Being a superstitious fellow, I have tended not to think deeply about retirement. By that, I don’t mean that I haven’t been paying into various employer programs and federally mandated schemes, or investing wisely, over the decades. No, what I mean is that I haven’t planned–or to put it accurately, daydreamed–very much about retirement.
This is based partly on experience–both my father and my father-in-law retired in their early sixties, and promptly expired–and partly on prudence. The idea of living in relative comfort off various pensions, of earning income without labor, is so counterintuitive after a working lifetime, so appealing and so tantalizing, as to seem, well, too good to be true. So I tend to wave off speculation on the subject with an all-purpose qualifier: If I should live so long . . .
Well, I am now of an age where the subject is less remote than it used to be. I still toss the AARP solicitations in the wastebasket, and since I’m not a golfer, ignore those handsome brochures about resorts for senior citizens along the South Carolina coast. But it is fair to assume that, sometime in the next ten years or so, employment will cease and the Golden Years shall begin.
Is this a welcome prospect? No and yes. I sincerely enjoy my work–note to editor: vomit here–and can say, in all truthfulness, that I look forward to arriving at the STANDARD offices every morning. But I have a carefully cultivated lazy streak, and can easily picture spending my afternoons planning day trips, or cataloguing my library, or chasing my long suffering, but still glamorous, wife across the veranda.
But where might all this be done? Without too much discussion, my wife and I seem to have settled implicitly on two Guiding Principles. The first is that we should live within striking distance–preferably in the same metropolitan area–of our children. To be sure, our daughter could end up in California and our son in Maine, but that leads to a corollary of Guiding Principle #1: For the bulk of our married life, my wife has been a southerner in exile, so if one of our beloved offspring settles somewhere in the Old Confederacy, we will be close behind.
I should point out, by the way, that my wife is no slouch in the manipulation department. Since she is a product of Nashville, and would undoubtedly prefer to return there at her leisure, she has carefully (and, to a startling degree, successfully) impressed the virtues of the place on our children. So the chances of one or the other of them, or even both, ending up in the capital of Tennessee are, I should guess, better than even.
The second, and undoubtedly decisive, Guiding Principle: Since my wife has loyally followed me around the country in the course of our married life–to Alabama, Kentucky, California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and (my hometown) Washington, D.C.–it seems only fair, toward the end of the ride, that her preference should prevail.
Which, I confess, is fine with me. We were married in Nashville, and it has a first-rate university (Vanderbilt), good museums, nice weather, decent second-hand bookstores, charming restaurants, interesting architecture, and (courtesy of my wife) lots of acquaintances and relations. I can live without country music, but you can spend a week in Nashville without ever knowing it is Music City, USA.
Nevertheless, any pleasure I take in visiting Nashville, as we did this Thanksgiving, is subtly tinctured by the knowledge that this might well be the city–if I should live so long–where I will think wistfully of my beloved Virginia, distribute my possessions to deserving descendants, lose my driving privileges, have infinite time on my hands, grow too arthritic to play piano, fall and dislocate my hip, and attend an increasing number of funerals–including, of course, my own.
Sure, it’s fun to drive around Nashville’s verdant residential areas and contemplate the local housing prices (modest by Washington standards) or visit a museum and consider someday becoming a Friend of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. During this recent sojourn I actually weighed the merits of different neighborhoods, and pondered whether it makes sense to settle in a one-story house in old age or to consider a “cluster” development, or even an apartment.
It’s more fun, however, to realize that, even as time gallops along, these questions may remain unresolved for years to come.
PHILIP TERZIAN
