It’s a Young Man’s Game…Or Is It?

A bunch of different threads in this post today, the result of a bunch of different threads “runnin’ around the ol’ Duder’s head”  the past few weeks. So bear with me while I talk through things out loud. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy, although a lot less effective, I’ll grant you (and probably not very interesting to you).

So, a month ago I wrote about how I’d thought about spending the summer when I was 26 at the surf break known as the Mexican Pipeline. I finally made it there this year, in March, when I turned 51, and I wasn’t ashamed to say that, upon my arrival, the waves were intimidating.

Puerto Escondido definitely intrigues me as a potential long-term destination. (I have every expectation that if I wind up dying of old age it will be in a foreign country. After seeing the way my father, a World War II veteran, was mistreated by this country’s health system, what can a selfish deadbeat like me expect as his body starts to wind down? But that’s a topic for a separate post.) But when I thought about spending significant time in a surf-focused life, I wondered if that really made any sense to an aging (as are we all) middle-aged man.

Puerto Escondido is a destination for young surfers from all over the world, and there’s a reason that particular demographic overruns the town during peak season. It takes strength and fitness just to step into the ring at a serious wave. And while I still go to the gym and play hockey and lead a generally fitness-focused lifestyle, well, there’s a reason I play in the over-50 hockey tournaments now. Can I still handle a wave like Puerto? Yes. But it’s exhausting. And potentially dangerous. And my recharge capabilities aren’t what they once were. Those are just facts.

So when I look at potential paths I might take — and I do that a lot as this year in which the generations of my family changed hands winds down — I question whether such a pursuit is an appropriate core focus of my life. In fact, I question WHAT should be the focus of my life to come.

And that’s an important question because in just a few months my father will have been gone for a year, at which point (or shortly thereafter) my role as executor, trustee and caretaker of the family’s assets and physical legacy will come to a close. And I have some decisions to make.

Do my brother and I keep our family’s house (our sister has no interest in keeping her share)? Does that mean I remain living there? If so, what do I do for a living around here? If not, do we rent out the house? Or do we sell? If we rent or sell, where should I go and what should I do? And if we keep the house, how do my brother and I come to terms about what we should do about various aspects of the house’s management and upkeep (and who should pay for them)?

Questions of career, location, home, legacy — questions that have built up over the close-to-a-hundred years of my parents’ lives and the lives of the children they produced, including me — are about to require an answer. And as those of you who know me well can attest, I have a wide range of interests and dreams pulling me in an even wider range of directions.

The security of a “straight” job back in Corporate America has its appeals but in my field those options are largely out west. And even if they’re in around here, among the reasons I didn’t opt for a commuting-into-Boston career when I got out of college is the fact it’s a hellacious, dangerous, expensive and exhausting commute from Plum Island. And it still is. But shouldn’t I be maximizing my income (and savings) at this point in my life in an attempt to set up my so-called “golden years”?

Or: What about carving out some sort of niche, working-for-myself career? Can I parlay my skills (cough, cough) and experience into something that lets me work from, say, the office on the third floor of the house at Plum Island? Travel — to Boston, New York and beyond — is easy enough. My mother always implored me to be my own boss (as she was), but I’ve yet to make that happen. Maybe I can create enough of a career yet stay at home — and keep that home in the family. But can I even create that career now, at this age?

Speaking of which: underlying all of these internal (now external) debates is the aforementioned fact that I recently turned 51. I’ve already experienced light doses of ageism and I can only expect them to increase, right? Is Corporate America or building one’s own career every bit a young man’s game as living for surf in a grubby apartment in Mexico?

Then there’s the age-old dream — and those of you who’ve known me for any length of time have heard me talk about this since I was a teenager — of buying a sailboat and taking off. I came close back in the ‘90s (Mom, in her infinite wisdom, refused to help me out financially then, for which I remain thankful). I came close in 2011 (which, given what happened to Mom and Dad in 2012 and 2013, I’m glad fell through). And when I returned to New England last spring I planned on two things: one, helping Dad; and two, buying a crappy, old boat and fixing it up to head south in November. That plan went with Dad in July, but there’s no reason the plan can’t be resurrected this year.

