Harold Fry: Stepping Out of Oneself

Perhaps what people fear most about retirement is boredom. Day after day of sameness. And the silence between a couple who, after decades together, have little to say or who have chosen to paper over past grief and grievances.

Such was the (fictional) life of Harold Fry – until he gets a letter from Queenie Hennesey, a former co-worker, who says that she is in hospice, dying of cancer. He tries to write to Queenie, who lives at the other end of England, but what do you say?  He tries to call, but she can’t come to the phone. Instead, he starts walking and soon becomes convinced (by a young woman who microwaves him a burger at a gas station) that his journey to Queenie will keep her alive. The notion that determination can defeat death is an idea that captivates everyone he encounters.

But what is most intriguing about “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” by Rachel Joyce, is the transformation and self-discovery that Harold experiences as he steps out of his decades-long rut -- opening himself up to people he meets along the way, discovering a natural world he’s never known, and challenging his body as never  before.

Mile after mile on the road, he is consumed by memories that now appear in a fresh light, reshaped by newfound strengths.

In so many ways, he is starting over. And the starting over is not a one-time process. As Joyce writes:

“Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naive. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcoming and overcome them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.”

For that matter, Harold’s wife – left behind –discovers, to her surprise, her own resilience. She, too, takes a deep-dive into their shared history and makes startling discoveries of her own.

It’s a simple tale, with a profound reminder that at any age we can take steps to move in a new direction. That we can walk a path of discovery.

The Man of the Purple Martins

Newborn purple martins at Cape May Lighthouse

Quick! Before the purple martins arrive in Brazil, I must write this. (How the summer has ‘flown’!)

Back in early July I was stunned to arrive at Cape May, N.J.’s lighthouse to find four really big birdhouses – bird hotels, actually -- being cranked from about 15 feet up down to eye level.  Inside each one were drawers. And inside the drawers were nests of tiny newborn purple martins.

 Naked in their featherlessness. Pink. Wrinkly. Vulnerable.

But cared for by more than their anxious parents, who kept arriving with the chicks’ favorite food – dragonflies – in their beaks.

Purple martins get human TLC

Also looking out for them were a couple of unretiring men who crank down the houses each day to shoo out other species like house sparrows and starlings, that commandeer the nests. They also order crickets to be sent overnight from Kentucky when the weather is so bad that the purple martins can’t find their favorite food, insects, on their own. (You fire the crickets toward the martins with a slingshot until they realize it’s food. Then they come flocking. Who knew?)

Such volunteers are called “landlords” in purple martin speak.

The day we were at the lighthouse in early July, the father of many landlords, Allen Jackson, 66, was there using special pliers to crimp tiny bands around the babies’ skinny legs.

 It’s a hobby – or rather, a mission – with roots in his childhood. As a youngster in Rhode Island, he and his father tried to nurture a purple martin colony, but failed because the management techniques now used were unknown. While working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in New Jersey, Jackson began setting up colonies on his own time – and then went full bore after retiring in 2002, the year he was also named “Purple Martin Landlord of the Year.”

 He’s set up 200 purple martin colonies in New Jersey and is a major force in the movement to rescue the species, which, east of the Rockies, depend on humans to create their housing. (Native Americans set out hollowed out gourds for them.)

Otherwise the bird, previously in a long decline, could be vanishing.

“I am one of those that stands by the fact that I am busier in retirement than I was doing work,” he said, as one after the other he gently held a chick in his fist and squeezed the band around its ankle, marked with a date and location.  “I’m going every single day. I love what I’m doing. My wife is ready to divorce me because I’m so involved in this.”

He came to bird banding naturally, he said, as he sat on a stool, a bucket filled with soft wood shavings between his knees.  “I grew up in the country in Rhode Island. When I was young, I used to milk a cow by hand. So this is very natural to me,” he said. “I’d rather work out of a bucket than anything else.”

This morning of banding was historic in a way. It was to be  Jackson’s banding marathon.

High tech has come to saving birds: banding is out,  geolocators are in.

With banding, if a human gets close enough to a bird, he or she can read where it was born and then wonder how it got to its arrival point.  With geolocators, which capture daily light records, analysts can retrieve the device and then use local sunrise and sunset times to pinpoint the bird’s migratory path.

So, now what will Jackson do? Is another transition in the offing?

