The Retirement Alternative

This blog post has had a lot of talk about the joys of retirement. Every day is a Saturday. Look at me, I'm a teenager with money. Wake up and decide what to do with the day. I do only what I want to do. All that. This week, however, I was reminded that there is an alternative.

The text message asked if I wanted to join an old friend... um, let me rephrase that... a long time friend for a trip to take advantage of the abundant snow in Colorado. He was going to take a few days off from work to join his ... um... long time friend for an annual boys ski trip, and they had room for a third to share a condo in Dillon, Colorado, at the foot of Keystone ski area. Not having skied anything other than gopher mounds here in Minnesota for a number of years, I jumped on the opportunity - because I can do that, you know, being retired and all.

Both my old friend, Dana, and his old friend, Kevin, a farmer from Michigan, are older than me and still working. They both talk about retiring and, in the same sentence, express hesitation. Not because they're not sure about financial sustainability in living on a fixed income, not hardly. Rather their hesitation is born out of a passion for, and enjoyment in, what they do.

Dana with Bonnie in the early Tulsa days

Dana was my senior as a sales representative, by a bit more than a year, when I started my career with 3M in Tulsa back in 1979. We worked with the same customers in two highly related product lines that often caused friction and conflict in other 3M sales territories. Not in the Tulsa region. Dana was above all that, and we and our wives became close friends over the three plus years we spent in Oklahoma. In subsequent years we both moved to St. Paul as marketing geeks and, eventually ended up in the same division working in different roles as associates. Over all those years, I never worked with a more dedicated, more ethical, more compassionate 3M'er. To this day, Dana has sales responsibility for 3M's top tier OEM customers of the abrasives division of the company. He still revels in maintaining and developing relationships with leaders of these complicated and demanding customers from around the world. He really likes his job, and continues to feel good about the contributions he makes to 3M's performance.

His buddy, Kevin, is in a completely different kind of job, but equally enthusiastic about what he does and the contributions he makes, even after all these years. They were college roommates at Michigan Tech in the upper peninsula. Even though Kevin graduated as an engineer, just like Dana, it wasn't long before he was drawn back to the family profession of farming. Over the ensuing years, he's grown his fathers relatively small parcel into a large and very successful crop farm.

You can hear his pride with every story. Describing the sophistication of his harvesting equipment (he pretends to be a luddite, but that can't be the case, given the level of semi-automation he's employing), he harkens back to simpler times, when experience and "feel" were key to making equipment adjustments needed to address variability in weather and land. Nothing pleases Kevin more than the sight of corn fields. Even with the backdrop of the Colorado Rockies, he expressed a preference for the beautiful symmetry of rows of stalks stretching to the horizon, supporting the ears of kernels that will ultimately be turned into fuel, fructose, or feed. He loves what he does, and talks about a time when he'll get out of it, but I'm pretty certain it's just talk.

Both took work related calls while we were skiing on the mountain, addressing urgent issues and responding to situations real time. I remember those days with the glee that comes from no longer needing to field those calls. But for them, it was not a bother. They're still happily engaged in the option to retirement.