This New Internet Thing, Chapter 2

That Retirement Gift

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

====== That Retirement Gift =====

Two years ago, on June 15, 1990, Len’s retirement date came up. He’d have kept working if he could, but old-line industrial companies like Chrysler were pretty strict about retirement, unless you were a bigshot. At age 65, you get the gold watch and out you go. 

Len had a lot of people under him, and they organized a farewell lunch. He’d built up his division’s finance department singlehandedly, and most of those folks owed their jobs and their careers to him. At lunch, they all took turns telling Len stories, and there were a lot of wet eyes in the restaurant. Mitch, the first person he’d hired and his designated successor, told how, in 1961, Len had taken him to lunch in his Dodge Dart convertible with the top down, and they’d been the envy of everyone on Woodward Ave. Len knew this would happen, of course, which was why he always took his interviewees to lunch that way. 

Later on, Judy described her experience going to lunch with him in his 1964 Chrysler 300K convertible, a story that sounded remarkably similar to Mitch’s. It turned out almost everyone had a story like that. Mitch yelled out, “Hey, Len, didn’t you ever hire anyone during the winter?” He said, “A couple of you, but it was a lot harder.” Everyone laughed.

Mitch asked him what his plans were now that he’d shaken off his chains at last. He said, “I’m gonna get my golf score down, finally. Get myself in shape. And there’s a long list of projects around the house I’ve been putting off, so I guess now I have no more excuses!” While he had the floor, he took the opportunity to give his goodbye speech, which everyone promptly forgot, including him. He noted that Chrysler was moving to Auburn Hills near his house, and why, oh why, couldn’t they have done that ten years earlier? His commute would have gone down to ten minutes!

Everyone laughed, but getting out of Detroit had been on everyone’s mind since the 1967 riots. Detroit was rotting away. Just last night, the Pistons had won the NBA championship and riots had erupted, killing 8 people. In 1967 at least there were grievances and riots all over America, but this riot was utterly pointless. What made it worse was that the city officials tried to blame the media for exaggerating it. Some of them made a point of saying that hundreds of thousands were peacefully celebrating the victory and only a few were violent, as if that made any difference.

No one at the lunch wanted to talk about last night, except for the game itself. Mitch gave Len the group present: a 20-year-old bottle of Ardbeg. Everyone knew how much he loved Scotch, and especially about the bottle he kept in his bottom drawer for special occasions, against all company regulations. “Save some for me, for when I come visiting, Len!” yelled out Dan, one of his newer hires. Len couldn’t help thinking that he’d probably never see any of these people again.

Finally, he shook hands with the men and hugged the women and got into his car, which nowadays was not a convertible anymore. Now he had a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron, “the land yacht” as he called it. While they were in the restaurant, someone had tied a bunch of tin cans to the back bumper, as if he was just married. He drove a mile away and then took them off, since he didn’t feel like dragging tin cans all the way back to Bloomfield Hills.

Back in the house, he looked at the bottle of Scotch, which he’d been intending to save, and said to himself, “If not on my retirement day, when?” He opened it and poured himself a drink and sat down to read the paper. It was too late to get in nine holes of golf today, and he was too tired anyway. Maybe Monday.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He still had some hair, which he was thankful for. A whole lot of guys were bald by his age. His lean, tough body from the Army had melted a long time ago and he had a fair-sized paunch. Next week he’d join the Y and get back in shape before it was too late and he was pushing a walker around.

The weekend felt like any other, with Janet calling at 9:00 am Saturday morning. She’d heard about the rioting and wanted to be sure he was OK. She tried to sound bright and cheery when she said, “So what are you going to do now that you’re free?” This was not the first time she’d asked that. “I’m going to brag about you whenever the other old folks talk about their grandkids!” he wanted to say.

On Sunday night it felt weird that he didn’t have that tightening of his stomach that said “back to work tomorrow!” He set his alarm for 7:45 instead of 6:00, although he figured he’d probably wake up at 6:00 anyway. He did, but he lay in bed awake instead of getting up. At some point  he went back to sleep again and found himself dreaming when the alarm finally went off at 7:45. “It’s a whole new life!” he thought. He made waffles for breakfast, something he almost never had time for, unless Janet was visiting.

