There are things about his job that Jim Martin doesn't love, like getting up at 5:25 each morning so he can squeeze in a workout at the gym before eating breakfast en route to work. Or the trafficky hour-long drive from his Manassas condo to his Annandale office, and the same lousy drive back. By the time he slogs home, fixes himself a martini and has dinner with his wife, there's not much time left for all the other things he'd like to be doing -- learning Spanish, for instance, or painting with watercolors. People at his stage of life are supposed to be able to indulge such interests.
But any gripes are outweighed by the things he does appreciate about his job developing spreadsheets and tracking income for the Purple Heart Foundation. There's the salary that buttresses an upper-middle-class life he's loath to give up, of course, but he also values the liveliness, the stimulation, the feeling of contributing to an honorable endeavor. In particular, he cherishes his small cadre of co-workers at the organization, which provides services for veterans and their families. "I love these people like children," he says one morning, settling in at his computer. "And some of them are young enough to be my children."
A few days ago, the staff put together a lunch to celebrate his birthday. His colleague across the hall picked up sandwiches; someone brought balloons (one is still wilting in Martin's office); someone else contributed a key lime pie with a single candle. Everyone sang, then presented Martin with a card signed with affectionate insults, which he's tacked to his bulletin board. "With age comes wisdom," one colleague wrote. "You must be VERY wise."
He is 71, a joke-teller and raconteur with a broad, ruddy face, a remarkable amount of wavy silver hair and empathic gray-green eyes. His endocrinologist regularly thwacks him in the midsection and says, "You've gotta lose that," but he actually looks fine, fit and healthy.
It's something of an illusion. "I have two diseases that will kill me one day; it's a matter of when," Martin likes to say, cheerfully. He's diabetic, and there's a pocket sewn inside the flowered Hawaiian shirt he's worn to work this morning to hold an insulin pump. Later in the morning, he unzips a small black kit, as he does four times each day, wipes his fingertip with an alcohol swab and tests his blood sugar. "Ooh, 216, very high, very high," he mutters, checking the meter, then using the pump to administer additional insulin.
Having lived for years with diabetes -- along with high blood pressure and, more recently, coronary artery disease -- Martin found it perhaps less frightening than it otherwise might have been to be seated across from an oncologist last winter. The doctor was so intent on shuffling papers, never quite meeting his eyes, that Martin braced for bad news, and he got it: "Mr. Martin, I have to tell you that you have leukemia." But it was chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a very slow form, the oncologist went on to say. One of Martin's other illnesses -- this was evidently the good news -- would probably kill him first.
So, having assessed the personal and financial costs and benefits, in the way that 45 years as a manager and consultant trained him to do, Martin is still happy to come to the office each day. After his birthday lunch, he thanked the singers, cautioned, "Don't go on the nightclub circuit just yet," and went back to work.
Which makes him at once an unusual figure -- only about 14 percent of those over 65 remain in the labor force -- and a potential role model. A massing alliance of researchers and analysts, lobbyists and advocates, opinion leaders, wonks of all sorts, would likely applaud him, because Martin's doing just what they wish the rest of us would do. Having examined the demographic trends, the labor force stats, the health and longevity data, the projected costs of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs, the experts have come to a strikingly widespread consensus: Never mind that golden-years stuff. Keep working.
Not forever; no one's proposing to abolish retirement. But after many decades in which people embarked on retirement at younger and younger ages, we're now being urged to delay it, possibly by quite a few years.
Forget that dot-com-era idea of cashing out at 55, the wonks advise. Let 62, Social Security's "early" retirement age, pass, and its "full" retirement ages, too. Seventy is the new 65.
At the heart of this proposed change is a fundamental mismatch: We are living longer, remaining healthy longer. We're better educated, less likely to have labored in coal mines and steel plants that cripple or deplete us. Thus, we're much better able than our forebears to remain in the workforce -- but we're not doing it. We're bailing out, most of us, as soon as we possibly can.
The idea of contemporary retirement, a phase of life that caps decades of work with years of freedom and leisure, has become so ingrained, so pervasive, that we forget how recent an invention it really is. It's younger than Jim Martin.
