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Recollecting time as it ticks away is an intimidating process
By Carl Heintze
The other day, a couple of young people spent 2 1/2 hours getting me to tell them my life story.
It wasn't because they were interested either in me or what I'd done--well, not in a personal sense. They are representatives of a small startup company in San Mateo that does market research. It happens that all three of us had gone to the same university, and they were interviewing all the people they could find from that school who were willing to talk to them.
Their current project is to interview what they politely call seniors (read: the old) to find out as much as they can about our habits, history, likes and dislikes. They use this information to consult with others about marketing strategies. So for the 2 1/2 hours, we chatted. In all honesty, I should say that I talked and they listened, interrupting now and then with a question designed to keep me on track. And naturally, it turned out to be something like an oral history of my life.
You might think at first glance that this was good. As my wife said after it was over (from a great deal of experience), "You like to talk about yourself, you know." Then she added what I thought was an unkind cut, "Most men do."
I countered that I at least like to write about myself, but, as usual, she was right. I did enjoy my oral biography. But their visit had more serious effect on me. After they'd gone, I got to reflecting about what I'd said to them (and, of course, to myself) and I got scared. For one thing, it was, in a way, writing or telling my own obituary. In an afternoon, I had to sum up how and where I had been born, where I was brought up, where I went to school (including college), World War II (a really big item in the lives of men my age), my children and what had happened to them (and hadn't), when and why I retired, how long I'd been retired, what I did in retirement, and so on.
If you don't think that's intimidating, try it yourself. Get someone to sit down with you and go over your life in detail some afternoon. Explain why you lived in the same house for 41 years, why you never did more than you did in the business world, how successful or unsuccessful you were as a father or mother, and why you spend a good deal of time sitting and staring out the window. (That's the retirement part.) The most overwhelming part of this experience is that your life is about over. Well, if it isn't over, it has passed from the active work phase to that peculiar state many older Americans find themselves in these days: retirement. It doesn't seem that you can add a great deal more to the equation.
Indeed, retirement is an uncertain, even perilous state. When retirees get together, they spend a lot of time talking about the state of their health, how much their health-insurance supplemental to Medicare costs, who their doctor is, and who they know who is sick and who is even sicker. They generally tend to avoid taking account of who has died. They also spend time talking about their children, if they have them, in part because their children are the people in their lives who are doing the exciting things.
Or they may spend time discussing travel. The current generation of retirees travels a lot. They certainly travel far more than their parents. They tend to collect travel experiences as if they were creating a photographic album--as, indeed, in some cases they are. They have been almost everywhere, Europe, Asia, Central and South America, even Africa (mostly to see the animals in Kenya). It's uncertain to me how much they get out of these experiences, but they certainly do go. Neither illness nor injury slows some of them down. They just keep on traveling, me among them.
I plead guilty to travel as a part of retirement, although I have yet to see the lions and elephants in Kenya. But it also brings up the question, as did my young questioners: what are you doing with the rest of your life?
I assume they wanted to know so they could tell others what I might buy in my golden years. But it also engendered a lot of guilt on my part. After they left, I asked myself what had I done with all that time and what was I going to do with the time I had left?
The only certain thought I had (which I did not tell them) was that I wasn't going to spend much of it thinking about what I was going to buy.
But I suppose they found that out, anyway.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