What to do today? He realized that if he was going to play 18 holes he should have teed off already. “Can’t sleep ‘til noon every day,” he thought. What’s on the project list for the house? What about all those books I wanted to read? I should join the Y, like I’ve been thinking about forever. It was overwhelming. He ended up puttering around the house all day and taking a nap after lunch. He felt vaguely guilty about that. “Is this what my retirement’s going to be: taking naps?” He resolved to start doing some of the stuff he wanted to do.

Tuesday morning he went down to the Y and joined up. While he was there, he got on the exercise bike and rode for 15 minutes. Most of the other people exercising looked like retirees, too. At the water fountain he got to chatting with another guy, Ted, who said he came here every morning about this time.

Ted was indeed retired. He’d worked as a production supervisor at an auto supplier in Pontiac. He’d been retired for four years now, and said it seemed like a lifetime ago. Now he was so busy, he said, that he didn’t know how he’d ever had time to work! Len was envious and inquired what he was so busy with.

“I don’t know; the time just goes!” Ted said. His kids were always calling him and his wife to come over and watch the grandkids or take them to Little League or whatnot. He had some charities that he worked with, and sometimes it seemed like he was the only one who ever did any work! The other people were retirees like him, and they were always going off on cruises or down to Florida in the winter, or else taking care of their grandkids like he was. So yeah, staying busy was no problem at all. He’d thought he was really going to work on his golf game, but now he was lucky to get in one game a week.

Len was both encouraged and appalled. Was this what retirement was like — just being busy with nothing? He didn’t have grandkids to take care of, and he didn’t want to go to Florida in the winter, either. But still, maybe volunteering would be a good thing. He asked Ted what sort of volunteer work he did. Ted worked at an animal shelter taking care of the dogs, which he loved doing, and he gleaned food for a local food bank. Len didn’t know what “gleaning” meant, but Ted explained that he picked up food that the supermarkets couldn’t sell, and took it down to a food bank.

Ted looked at his watch and said he had to hurry home and take his wife to her doctor appointment. He asked if he’d see Len tomorrow, and Len said it was his first time here, so he didn’t know.

On the way home, Len thought about Ted’s volunteer work. At Chrysler he made decisions that involved a fair amount of money, or arbitrated difficult disputes between people. Now he’d be doing… what, exactly? He thought about the job before Chrysler, too, and how much he looked forward to being a detective on the fraud cases. Maybe there was some way to do that again! Detective work wasn’t about solving murders or having a shoot-out with the bad guys, after all.

The rest of the week was similar to Tuesday: he’d go to the Y in the morning, have lunch, take a nap, and work on little projects around the house. It was summer so he had a lot of yard work. He thought maybe he and Ted could become friends, but it seemed like Ted was always busy doing something with his family or his charities.

He’d always been interested in the stock market, but in Finance at Chrysler, he had a lot of restrictions on what he could invest in, plus it just seemed too much like work, so he’d never done much with it. Thursday afternoon he went to the library and looked at Value Line and some of the other financial publications, and he signed up to get the Wall Street Journal delivered. He looked into Janet’s company, 3Com, but that didn’t seem to be doing much, and neither did her previous company, Apple.

When he was looking at Value Line, he saw some “technology” stocks. None of them seemed to be doing much. “Why the hell is that?” he wondered. “That’s gotta be the future. Janet used to be at Apple, but now what happened to them?” He remembered back when he was a kid, there were all these shady car-related companies in Detroit. Everybody and his brother was starting a company in their garage. They’d get a story in the paper, collect some money from gullible investors, and then you’d never hear of them again. Some of those guys belonged in prison. 

He wondered if this same thing was going on with computers now. It had to be; where there’s money, there are fraudsters. But how would you find out about it? And who was going to pay you to do it?

