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| Flora Wolf, former Common Pleas Judge |
In trying to find “purpose” and “meaning” in later life,
some folks act as if they’re cramming for the test of their lives: if they
don’t study really hard to figure it out, they’ll be failures in retirement.
True has-beens.
Such is the pressure.
Former Common Pleas Court Judge Flora Wolf, though, sees this next
stage of her life as “reinvention,” and one that comes with a sprinkle of luck,
love and poetry.
Of reinvention, she told about 50 people at Philadelphia’s Cosmopolitan Club the other night, “I’ve
done it more than once.”
“When I was 33, my husband died, leaving me with two small
kids, a dog and several cats. The dog had puppies -- eleven!
“It became apparent to me that I needed to work but I didn’t
want to go back to school. So I got involved in a political effort, a ‘Recall
Rizzo’ campaign,” she said, referring to the city’s cop-mayor of the 1970s. “It
was a wonderful experience for independence, self-confidence, political
connections and general friendship -- and out of that came law school.”
After a decade practicing law, Flora morphed again. She ran for
election as a judge, building, she said, “another level of confidence.” For 20
years, it was “the best job I ever had.” In her late 60s, she contemplated running for
a third term, but it didn’t seem worth it.
“You go senior at 70 and somebody else gets appointed to
take your place. So I said no. I had almost a year and a half to think about
the next reinvention.”
In reading, The Third
Chapter by Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Flora was struck
by her discussion of the “liberation” of this time of life, of “not having the
same urgency, not having the same financial pressures, of not having the same
ego, and I thought that was very appealing.”
While Flora was determined to work part time on a meaningful
project, “my goal for the first day of retirement was to stay in bed all day.
My goal for the second day was to go to [the restaurant] Parc and sit in one of
the windows and drink cappuccino and be entertained by all the passersby.”
Her plan had been to help social workers deal with
“dependency” cases in the courts, involving children and families, but with
bureaucratic changes, that idea went out the window.
Instead, serendipity flew in. And Flora was ready to embrace
it. Or rather, him.
“I didn’t know that I would find a new relationship, and
that we would travel together. It’s been an enormous pleasure. We went to India
last year,” she said.
A year and a half into her transition, she’s still finding
her way.
Yes, she’s on too many boards and committees – something she
says she’ll “have to sort out.”
And no, she isn’t spending time at
her desk. “I really need to spend an hour or two every morning doing the
computer stuff, doing the reading, doing the paperwork I avoided for the last
50 years. And perhaps I will.”
And yes, there are things about her
job she misses.
“I miss the work. I miss the
responsibility -- occasionally.
“I miss my friends, but I still
have lunch with them -- occasionally.
“It’s a good thing that we get two years
in which to figure this out because I’ve now used up a year and a half of my
transition time. I have to say it’s been one of the happiest times in my life
so far...We’re getting ready to go to France. We’re going to study French. And
when I come back I’ll find that project and save some small part of the world.”
Flora closed her remarks by reading
from the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred Tennyson:
Come,
my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off…To sail beyond
the sunset...
Though much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We
are not now that strength which in old days
Moved
earth and heaven that which we are, we are;
One
equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made
weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Click here to read a blog on another Cosmopolitan Club speaker, Dr. Anna Meadows.
If you're reading this on a phone and wish to comment, please go to unretiring.blogspot.com
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