King David’s
Retirement
There have been
many ways that having someone retire from a career have been stated. “You ever
think about retirin’?”---Mickey Goldmill in Rocky. In Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski
is handed a clock with huge numbers on it.
This is in a request his daughter and son in law hint that he should
retire from the home he and his wife raised their family in, since he is
already retired from the Ford Motor Company. What’s next? They’re thinking
death. He is living one day at a
time. He’s living in the moment and he
doesn’t care about someone else’s comfort. Because it is none of their
business.
In 1973, our
family of four drove up to my Gramp and Nana’s house for a party. My Dad’s Dad
was at the retirement age. Which for that time period was sixty-five. It did,
however, depend on who you were and who you worked for. The average age could be either sixty-two or
sixty-five. An age back then few made it
to. The statistics showed life expectancy on an average for Caucasian men was
sixty-seven years old. For
African-American men it was age fifty-nine.
Many places you
worked for, like Campbell’s Soup, Pepperidge Farm, Ford Motor Company gave you
a watch or a pen set upon retirement. Something
to denote your time finished in the working man’s environment. Basically, you were put out to pasture. And many times, you were considered too old
for new ideas. Too old to be productive.
Too old to remember key applications that the younger blood, coming into
the workforce could remember.
This thought
brings to mind quite often in my day, how in the Bible Joab convinces King
David to retire. Joab will take care of going to war. He declares King David to be too old to go
into battle. And besides, he’s the anointed.
Reluctantly, King David retires from going to battle, for the most part. I have
no clue why I have throughout most of my life, contemplated this scene from the
Bible seemingly implanted permanently in my head since 1973. But it exists,
regularly in my mind’s eye, practically every day.
Part of the
thought is, ‘Why do we want to retire and sit around doing nothing?’ I
see the people that retire, perhaps they move away to the south. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they get a
job, start a new job, go back to school or enter into the world of voluntary service
to others. It appears they all live the same amount of time, if they haven’t
changed their mindset. I’ve known plenty of people working well past their
retirement age. A few till age eighty-five, staying in the same business. My Gramp was one of them, working till age
eighty-three, until Alzheimer’s forged ahead forcing him to officially retire. Some
on a different level remain in the same business. I knew a doctor from when I
was a child who died six months after he retired from medicine at age
ninety-nine.
Quite conversely,
I see plenty of people, who are generally healthy, who do even less after they
retire. Whether they move away or reside in their home they’ve been in for
decades. Those people appear to lose the capacity of remembering things, as well
the ability to thinking outside the box. What comes to my mind is, ‘What
a shame’. Retirement quite often is discussed during the holiday dinners,
perhaps within families. I remember this conversation more after I was married
nearly thirty-six years ago. The
discussion back then was among my husband’s older siblings and cousins, who
were in their thirties. And their plan was to bask in the sun, or something
like that. One evening after a holiday family
gathering, on our ride back home. We had stopped at a traffic light. I then inquired of husband, “You retiring? I’m not ever retiring.”
His response, “I’m not retiring.” I quipped, “That’s so depressing. We can always work at something. That’s what we’re meant for.” He agreed.
King David
reluctantly retired from going into battle.
However, he was still king. He
still called the shots. He made plans
and strategies for the army. On his deathbed, he handed the torch of King to
his son Solomon. King David retired on
his deathbed. King David technically never left the workforce, he just changed
the angle in which he worked it. Comparatively, when someone changes a career,
we could say they retired from whatever it was that they’d done previously.
However, we use the word retirement as a finality, sort of like a death. We
need to change that thinking, so that we promote a quality of life thinking.
King David did.---Jody-Lynn Reicher
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