I follow the journals of friends who are living a life of early retirement. I follow those who continue to work but live on the road. I monitor the experiences of those courageous souls who never bought into the system in the first place. Hell, I even adore the fictional character Travis McGee and his plan for “taking retirement in installments.” So the pull of that dream I’ve had since I was a boy remains strong. And this might be the time to make it happen. Selling the house would certainly generate enough cash to go. Keeping the house and renting it out would generate at least some income on which to live. Hell, there might even still be enough money left in my savings to go as I’d planned to last year (though I’ve been burning through a lot of it this year as I’ve been living at the island and chipping away at what’s needed doing), but would managing that be more trouble than it’s worth?

No matter what I wind up doing, I still need some sort of purpose in life though, don’t I? Elon Musk raised the question of a universal basic income as a response to the rise in workplace automation, but questioned what, if anything, such “free” income could do for people in terms of a reason to live. As I’ve been mostly idle for the past year, I’ve come to realize that a focus, a calling, a purpose is a good thing. It’s a requirement, actually. Elon’s right.

Which brings me back around to today’s original question: What to do when those things that might function as a focus in my life are largely geared toward those (much) younger than me? Do I rage against the dying of the light? Or take up a serious golf habit?

These are the things I ponder of late. A lot.

Navel Gazing, New England, Ocean Fun, Personal, Travel, , , , , ,

The Big Room

On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room.

I hadn’t been able to make the move sooner for a variety of reasons. For one, I like my old room. It’s cozier than the master and it looks out toward the northeast and the Atlantic Ocean — or rather, it did before the asshole put up the oversized monstrosity on the lot across the street. The bizarrely designed box took the place of the small cottage that had been there for decades; the woman who lived there died and the charity group she left the place to sold it off to the new guy. He’s an architect who ruined a nice, stylish beach place down the street a few years ago and the worked his magic on this beachfront lot. But I digress…

Anyway, yes, my old room is cozy and nice. But it is also small. And the bathroom is down the hall, shared with two other bedrooms on the floor.

The master, on the other hand, has high ceilings, a wide-open floor plan and an en suite bathroom. It also has a view of the Atlantic (to the east and southeast) and direct access to the deck. While not an issue with winter approaching, deck access is nice because that’s where I spend a lot of my evenings at home. My usual spot on the deck, accessed through my sister’s room, faces east and northeast, and while nice, has been assaulted by the aforementioned glitter dome. That the palace is lighted all night also lessens the stargazing.

But at my parents’ corner of the house there’s a wondrous shadow. No streetlights impinge on the sky and the neighbors on that side value the night sky as much as I do. And instead of having to carry speakers outside with me when I chill out on the deck in my old spot, now I’ll be able to simply open a window and turn a speaker to face outside and I’ll have tunes to suit the occasion.

So there were concrete reasons why it took me three months to make the move. But there were also more subtle obstacles to be overcome.

For starters, it’s not my room. It’s my parents’. It’s ALWAYS been their room. Moving in there puts the final touch on the fact that they’re gone and the generations have changed hands. It’s like it’s the next, penultimate step in the path of life: birth, cradle, shared bedroom, own bedroom, master bedroom…casket. It’s been weird enough no longer having living parents and moving into the master bedroom makes that fact even clearer.

There was also one unanticipated consequence to moving into the master bedroom: doing so has made the already-too-big house even bigger. When I occupied one bedroom and the shared bath and the hall in between, I was using a good half of the floor. Now, with everything self-contained in the master suite, I’m using maybe a quarter — and the rest of the floor can essentially be shut down. That’s nice financially — the heat can be turned way down in those other rooms and the sun bakes the master room to a high temperature all winter long, which is nice — but it makes the place a little lonelier.

And finally, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to make the master room mine. I’ve hung some things on the wall and put my clothes in the closet, but I don’t know that anything less than a wholesale overhaul — new paint, new window treatments, maybe new flooring — ever makes it seem like I’m doing anything other than sleeping in my parents’ room. Or maybe that’s just a function of time. I guess we’ll find out.

With the finality of my father’s passing, and the fact that my siblings and I are now the oldest limb on this family tree, everything has become a function of time, and finding things out down the road. I guess all of life for everyone is that way, really, but it’s still weird to make that right turn into the master bedroom instead of continuing on down to the end of the hall when turning in for the night.