“I will continue to do purple martins. I’ll probably start four or five purple martin colonies each year. It keeps me going all the time. I give talks, I have a slide program” and he motivates and mentors landlords for each colony.

In an interview in 2002, Jackson explained his love of the martins, saying, “It’s hard to believe a bird can have so much of an impact on a person, but it truly is a magnificent bird. I am fortunate to be in a perfect location for purple martins, not only to be able to have a martin colony, but to be able to work with so many other great people who also care.”

Caring. Making a difference to the world. Mentoring others.

 All ingredients for the next great thing.

Take a Guess: At What Age Are Professors Retiring?

Two stunning statistics: 

--60 percent of academics are staying on the job into their 70s.
--And 15 percent are into their 80s.
These numbers come from a study  done only about New York University faculty and published in the July issue of Educational Researcher. But they conclude that those same stats apply broadly.
No wonder it's tough for young academics to get jobs! And why tenure is going bye-bye.
Back in 1986 when Congress passed the Federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which made mandatory retirement at age 70 illegal, it exempted post-secondary schools. But in 1993, after the National Research Council said that allowing college profs to keep their posts would have "minimal impact"on higher ed, the government did just that. Before then, only 11 percent of faculty stayed on the job after age 70, perhaps because of special arrangements, the study says.
Here's another surprise ! (but maybe not to some of you.)
Even those who do leave their academic jobs aren't necessarily "retiring." It's the professors who can best continue to be intellectually engaged and financially rewarded, namely those in the fields of healthcare, business and the law who go off to set up shop as consultants.
So what to do? The researchers say there should be a rethink of how to use these professors-who-don't-leave. And it's much the kind of thing that Marc Friedman and his encore.org talk about -- using their wisdom to help younger generations. Here's the new study's suggestion:

Consideration should be given to developing programs to encourage senior faculty who are not otherwise as fully engaged in research and grant-writing as they were in earlier years to focus their activities on classroom teaching, advising undergraduates and graduates, and mentoring junior faculty...These efforts may not only serve to avoid or reduce the costs of pre-retirement packages but also may serve to meet the increased demands for improved teaching, advising, and mentoring without having to hire additional faculty or otherwise expend additional resources.

P.S. The above picture was my father's -- and it's been "under the bed" for decades. Finally, a use for it! It's titled "Portrait -- Artist Unknown" by Lawson Wood. It was done in 1919. Maybe professors didn't have to retire back then. Or they just looked older!

Bruce Thornton-- Still Loud and Clear at Amtrak

At Amtrak's 30th Street Station this morning, I saw -- or rather I heard -- Bruce Thornton, the Amtrak announcer with the basso voice.

A year ago when I met him, he was counting the months to  retirement. “I don’t want to be a honeydew,” he had told me, as in “Honey, do this! Honey, do that!”

As soon as he saw me, he grinned and said, "I've got 11 months to go!”

What will you do? I asked.

“I’m going to work mornings for USAIR,” he replied, a job he had mentioned last summer. Unlike so many of us, some people walk a very straight line into their next great thing, never doubting their choice.

I’ll try to talk with him a year from now and see how his transition is going.

I hope it will involve his wonderfully deep voice and that he’ll keep articulating “in the King’s English,”  just the way his high school teacher coached him to do.

Revealing Secrets, Repairing Reputations at Our 50th High School Reunion

I dropped by my high school reunion last weekend for the part I liked best last time around, 10 years ago. That was a casual lunch where people talked emotionally about what their high school experience had meant to their lives. It proved to be a significant question for 1963 graduates of Scarsdale High School who revealed their embarrassment –and occasional rebellion – at claiming this wealthy community as their hometown, especially during the Civil Rights era.

This time, the event moderator was a classmate who had risen in recent years to an unexpected spotlight: judge in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy case.

“Ten years ago, I had no grandchildren. I now have four grandchildren,” Jim Peck said. “Ten years ago I was a practicing lawyer in a big law firm in New York. Today I’m a federal bankruptcy judge. My life has completely changed in 10 years.” 

He suggested that this time our class topic for discussion be, “How we are the same, how we are different and where do we see ourselves going?”

 But first, he said, “Let’s talk about why we came back to this reunion, our 50^th.”

Big mistake. The judge with the chops to manage a courtroom teeming with lawyers, had just lost control of a classroom of 67-somethings, who never got back to the theme.

