“Retire from work but not from life.” Indian homeopathic physician M.K. Soni
Dr. M.K. Soni
“Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Waterson once said, “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” When I first retired as a full-time History professor, it seemed an impossible task to fill the waking hours; but before long, that problem vanished. I am now playing duplicate bridge twice a week with fellow retirees when not at my emeritus office at Indiana U Northwest writing or interviewing people for the Calumet Regional Archives. When Charlie Halberstadt offered to teach octogenarian Don Giedemann backgammon, which he had expressed interest in, Don told him it would probably have to wait until winter when he wasn’t so busy. At the Valparaiso bridge game Norm Filipiak noticed my Cancun shirt and mentioned staying at a resort near the Mexican coastal city years ago and renting a jeep to take his family to Mayan sites only to have a sudden downpour ruin the plans minutes after they started out. Banta Canter winners were the Fieldhouses with an impressive 68.5 percent. Karen Fieldhouse is a retired Grand Rapids teacher."
NWI Times reporter Emily Schnipke interviewed Barb Walczak and 94-year-old Jennie Alsobrooks (above) for an article about duplicate bridge. “There’s always more to learn,” Walczak said. Alsobrooks learned to play at age 10 and took it up seriously after moving to Gary in 1948. Now living in a Merrillville facility for seniors, she still plays regularly, telling Schnipke, “At this age I like the challenge. And I like to win.”
Paulette LaFata-Johnson retired as IUN’s Director of Alumni Relations, a position legendary Region newsman Tom Higgins held until deemed too opinionated – not enough of a yes-man - for former chancellor Bruce Bergland’s taste. Paulette was a worthy successor and seemed not to age in all the years I’ve known her. She played a key role in graduation ceremonies. After the university unfairly terminated English professor Anne Balay, graduating senior Amanda Board attempted to present IU president Michael McRobbie a copy of my Steel Shavingsissue that outlined how she had been unfairly denied promotion and tenure. As the precession began, Paulette snatched the magazine away from her, claiming students were not allowed to carry things with them on stage. While University Advancement held a small going away party for Paulette, there evidently are no plans for a university-wide retirement ceremony, once an annual tradition.
above, Amanda Marie in 2019; below, Stewart O'Nan
Stewart O’Nan’s “Henry Himself” takes place in 1998, the year, O’Nan reminds readers, that baby doctor Dr. Spock, Cher partner Sonny Bono,singing cowboy Gene Autry, and Cubs announcer Harry Caray died. The novel is such a realistic account of a 75-year-old retiree’s daily routine that I was surprised to find that O’Nan was only in his fifties. The author of 20 books, including non-fiction, O’Nan co-wrote with Stephen King “Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season” – when the Bosox broke the so-called Babe Ruth curse, capturing their first World Series since “The Bambino” was traded to the Yankees in 1919. Led by Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez, they swept the Cardinals after a miracle comeback in the playoffs against the Yankees, winning four in a row after dropping the first three games. O’Nan’s fiction has been compared to John Updike in terms of capturing the essence of everyday life, an insight I concur with and that O’Nan regards as a compliment.
In a chapter titled “The Birthday Boy” Henry Maxwell asks wife Emily not to make a fuss, knowing that she will. O’Nan writes:
He was going to be 75 – a big one, as they never tired of reminding him. He wasn’t embarrassed by his age, but, like living longer than his mother, neither did he see it as an accomplishment. Birthdays were for children. . . . Like a funeral, a birthday wasn’t yours but for the people who loved you. Why resist the inevitable? Better to acquiesce, and yet the prospect depressed him, he couldn’t say why. Seventy-five years was a long time
Aware that family physician Joseph P. Runco M.D. recently succumbed at age 75 to brain cancer, Henry’s birthday wish was for another.
In “Side Effects” O’ Nan lists the dozen or more medications Henry and Edith swallowed, in addition to antihistamines, analgesics, and ointments in the medicine cabinet. Two I also take: metoprolol for blood pressure and Klor-Con as a potassium supplement to counter the side effects of the former. O’Nan writes: “The size of the crosshatched plastic reminders he and Emily relied on – organized by the days of the week, further divided into slots for morning, noon and night like a tackle box – had become a morbid joke among the children.” There was no mention of Cialis or Viagra among the many pills – in fact, sex seems to have been a thing of the past between Henry and Emily. On their anniversary, when Henry gets amorous, Emily firmly puts the kibosh on the idea, more interested in knitting or reading. After spending years at Westinghouse working on a project ultimately scrapped, he is reduced to using his engineering expertise on mundane household chores.
