I was 11 years old on the day my father retired from the bank where he'd worked for 45 years. My mother made a big dinner and a frosted cake, and I remember that when the front door opened she did not wait for him to wend his way into the kitchen but took a few steps away from the stove and craned her neck to watch him come in.
And he did not stop to look at the mail on the dining room table; instead, he kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the kitchen. Even when my brother intercepted him to shake his hand, my father only barely acknowledged it -- his eyes were full on my mother and the two of them, my parents, seemed to be having a conversation they'd waited 45 years to have, all in the look that went between them. It probably wasn't half a minute before somebody said something loudly cheerful like, "So, how does it feel?" and my father answered something confused -- "Yeah! How 'bout that?" -- and everyone gathered around him to see his new watch while my brother examined the liqueur they'd given him. The phone started ringing then, with calls of congratulations from his three college-age children, who had wanted to be there but couldn't, and from all his friends in the neighborhood.
My 11-year-old mind got stuck on that look though, and I could not, no matter how hard I swallowed, move into celebration. Instead I took the big mahogany nameplate my father had brought home with him down into the basement and curled up with it in an old armchair. I held the heavy authority of that nameplate in my hands and fingered the thick brass letters that spelled "J.D. Blakely, Cashier." As I listened to my father laughing with the crowd above me, I thought about how official he wasn't anymore and started to cry, until my mother came down and assured me that she had plenty for him to do, and that if she ever ran out of ideas he would just have to find another job.
Whenever I remember the day my father retired, I remember my mother, and how ready she seemed for it all to happen. My father was a bit overwhelmed, and as I watched him come in I should have recognized that my own overemotional response toward life was inherited from him, the balding but forever boyish-looking man with the flushed cheeks and the watery, expectant look. The sense of moment could hardly have been lost on my mother, whose lifestyle would be changed as much as his by this event, but no matter; if there were to be an episode of passionate upheaval inspired by the situation then she could handle herself, and she could handle my father and me too. With the compassionate firmness genuine care inspires in women of strength, my mother had a way of letting her brood know when we had despaired enough, when it was time to "stop being ridiculous," and most importantly, when it was best to "get on with things."
The ethic of "getting on with things" played an important part in the lives my parents crafted for themselves in retirement. During the first months of his apparent joblessness, my father kept busy by fixing things, and often he would attach himself to a worn-out something that my mother thought beyond repair. For a while he ran a halfway house for ailing household items out of his workspace in the basement. "There's a couple of good years left in that," he would say as he dragged a broken chair or a tool without a handle back from the garbage to keep until he could restore it. If my mother would refuse to admit the piece to its former place of dignity in the house, he'd put it to work in his territory for the time that he had promised to extend its usefulness.
Some things he "fixed" did serve him those "couple of good years," though sometimes in a more limited capacity: a child-sized card table that had rusted was low to the ground and thus "good for gardening," screwdrivers with taped handles stayed on his inventory of tools "to open paint cans." Once, he took on a huge dining room table that seems to resist his best restorative efforts, but before it could be carried out it lay legs up for six months on the basement floor. At last his son with the carpentry experience came in from Canada for Christmas, and the two spent hours together working on it, my brother noting with empathy that it was indeed made of "good wood," my father finally conceding that while it had three great legs, the last one "was a stinker."
Eventually he did go back to work. He took a part-time job taking care of the banking and other special errands for some Walgreen executives. At 10 a.m. he left the house each day and drove to company headquarters, where he picked up the banking paperwork and was then driven downtown in a chauffeured limousine. For two hours or so, he would walk through the Loop "taking care of things" -- making large deposits, arbitrating complicated loan agreements, stopping in at Tiffany's to pick up a diamond for the vice-president's wife -- trivial stuff for a former bank officer, but he was hardly interested in advancement. He became a kind of corporate wise man to the people he worked with -- he was one bold step of disinterest beyond those "seasoned professionals," and they trusted him. One day he came home particularly pleased that he'd consoled a worried junior executive by explaining that the company was "grooming the fella for management." And "sure enough," the following month the promotion came through.
In the meantime, my mother made plans. Regularly and playfully, she added to her list of things she always wanted to do and coaxed my father into doing them with her. They'd never been to Europe -- three of us took a dizzying tour of the continent. She efficiently handled their elaborate schedule of bridge dates and golf outings and dances, and always managed to be sure that "the folks" were home whenever their more casually organized children drifted in for the holidays.
Gradually, my father began to accommodate to the rhythms and pleasures of this new lifestyle. By the time he retired for the second time, his fix-it work had become less painstakingly carried out and more outspokenly clever in appearance. There was the eyebrow tweezer than hung precariously in a dashboard groove of our car where the knob to control the heater had broken off. If you wanted heat, you reached into the groove with the tweezer and turned the stem. And there was the bright blue tile from his collection of odds and ends that he grafted onto the smooth pale gray of a kitchen counter to hide where the coffeepot had burned the formica. His resilient optimism about the utility of time-worn things made the house a place of contented amusement for all of us -- the corners that marked his work area seemed particularly charged with this air of almost ridiculously high-spirited antiquity. Few of his strictly make-do repairs coordinated well with my mother's decorating scheme, but if she argued against them he'd defend his craft with vigor. Inevitably, she then would caution him about how "eccentric" he was getting in old age.
Indeed he was and is, but my parents now see "eccentricities" as a kind of old-age index that they check regularly in their playful teasing of one another; it is one in a whole list of fears about old age that they make it a point to laugh about and then "get on with things." They moved to >Florida a few years ago, where they bought a mobile home in a community of their peers. It is a place full of people who, like them, live bravely and, despite fears about eccentricities or physical frailties, pursue relentlessly the game of "shuffle" or the dip in the pool or any other number of "daring" things they do to bring themselves joy.
It's there that my father will celebrate his 89th birthday this December. If I know my mother, there will be plenty of Bailey's Irish Creme on hand for the celebration, as well as family and close friends and telephone calls from the working children who wanted to be there but couldn't.
I will be one of those phone callers, yelling cheerful well-wishes and participating, as far as possible over the miles that separate us, in the passionate excitement of another landmark day in his life. On his 89th birthday I would like my father to know that watching him move forward into the created contentment of his life in retirement has taught me never to indulge dread, and that I treasure a certain memory of the expression he wore the day he came home to retire because it reminds me of how much we've grown, he and I, over the years.
I know that in our separate cities we will both get red in the face and moist at the eyes, and that my mother and guests on his side and a few close friends on my side will have to be on hand to keep us from getting overemotional. But things will be entirely different from the day my father came home from the bank where he'd worked for 45 years. The girl for whom doubt was too much to bear at age 11 will raise a toast to her father, arrived with such grace and good health upon the age of 89. Savoring the richness of Irish Creme, she will thank him for his usefulness to her as a man wise for his years, and celebrate the privilege of "getting on with things" in such fine company.
