Heaven Can Wait

Martin has indeed worked hard, ever since he graduated from high school in Attica, Ind., a two-traffic-light factory town, in 1952. His family couldn't afford to send him to school, so he spent three years in the Army, then entered Purdue University on the GI Bill, earning a physics degree and a master's in industrial administration.

Once he'd graduated, Martin spent nearly two decades managing manufacturing plants, first an Indiana factory that produced retail display fixtures, then an office equipment maker in North Carolina. For the second half of his career -- though it may turn out to be the middle third -- he was a management and training consultant with such clients as U.S. Steel, Clairol, Philips Lighting and several big pharmaceutical houses. During much of that time he was such a road warrior, leaving home on Sunday afternoons and not returning until Friday evenings, that when Anna received a tempting job offer in 1989, the thought of relocating from North Carolina to Virginia barely fazed him. "As long as there's an airport," he told her, and they moved.

Partway through his sixties, though, he began to sense a change. "Most of the mid-management people you work with are in their forties to mid-fifties," Martin says. "They don't want to hire old guys . . . I could discern what was coming down the road." And the travel was wearing him out. He started looking for "a real job, where you go to the same office every day." The director of Senior Employment Resources in Annandale, where he'd volunteered to teach a weekly computer class for older workers, told him the Purple Heart Foundation needed a part-time consultant.

"Jim's a great asset," says the foundation's executive director, Dick Gallant. "I discuss things with him. If you have a problem, he can bring in multiple years of experience." Initially, Martin warded off Gallant's offers of full-time employment; he liked having long weekends and besides, the salary wasn't high enough. Then three years ago, Gallant upped the offer, and it was.

The money matters. Martin acknowledges that he could retire right now -- on his $1,200 a month from Social Security, a small pension from the Indiana plant and personal savings -- but he couldn't live in this rambling new 2,300-square-foot condo with a gas fireplace and an oversize bathtub and two decks under construction. (A ceramic plaque in the bedroom reads: "Do Not Resist Growing Old -- Many Are Denied the Privilege.") Purchased for about $320,000 two years ago, it's not cheaper than the house they sold at the other end of town, but it's easier to let someone else worry about the yardwork and maintenance.

He could retire -- but he probably couldn't afford to accompany Anna and her students to music festivals in Europe each spring. The Martins have visited England and Scotland and next year are planning their fourth trip to Maastricht in the Netherlands. Their season tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra, and those gracious restaurant meals before the concerts, might have to go. Eating out in general would have to be trimmed back.

"We're working because we want this lifestyle," Jim explains. "And we'd have to change it if we stopped. We'd have to move someplace less expensive, or I'd have to win the lottery." But he doesn't buy lottery tickets. And Anna plans to work for several years -- she likes teaching and also wants to fatten her pension -- so that rules out, for now, decamping for North Carolina or another low-cost location. Plus, there was that grim period five years ago when Jim's love of technology, and tech stocks, meant that each monthly brokerage statement looked scarier than the last. "You'd keep watching that bottom number go down and down and down, and you'd say, 'Is it ever going to end?'" He estimates he lost about $150,000 in paper profits.

So his job, which pays something more than $40,000 a year, makes the difference between getting by okay and enjoying the standard of living he and Anna are accustomed to. Happily, it also meets Jim's personal criterion for enjoyable work, which is that you don't dread Sunday nights.

"The only thing I don't like about it," he says, "is the same thing I wouldn't like about any job: the lack of freedom, the time to do what I want to do." If he feels like spending a month or two in Florida this winter -- an attractive notion -- he can't.

But he exhibits little apparent regret or frustration about this trade-off. It helps to be, as his son, Jeff, calls him, "the most positive man I've ever met," an admirer of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, the mother of all self-help books.

No more inclined to grumble about work than about his health, Jim marches on with acceptance bordering on fatalism. "I'm a firm believer that I'm where I'm supposed to be right now, doing what I'm supposed to do," he says. "And when it's time to do something different, that's what will happen."

Working longer is also in the cards for the people Milton Chavis ushers into his tiny cubicle at the D.C. Office on Aging, though most can't summon the same equanimity as Jim Martin.