“Henry Himself” ends seemingly without drama, inconsequentially, on a snowy winter morning, as Henry takes Rufus on a walk to a neighborhood reservoir in Pittsburgh, and they spot a ring of deer lolling beneath an apple tree, who file into the woods when Rufus barks. O’Nan writes: “Later he would see this as a premonition, but at the time he had no reason to assign it a darker meaning.” “Henry Himself,” it turns out, is a prequel to “Wish You Were Here” and “Emily Alone” that chronicle a widow’s life after Henry’s death, which evidently followed a period of convalescence, not suddenly, as Henry had hoped. New York Times reviewer Ruth Franklin repeated these lines from “Wish You Were Here” describing Emily tormented by memories of their honeymoon to Niagara Falls when there with grandchildren:
The sun made the day sharp and promising, as if they might drive forever, only stopping to make love and eat. It had seemed that way, though they must have waited in line like this, and sat at stoplights, and fussed with the luggage. She remembered only the best of them, compensation for the months she'd spent at Henry's bedside, memories that caught her walking across the living room or washing out her teacup at the sink, leaving her useless and fretful for the rest of the day.
June 27 would have been Midge’s birthday number 103. She lived well into her hundredth year. At her assisted living facility in Rancho Mirage, California book club members read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” of which she claimed to disapprove when I noticed it partially hidden in her bookcase. Back in the 1970s she got Howard to take her to the X-rated “Candid Camera” producer Allen Funt’s movie “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” and hinted that my stepfather was not as amorous as she would like. Of course, I wanted nothing to do with either topic.
I grew up in the Tolleston area of Gary which was, at the time, very Germanic and some Polish. I went to St. John’s Lutheran Church and spent much of my time there. We lived right across the street. In addition to church activities, we had school activities: the sports programs, the social programs. All of these made a significant difference in our sense of community. Friends were made and became solidified as a result of the closeness of everything.
Back in the mid and late ‘60s we had a pastor named Norman Brandt. The neighborhood was changing because of the steel mill and other economic activity. And so he went pretty much door-to-door and started inviting all kinds of interesting people to attend church and eventually become members. He was probably one of the first activists in that area, speaking before the city council and sharing thoughts about how we should be a unified society regardless of our race. But as the situation, economically and socially, changed and whites began to leave, the church became more and more African American.
Realtors would come into a neighborhood and say, “Better move now while your property is still worth something because when this neighborhood starts changing, property values will decrease and you’ll lose out on a lot of money.” And that eventually became illegal, but folks just felt, “Well, I’d better do as they say and turn my house over to the realtor and get rid of it while I move elsewhere.”
So many people just heard about these problems; they didn’t really experience them. They were watching television, seeing all kinds of marches and rebellions across the country, and they just got the impression that the black culture was one that was antisocial. When we watched, on television, the funeral of Martin Luther King, you know, my uncles would say, “Oh, man, we can’t have this.”You know,“What is going on here? What’s happening to our society?”All they saw was the violence they thought was going to be widespread and come into Gary. And I guess the whole idea of being in the same neighborhood in the same church with black people was just something that they could not understand or tolerate.
My parents moved from the Tolleston area to the Horace Mann district, which seemed to be changing more rapidly than Tolleston. Residents were hearing all kinds of news about fights and violence, and they just got a little scared and moved to Merrillville or other suburbs. In Merrillville, there was a black family living next door. My parents were fine with that, but they didn’t really communicate or socialize with that family. We’d say, “Hi,” over the fence and ask how things are going but not invite each other to a social event, you know, a marriage or birthday party. That was just not something we would do. Some of our former friends from St. John’s moved into that subdivision and we’d celebrate events with those families; but in terms of actually visiting the neighbor next door, that wasn’t done. The community was more outside of Merrillville. It was still at the church. It was still at the school for the kids. And I see that still today. A lot of people just don’t have the neighborhood relationship that was once there forty, fifty years ago.
It used to be that people could walk to downtown Gary or take a bus. A car was not as prevalent as it became later on, but now it’s a car to the doctor’s, a car to the shopping mall, a car to an auto repair shop. And the use of the car, I think, has dramatically changed the way people live in a way that would be totally alien to previous generations.
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