I can afford to retire. I suspected that was the case. My university has an excellent retirement plan, my house is paid for, and my wife and I have been storing pretax cash in a 403(b) plan for years. But seeing the spreadsheet that showed a postretirement income roughly equal to what I now earn was a revelation.
For years I swore I would work until I dropped. My dad retired at 62 and immediately went downhill: divorced at 64, nursing home at 67, dead at 72. He was depressed, a steady drinker, and fundamentally unhappy with life, so perhaps he was atypical, but I've known others who followed a similar path.
And most days, I like what I do as grants director at a small university in the Midwest. I like having an office to go to, I like most of my coworkers, I like the occasional travel that my job requires.
So why stop? Four reasons:
First, I have interests outside of my job. I garden, I cook, I take photographs. I consult for other institutions. I exercise. I build things in my wood shop. My wife and I like to travel. Those activities look especially attractive when I'm sitting behind a desk working full time.
But I know the attraction can be illusory. I've been involuntarily retired a couple of times in the past and learned that cutting firewood day after day isn't nearly as much fun in the execution as it is in the dreaming. Still, it's not as if I would be twiddling my thumbs and watching endless reruns of Law & Order if I didn't go to work every day.
Second, my grandchildren seem to really enjoy having me around. I have two of them, ages 5 and 3, with a third one on the way. The 5-year-old is learning his letters; we like to write stories together. His sister needs no encouragement to make up stories -- usually involving princesses -- but she appreciates an audience. Their parents are as stressed as most young professionals with children, so my occasional visits provide them with a much-needed break. I would like to spend more time with them.
Third, my memory is failing. I have to consult the campus telephone directory far more than I used to, and half the time I struggle to remember the name of the person whose number I was searching for. Recently, I was well into a novel before I realized I had read it before. Worse yet, I couldn't remember how it ended, so I finished it anyway.
Those are relatively trivial failures, but within the past couple of years I've missed two deadlines. One was for a grant competition that we might or might not have won; the other was for a guaranteed $80,000 in federal money. Another administrator forgot that deadline, too, and was equally culpable. Fortunately, he had enough reserves to meet the deficit, so disaster was averted.
But I'm the grants administrator here; forgetting a deadline is a cardinal sin, and it still stings.
Worried that I was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, I made an appointment for a neurological exam. The doctor had me balance on my toes, then on my heels, then with my eyes closed. She tested my visual field by circling her pencil around my head and asking me to report when I could no longer see it. After every test, she would tell the intern in the room with us, "Not bad, for his age," "OK, for his age," or "Pretty good, for his age."
And that was her diagnosis: normal, for my age, and no signs of early Alzheimer's. Was I relieved? A little. I suppose I could have extra-early onset Alzheimer's, but it's more likely I'm suffering from normal memory loss. My age cohort around the campus calls it the CRS syndrome, for Can't Remember Squat.
But it does make me wonder: Is it time to hang it up? Can I keep doing my job? I think I can. I haven't missed a deadline since the $80,000 mistake, and I'm using more ticklers and reminders than I used to. My bosses and constituents seem happy with my performance. Still, those lapses in memory tell me that it's time to start thinking about retiring. I guess that's normal, for my age, too.
Finally, and perhaps the most important reason I have been thinking about retirement: While I still enjoy aspects of my job, larger and larger pieces of it are becoming tiresome.
Working with faculty members on new projects can be exciting. It's downright fun to help someone create a new course, pursue a research agenda, or design a new curriculum. I even enjoy editing grant proposals and writing budgets. Most faculty members hate those chores. When I pitch in, they are grateful, and that is satisfying.
Even some of my ancillary responsibilities are rewarding. In recent years, I've coordinated undergraduate research programs on my campus. Some of the work is tedious -- arranging travel to conferences, publicizing off-campus opportunities, sorting grant proposals -- but I get to work with bright, committed, enthusiastic students who are doing fascinating projects. That's a treat.
On the other hand, my patience is wearing thin. Recently I met with two professors for an hour to talk about their grant proposal. One of them, a guy who can't ask a question without immediately supplying two alternative answers (a problem endemic to academics), was his normal pain-in-the-neck self. He's written a pretty good proposal, however, so his verbosity was tolerable.
But his co-investigator drove me crazy. A young scientist doing excellent work, she seemed incapable of finishing a sentence. Every opening clause elicited a parenthetical remark, which led to another digression, then another, and so on.
My notes from the meeting are a hodgepodge of scribbles and squiggles, lines looping back to early phrases, boxes and arrows pointing to nothing -- in other words, a mess. I wanted to smack her. Five years ago, even a year ago, I would have had much more patience.
And my tolerance for baloney is also decreasing. I've served on governance bodies at three universities and chaired several of them. In my experience, faculty members are at their worst in Senate meetings. When they should ask questions, they disclaim; when they should deliberate, they fulminate. Every issue -- curricular, administrative, fiscal, personnel -- becomes a political one, and none of the participants will budge from their positions, loudly expressed.
At one time, I could sit through those endless debates with equanimity and sometimes even contribute a nugget of wisdom. Not anymore. And don't even get me started about the administrative meetings on strategic planning or accreditation. Almost intolerable.
Have I reached the tipping point, where my suppressed screams are outweighing the entertainment value of academic life? Am I ready to file my retirement papers?
Not quite yet. I've been around long enough that I can minimize the baloney and maximize the fun stuff, so even though my patience is declining, I regularly stay in my office longer than I must, just because I'm working on something interesting.
Besides, how could this place get along without me? I created this office, invented all of its policies and procedures. I'm the only one who knows how it all works. Human-resource experts preach that no one is indispensable, and I agree. But if I were to depart precipitously, my university would struggle a little. I would like to help arrange a smooth transition, and we're not ready yet.
Still, I have a tentative plan: I expect to cut back to half-time this year and retire in the summer of 2009. I've shared my plan with my boss and we've started talking about transition, so the ball is rolling. I have many issues to think about between now and my final day, both personal and professional. I'll be writing about them in occasional columns.
