Everybody is talking about retirement these days. It seems anyone over 40 is trying to figure out how they can retire.

There was a time when folks had to be old before they could retire. (They seemed old, anyway.) Now people just quit whenever they feel like it. Just recently, I told my wife, “I’m over 60 years old. It’s about time I slowed down a little.”

“You? Slow down?” She laughed. “You’ll never slow down. You’d have to speed up before you could slow down.”

I’m one of those unfortunate people who work at home. Stay-at-home moms learned long ago as long as you are at home, people will never believe you’re working.

I can remember when employers had to create a mandatory retirement age to get old codgers to quit; now it’s hard to keep folks working long enough to learn what’s going on.

Some industries worry about a shortage of older workers, and are beginning to recruit guys with hair in their ears for their experience.
I taught school in Ohio during the late 1960s, when there was no mandatory retirement for teachers in the state. Teachers in Indiana were forced to retire at 70. Some of our best teachers in western Ohio were folks who were forced to retire in Indiana.

We had others, of course, who could barely find their way back across the border each evening. They should have taken their retirement and gone on a cruise or something.

Every state had some age law in those days. Ohio had a law, for example, requiring girls under 21 to have their parents’ signature before they could marry. We had retired teachers commuting from Indiana to work in Ohio, and young people from Ohio sneaking across to get married in Indiana. The traffic could get pretty dicey on those side roads at times.

I may have digressed, but what concerns me about retirement is the modern-day tendency for husbands to retire early, while their wives are expected to keep on working. You know the line: “Oh, I plan to retire next year, but Edna still has a few more years to go.”

Wives who stayed home with the kids for a number of years will be getting a little age on them if they have to work for a full retirement. This has worked well for men, but a note of caution might be in order. Readers may have heard about the 50-year-old woman who called her husband from work one day.

“You won’t believe this!” she exclaimed. “I just won $10 million in the lottery. Pack your clothes.”

“Wow!” the husband said. “Where are we going? What should I pack? Winter clothes or summer clothes?”
“Both,” she said. “I want you out of the house by six.”

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.