Instead, over the next hour and 17 minutes, there would be tears, laughter and true confessions as classmates – many of

whom barely knew each other back then – sought to explain what had drawn them back.

For some, it was a chance to show each other the person they had grown into – not the teenager who’d only gotten B’s or done dumb things – sometimes so dumb and so secret that even their classmates had never heard the tales til now.

Like: “Pool hopping” –swimming naked in people’s backyard pools, then running down the street naked, trying to escape the cops that some neighbor had called.

Or the regular poker game played in an apartment in the next town, rented by 14 or 15 seniors for that purpose.

Or calling the geometry teacher, “stupid” – and doing so in front of the entire class.

“I came here to salvage my reputation,” said one classmate, after listing his own litany of detentions. “Because I don’t want you to remember those incidents. I want you to remember me as someone who helped kids in the juvenile justice system and foster care. I want you to remember me for working for 25 years to develop programs for families dealing with cancer. And I want to be remembered as a good father.”

 Me, at graduation

Said another: “I came because I felt good enough myself to do it.  I used to be ashamed of myself and now I’m proud --of everybody.”

Yes, “proud of everybody.” There was love in the air, though most had to squint at each other’s name tags to remember who it was.

Eric Baron, an adjunct professor at Columbia University's business school and a consultant specializing in corporate training (www.barongroup.com), said one of his biggest regrets –which he first realized at the 20^th reunion -- was failing to take the time to get to know so many “intelligent, thoughtful, creative” people while he was in high school. “I was horrified I had never made connections with them.  One of the reasons for coming back is to see some of those missed opportunities and to grab a little of it during the few hours we have together.”

Or as Jim Peck said of the previous night’s dinner:  “I ran into people I hadn’t seen in 50 years and I had more meaningful conversations with them than with people I really know well for 10 or 20 years, but we didn’t grow up together.” 

“Magically,” he said, “we are more friends than strangers.”

What it is it about these teenage ties that brings out so much emotion after so many years?

“You’re my peer group -- who I feel I am, ” said one. Between 4^th grade when he entered the school system and graduation, “I became identifiably me and we were doing that together and it’s created a kind of psychological reference point that’s very powerful.”

“This is the closest we’re ever going to come to time travel,” said another. Coming back in time to talk with each other.

And,  “The seeds of my life were planted here.”

For a few contrarians, what they did not do in high school became the kick-in-the-pants for the rest of their lives:

One who rebelled against all the academic pressure cruised through high school as an underachiever, only to discover that his 85 average wasn’t good enough to get into an Ivy League school. So for the first time in 50 years, he came to a class reunion, traveling from Hong Kong to tell us of his life’s success.

“I think it gave me the impetus later to be very very motivated to be successful,” he rose to tell the group.  “My mantra was to be as successful as I could be.

Baron, nagged throughout his life by the regret that he had never dared to try out for football, said it had made him determined to take risks, most of which have worked out.

Perhaps the teariest moments of that lunch,  the gregarious, laughing kid we knew in high school revealed himself as have secretly been reeling. Insecure in a new school, angry about his parents’ divorce, and suddenly diagnosed with Type I diabetes, he crashed his car and was saved just in time by a shot of glucogen. High school offered him the lifeline of a new best friend and his friend’s whole family, whom he adored, he said, tears welling.

“The microcosm that Scarsdale High School was to me was really to face adversity. Major, major adversity.

“A lot of you saw me as a very happy-go-lucky guy who seemed like life was easy, but I needed to put that out there because I needed people to like me.”

Wrapping it up, Peck said.

“Emotions are at the surface here, much more so than in an ordinary gathering of people some of whom I don’t recognize. Yet we are bound together. I think that’s really important. I’m glad I came here.  Especially for this conversation.  There are two truly important things in life: love and work,” he said, citing Dr. Oliver Sacks citing Freud. “There’s love in the room. I can feel it. I feel the connectivity in the room. Let’s not lose that.”

As for me, I later wondered: Did I choose to come for only a fragment of the reunion weekend because I didn’t want to open myself up to so much emotion? Had I come, instead, more as a voyeur than a participant, to capture this moment in this essay? Was I still carrying the baggage of my own insecurity, afraid, as I had been in high school, of not being accepted?

Disbelieving, as I had 50 years before, that these people had elected me “Most Likely to Succeed,” because I hadn’t  believed in myself.

Do you go to class reunions? If not, why not? If so, what's your experience?