Since reaching the hoary age of 79, I’m entitled to look back at my life and do some evaluation. And this would also mean that it is worth making an attempt to decide what I shall do with the rest of it.
If you’re a mountain climber, you know that somewhere in your future resides a mountain too formidable to climb, which is when you’d think about retirement. Except that I know of two cases where a guy dropped dead within days of signing the retirement papers, or whatever it is that you do when informed that your life is somewhat over. One was the proprietor of a grocery store I used to visit and the other was my high school principal.
When, on occasion, the subject of retirement comes up in the course of a discussion, I generally remain uncharacteristically quiet. That’s because the entire concept is foreign and terrifying, for my retirement plan is, well, blank.
I suppose that’s because of the way I’ve lived my life, the central tenet of which is that I do whatever I want. I enjoy repairing stuff, so that’s what I’ve turned to for most of my misspent years. And some years ago I longed to teach technical subjects, and I’ve spent years doing that at one school or another. And the list goes on: I wanted to work at a radio station, I wanted to work on a ship, I wanted to learn enough electronics so it would make sense to me. I’ve done all of those.
Some choices were not successful. No matter how hard I tried, I turned out to be a dud as a professor (though I still tutor physics online when there’s work, which hasn’t been often) It also seems that I cannot work in an office with other people (it likely reminds me too much of the Kinsler family), making it necessary to establish my own little one-man shops.
All this has proven manageable over the years, or it was until my body and brain went south. I am currently debating whether I should continue to repair clocks, for my hand tremor has reached the point where I spend most of the time looking for tiny parts that I’ve dropped, and I may have lost confidence in my ability to tear down complex (or fairly complex) mechanisms and re-assemble them.
Much comes from my latest clock adventure, which is a Seth Thomas Model 140 mantel clock. This thing is supposed to ring the Westminster chimes every 15 minutes and it still does. All would be fine except that the escapement (the part that goes tick-tock) will not function and, despite some ten days of intense activity, has not improved.
What I’ve finally done is to pack the whole thing in a cardboard box and promise myself that I won’t touch it for a week and turn to other chores and other clocks in the meantime. That’s not a bad strategy for now.
In the meantime, I have a formidable protector who at the moment is buzzing around the kitchen re-organizing something or other. She’s declared that she won’t give up on me.
Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, lives with his short protector and her two cats in a little house in Lancaster. We recently realized that we’ve been here longer than we’ve lived anywhere else.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Why this 79-year-old isn’t ready to retire just yet
Reporting by Mark Kinsler, Special to the Eagle-Gazette / Lancaster Eagle-Gazette
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Mark Kinsler, Special to the Eagle-Gazette | USA TODAY Network
