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Not if working’s a sweat-free pleasure

By Ed Goldman

My working life can be summed up in three rhyming words: headline, deadline and bread line. If the first one misses the mark, causing you to skip the column that follows, and the second one is missed often enough to make you wonder why you subscribe to the column in the first place, the third one is inevitable, but only for me.

Many of my journalism colleagues and sworn enemies (in many cases, one and the same) are either retiring or retired some years ago, some with a generous corporate buyout. Others have had the audacity to permanently attrit (what’s sometimes called going to a better place,” as if we can be absolutely sure that we go to Disneyland when we die). 

Meanwhile, I seem to be working more than ever. I’d have said working harder instead of more, but let’s face it: When you’re lucky enough to ply a trade you enjoy almost 100 percent of the time, what are you supposed to retire from—or to? 

Some retired people say they plan to write a book but I’ve already done and am still doing that—under my own name or sometimes as a ghostwriter. (I’d tell you for whom I’ve ghost-written but then I wouldn’t be very effective at it, would I?).

Some say that when they retire they’re going to travel more. But as a freelancer, the only thing preventing me from circumnavigating the world is not having received a generous corporate buyout from anyone. I did mail in a coupon for a $5 rebate from a high-fiber cereal manufacturer a few years ago but when the check arrived, it included neither a travel brochure nor the requested bottle of Imodium®.

It’s not as though I didn’t have options early in my adult life to pursue retirement-friendly careers.

I had an affinity for performing on stage but wasn’t an especially fine actor, just “peppy,” as one critic saw me. Meanwhile, aptitude tests suggested I could become an attorney but, as with performing, just because I had potential in a particular field didn’t mean it’d be a fit. In fact, I felt about lawyering the same way a character in a Peter DeVries novel felt about writing—that he’d like it better “if it weren’t for all that paperwork.”

I admit that’s a dated one-liner since there’s less and less paperwork required of writers these days than before the invention of the home computer and smartphone. To be sure, I still do some amount of writing in longhand, often beginning a column on my iPhone while waiting in traffic for a light to change or a flaming Tesla to be removed from the roadway.

Writing has kept me youthful, at least on the inside. On the outside, of course, I look every one of my 118 years—though I have to say that my chins and pecs have yet to link up with plans to meet at my midsection for a voyage to the bottom of the me. 

A number of retirees love having the time to golf, play pickleball and fish, only two of which I’ve ever done for more than a half-hour each. 

My golf experience involved going with my dad to hit a bucket of balls one summer evening because he’d been asked to round out a foursome the next day—and, like me, had never played.

The cousin-in-law who’d invited him to play had done so in the hope that he and my dad would profoundly lose to his two clients, who completed the quartet. But my dad was a natural athlete all of his life and took to the game. You know where this is headed, don’t you? My dad outplayed the other three men, he and his cousin-in-law won the round and my cousin-in-law lost both of the clients within a few days.