*    *    *

Sidebar: People have asked about the future of the house. The short version is this: The house has, for almost a decade, been owned by a trust comprised of my brother, my sister and me. My sister has no interest in the home but my brother and I do so we’re going to buy out her third and keep the place. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how finances work out and that won’t be determined for several months. But I’m living here now and have been since the spring, and I’ll stay here for the foreseeable future barring any amazing job offers elsewhere (hint, hint to anyone reading). On the job front, my goal is to set up some freelance projects (another hint, hint to anyone reading) — consulting, writing, editing — so that I can remain here. And in the meantime I will continue to clean and thin out the inconceivable amount of stuff my we-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression-so-we-saved-EVERYTHING parents had stashed all over the place. One dumpster’s worth of stuff has already been removed and another will be needed soon. I also have close to a thousand books to be donated or discarded — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of books I’m keeping because they’re of interest to me personally or they’re first editions or autographed or an antique or some other reason that gives them a particular value. If you’re a bibliophile, give me a shout.

Personal, , , , , , ,

Fools’ (plural) Overture

August 1982

The Smith men, in Utah in August 1985, following the loss of the youngest Smith male.

Heads up. Here comes a whole lot of navel gazin’. Hey, it’s cheaper to puke on this here blog than it is to pay a therapist to get this shit out…

I’ve chronicled the challenges I faced following my mother’s passing in October 2012. Mom’s passing was a blow, but the real challenges came three weeks later, when my father broke his hip the night hurricane Sandy broke the metro New York City area. I’ve chronicled here, too, the challenges of the months that followed, caring for my father and doing things no child should have to do for his parent. And finally, I chronicled my exasperated escape, when my father’s stubborn nature and disrespect led me to move back to San Diego — pretty much as far away from Plum Island as you can get and still be in the continental United States — in September 2013.

What I haven’t chronicled (in addition to the times since that move) are the pangs and emotions that have wracked me ever since. No, I’m not Catholic and even if I was, I did my part for the cause. I felt wholly justified in departing, and I don’t know a soul — not even my father’s friends — who would begrudge me my leaving.

So why is it that when I hear from my sister this evening — my father won’t talk to me anymore — that my father, after falling and hurting himself, and spending some time in Newburyport’s Anna Jaques Hospital, is now in one of the notoriously bad rehab facilities, that I feel a sudden obligation to jump on a plane and go back to New England to rectify the situation?

My sister’s call came as I was nearing my apartment this evening. I called her back a few minutes later, after I’d walked inside, and she gave me the details. And that urge to head east came over me like some guy whose buddy took a bayonet for him back during the war.

The irony is that if I did fly back, my father wouldn’t agree to anything that would get him out of the crappy home and back into his house. He’s become so stubborn that he turned down food items he normally loves that my brother got him at Christmas, just because HE hadn’t suggested them first. Seriously. So suggest arranging an in-home nurse because it will get him? No. Suggest rearranging the house to accommodate less stairs and simpler living? No way. Don’t even bother suggesting a nicer, more home-like rehab facility such as those he was in in 2012 — those are right out.

I’d reconciled that realization, that his stubborn nature makes my abandoning the life and career I’m building here in San Diego a pointless gesture, over the course of a drive up the coast following the phone call with my sister. I stopped in for some tacos at a joint in Carlsbad and was driving home, content if somewhat saddened, when a song I haven’t heard in years came on the radio.

It was Supertramp’s song, “Fool’s Overture.” It’s a long, disjointed (but beautiful, great, haunting) piece about Winston Churchill and the resilience of the British people during the darkest days of World War II. It chronicles the shabby treatment the Brits gave Churchill, their savior, following the war, and makes clear that country’s debt to such a great leader.

It must be the fact the song references the war that made it hit me so hard on the ride home this evening. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe my father ever came home from World War II. He had a career, raised not one, but two, families, and has had a great, long life. But he’s still in the Ardennes; I believe that firmly. He’s one of a generation that we — not just Americans, but the entire world — owe an incalculable debt to. And me, too; I owe him. I still believe I’ve more than paid that debt back, but the anxiety of wondering if I have, and the sadness of watching, however remotely, an ancient man watch things wind down is unbearable.

The fool in Supertramp’s song is Churchill, those who cast him aside, Neville Chamberlain and all Brits who’ve come since 1940. Same goes for my family: we’re all fools. As Prince in “Romeo and Juliet” points out: all are punished.

Navel Gazing, Personal, , , ,