Anyway, that reminded him: he should get a better computer! And a modem. He picked up one of those computer magazines while he was at the library and leafed through it. Most of it went completely over his head, but he definitely got the idea that he should get one of those 80486 PC’s at least. His old PC was almost a joke. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would do with a modem, but he picked up a brochure at Sears on something called “Prodigy.”

He asked Janet about it, but she didn’t know much.

He thought about her a lot. Knowing that a great guy like Walt was there for her really made a difference. He’d never had that feeling about her first husband, Kevin or whatever his stupid name was. What a loser.

Now he didn’t need to worry about her all alone in that house any more. Of course, they didn’t have as much crime in Silicon Valley as Detroit did. Thank God she’d gotten herself out of here after college. Jeez, Detroit has been declining for 30 years now. Maybe he should sell the house and get out, too. But where? 

His old neighbors Harry and Helen had moved down to Florida last year, and they invited him to come visit during the winter. He got sick of the cold and snow, so he went. It was definitely nicer weather, he had to give them that. They had a condo in Fort Lauderdale. Their neighbors Harry and Judy down the hall seemed to drop in constantly, or else they were dropping in on Harry and Judy. They were from New Yawk, but Harry and Helen always told them to give it time;  they’d recover eventually. Bridge games seemed to take up their days, if Harry wasn’t playing golf that day.

The complex had regular bingo games at night, and Helen bragged that she was running eight cards at a time now, but some of the old-timers could do sixteen. Their other obsession seemed to be fighting with the homeowners association. The current controversy among the owners was about the pool service and what a lousy job they were doing, and when the monthly maintenance fees would go up. To Harry, maintenance fees were a good thing: They meant that he didn’t have to mow the lawn in the summer, rake leaves in the fall, and shovel snow in the winter. Len admitted that he was sick of that stuff, too, but he was noncommittal when Helen said he really should move down and start enjoying life. “You call this enjoying life?” thought Len.

“But it never snows here,” Helen said. “What about the hurricanes?” he asked. That was only a problem if you owned a house, they said. And anyway, the hurricanes were never really that bad. The TV always exaggerated how terrible it was going to be, and then it was nothing but a heavy rain.

Some of the older people Len knew moved to be near their grandkids. He thought that was dumb, too. In ten years the kids would be too old to need you anymore. Maybe their parents would drag them to visit you once a month in the nursing home. In any case, Janet didn’t have any kids, so that was out..

He found himself looking forward to their weekly phone calls more and more now. She was climbing the corporate ladder like nobody’s business! He wondered where she got it from. Not from him, for sure. He’d made it as high as Department Manager at Chrysler after a lifetime of work, but hell… she’d be a CEO real soon at this rate. She got tired of hearing him say how proud he was of her. Every time she told him how many people she had under her he wanted to tell her again, but he’d learned to stop himself. She didn’t need any more encouragement.

Now she and Walt seemed to be worried about him. He’d made the mistake of mentioning the nice bottle of Scotch they’d bought him for his retirement gift, and even though she never mentioned it, he just knew she was thinking about it. He’d never be a drinker. His father had had a weakness for that, and his mother had made him vow to never touch the stuff. Now it wasn’t quite never, but still, just once in a while. He planned to keep it that way.

On Sept 23rd, she said that she and Walt wanted to come visit for a week! What could he say? He knew they must be worried about him, so at least he could show them he was doing fine. He didn’t know how they’d amuse themselves here, but at least Janet could show Walt all the places she’d hung out growing up. It had to be a lot different than Walt’s childhood in northern California. They thought October would be a good time. 

He thought about going fishing in a couple weeks, if he could find a place to rent. Janet had begged him not to sell the cabin up north, but for some stupid reason he’d gone ahead and done it. He wondered if the new owners were actually using it, or maybe they’d let him rent it! That would be fun. The time he got to stay in Walt’s cabin while they were on their honeymoon was pretty fun, too, even though he had no idea how to catch those kinds of fish. California lakes didn’t seem to have walleyes or Northern Pike, and in fact they all seemed to think Northerns were trash fish to be exterminated. Snobs.

======

There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc on the Paid section of this site, where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.

Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.

There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, paid-only, where you read the real story if there is one.