Independence Day by Steve Lopez

Author:Steve Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Horizon
Published: 2022-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Last quarter of life? I hadn’t considered my life in percentages like that, perhaps because it’s so depressing to do the math. If I’m already three-quarters of the way to the finish line, it means I’ve got twenty-three years left, which would take me to about ninety. Maybe, as we age, we live in denial about how fast the clock is moving.

One Leisure World resident told me she had turned in her retirement papers at the public university where she teaches. She has loved teaching, she said, but she was satisfied with the contribution she had made. She wanted to chase other pursuits, including the study of Buddhism, and she wanted to hand the baton to the next generation of professors.

In the last couple of years, the Los Angeles Times has added three columnists, all much younger than I. My newest colleagues have interests, skills, backgrounds, and perspectives I don’t have, all of which is good, because the newspaper business will surely die without cultivating younger readers. But we have another columnist who’s about ten years older than I am, and he shows no signs of slowing down. George Skelton covers government and politics in our Sacramento bureau, and his knowledge, institutional memory, skill, and objectivity are all great assets to the Los Angeles Times. The audience for the print version of newspapers is shrinking, but those still hanging on tend to be older. I’d like to think I write about people and topics that interest them, and I hope I change things up enough to attract younger readers now and then. Everyone does, however, have to pass the baton at some point.

The Leisure World resident who wrote to say “my advice about retiring is don’t even think about it” is a freelance writer, still working. Her neighbors seem to be having a swell time playing shuffleboard, Ping Pong, and golf, but none of that appeals to her.

I plan on doing this until I drop. When I think to myself sometimes that it would be nice not to have the pressures that come with this kind of work, I remind myself that it is far better than what I see my neighbors doing, and I am happy that I have purpose and work that sometimes is so engrossing that I lose track of time.

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