater about eight blocks from my house in Minneapolis. It was famous for showing “Harold & Maude” for three years until the neighborhood finally held a protest. It was a great job for a high school kid: not much responsibility, plenty of time to goof off, free fresh popcorn galore. The projectionist drove an orange muscle car and had hooks for hands. I got to know kids I wouldn’t have normally, like a boy from a wealthy suburb who told repeatedly told us his dad went to Harvard, like we cared. I went with him to his school’s homecoming dance with another couple named Jack and Perky. The dance was on a riverboat and Jack had just gotten his hair permed—he was terrified it was going to get wet. Perky lived up to her name and was the best part of the evening.
College work was all about five nights of food and cocktail service while trying to get good grades and pay my rent. Work was my social life and I remember promising myself that someday I would sleep as much as wanted (that has never happened). I majored in writing, which was the only subject that earned me easy “A”s. Many nights I got home from work at midnight and cranked out comparative lit. paper for class the next day.
In grad school, I needed a second job to add to my restaurant work just to live in Palo Alto. I got a teacher’s aide position in an elementary school, working in a single learning disability class—all boys in third through fifth grade. There have been very few times when I could measure my personal growth daily; those little rascals taught me how to keep my temper and keep my cool. Once on playground duty, a kid found a gopher snake in the field and held it up by its tail: it was longer than the boy. I couldn’t reveal my snake phobia (or any weakness) to them, so I just nodded, smiled and shouted “Drop the snake, Jeff,” as my heart pounded out of my chest. “DROP THE SNAKE.”
I moved to Portland in September 1991, ready to quit restaurant work—my back was already a wreck. I had a new master’s degree and expected to find a good-paying job but I couldn’t even get an interview. Finally, after almost two months, I went to a temp agency. They said “there’s nothing out there. Don’t expect a call.” But they did call, for a two-week office data-entry job. The catch was, it started the Friday after Thanksgiving, when no one wanted to work. I instantly agreed before I learned it was at Portland’s alternative newsweekly, Willamette Week. That stroke of luck (or fate) changed everything.
The newspaper hired me permanently to work in the office, and within six months I was writing for them. I didn’t like Portland much at first: it seemed conservative, backwards and too white compared with the Bay Area. But working at a liberal weekly paper was the place to learn about the interesting aspects of the city and meet the best people. My core social circle is still based on the friends I made there.
But at a certain point, I got tired of being broke and realized work is the way we support ourselves in this capitalist country. I continued to freelance and got a full-time office manager job at the Oregon Humanities Council. It was there I took advantage of great health insurance and maternity leave and had a baby. But soon I realized I couldn’t work a job-and-a-half and still function as an adequate parent. My househusband was dying to get out of the house and go back to work. We switched roles and I stayed home.
After freelancing for a couple years (luckily during the dotcom content boom at the turn of the century), I joined Western Oregon University as the Student Media advisor to the newspaper, television station and literary journal. I quickly discovered I wasn’t a great teacher but I was a pretty good coach. Yet after seven years of fighting a conservative administration for an independent student press (like Oregon’s other public universities enjoyed), my contract wasn’t renewed.
I was unemployed for two years during the great recession of 2007-08. The company my husband worked for went out of business and for two years, we scraped by on unemployment benefits, garden produce, small jobs from generous neighbors, and pure anxiety tempered by optimism. My husband entered a state program to start his own business; I got my foot in the door as a temp at the Oregon Health Authority, writing health communications for the H1N1 flu pandemic. A few years later, I was the state public health communications officer. I loved providing crucial information to keep people in Oregon healthy and safe.
I’m lucky and grateful to have had interesting, meaningful jobs that have had a positive impact (I hope). I’ve met the most lovely people and formed lasting friendships. I’m thankful to have lived a simple, mostly debt-free life so I could save save save. Retirement isn’t about age, it’s about money. A recent AARP survey shows 1-in-5 Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings and more than half worry they won’t have enough to last in retirement. That so easily could have been me.
The other sentence I underlined in “Work” so many years ago was, “I only asked to be a useful happy woman, and my wish is granted: for, I believe I am useful; I know I am happy.” I think that’s all I hoped for. The decades raced by but if I could go back in time, I would offer that 21 year old that same advice I’ve gotten many times through the years: just keep going. Work is hard, saving is hard, aging is hard. I honestly can’t believe I made it here after all.
Calmly saying "Drop the snake, Jeff" will be my new work mantra.
Congratulations on getting through, and most importantly, on all you did in your work lives.
You will be sorely missed by many. I'm just one of them.