Retirement Without Golf

Election Polling Place Work Again

California has another primary coming up June 3 -- a small, boring one, with a couple of right-wing initiatives about eminent domain all alone on the statewide ballot, accompanied by a few local races. Turnout should be really low.
   All in all, it sounds like an easy, if long, 14-hour day in store for me at an evangelical church in Playa del Rey, Calif. I'm signed up as a volunteer precinct clerk for pay of a munificent $105. On Feb. 5 Super Tuesday I was the boss, the precinct inspector, for $175. That worked out OK, thanks to the help of my wife, Irma, who worked as one of 7 clerks. But this time I wanted to take it easier. Clerks -- the ones who sign voters in, hand them their ballots, accept the completed ballots -- work much less hard and have far less responsibility than the inspector.
  Again, I recommend this volunteer work for anybody. It's a real civics lesson in the grassroots workings of democracy.
  On other fronts in my retirement, I gotta tell you, life sometimes gets boring. I'm still searching daily for long-term volunteer work -- the animal shelter? The ACLU? The local courthouse? -- or for a part-time job.
  "Retire and die," an old lawyer friend of my lawyer brother once said, recommending against ever retiring. The guy had a point.

Retirement is Overrated

   Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
   Actually, retirement can be rewarding. But what I'm learning is that it's not enough to plan for it financially; I did that, successfully enough so that I don't have to keep working. No, what's additionally required is advance planning of how you're going to spend your time. The golf nuts I have enjoyed ridiculing have it easy. They can look forward to decades of pursuing their passion -- for hours every day, if they want to and can afford it. But we non-golfers have to find, well in advance, an equally fulfilling time-filler.
   Plan it all -- not just your income, but exactly how you're going to spend the bulk of what you will soon realize are yawning expanses of time, time, time.

Amaze Family and Friends -- Become a Moviemaker

   I heartily recommend video production as a retirement pastime.
   It sounds difficult, but for anyone with the slightest ability to read an owners' manual, turning out nearly professional-looking movies is easy. Buying a simple, Standard Definition (SD) camcorder and using only the movie-editing software that comes with it on an installation CD, you can produce short, technically low-resolution videos that don't take up much file space and so can be uploaded to YouTube (though uploading even a 2-minute, 100-MB video can take an irritatingly long time).

   Better yet, you can produce longer movies at higher resolutions and burn them onto DVDs to send to everyone in sight. The picture quality is akin to that of typical low-def cable channels such as CNN: not bad.
   I've already made a 30-minute video of our summer life in Vermont; a 20-minute video of our trip to Italy last September; an 8-minute video of a day in the life of our fabulous longhaired cat, Bessie, and short YouTube videos of harbor seals at La Jolla, Calif., and a Barack Obama fundraising party. 

   Adding voice-over narration and scoring the pieces with music is a snap. (But watch out for copyright violations.)
   It won't take long before you want to take the next step: high-definition video to match the capabilities of your big, flat-screen HD TV set. We start talking about some serious money here.
   An HD camcorder will set you back about $1,000 -- less if you can find a bargain in your desired model online. If all you want to do is connect the unit to your HDTV and play your raw video footage, no more expense is necessary. But if you want to burn high-def DVDs for yourself and your network of fans, some investigation is needed. You might end up with a $400 high-def DVD burner drive that connects to your PC externally. If you want to play the resulting HD DVDs back on only your PC, your wallet can stay closed. But if you want your edited, thoughtful movie to play on your HDTV, you'll probably need another $400 for a Blu-Ray HD DVD player.

   Don't forget that friends to whom you'll mail your HD DVDs probably won't have a Blu-Ray yet, and will be seeing your masterpieces in soggy Standard Definition. In other words, the hardware and software that people own hasn't yet caught up to HD videomaking technology.
    Before buying that hot new camcorder, It will pay to learn about the technology of high-def videocams. Cameras that store your pictures on those hoary MiniDV tapes -- still used by professional news crews and big, fancy, $3,300 "prosumer" cameras like the excellent Canon XHA1 -- will be relatively easy to match up with a software program that can turn the pictures into edited, narrated, scored movies on a moderately powerful computer. The experts say that MiniDV still yields the best video quality.
   There's a new, rival, much-touted recording format called AVCHD that enables manufacturers to dispense with the tapes and to store pictures on a built-in hard drive (HDD), a DVD, a flash memory device or other "non-linear" medium. This is appealing, but the best websites in this field warn that it's still hard to find a decent editing program that will handle the highly compressed AVCHD. They also warn that you will need a super-powerful computer for this work. So make sure that before you buy an AVCHD camcorder, you will be able to find and install a compatible moviemaking program on your PC without buying a new computer in addition to spending all that other money.
   With all this said and done, forget all the technical stuff. Just go out and shoot the heck out of your experiences -- an Alaskan cruise, a day at the beach, your kid's first birthday party. Organize the footage logically, trim it ruthlessly in an ego-free way -- and enjoy the rave reviews lavished upon you by the people who love you for the wannabe-Spielberg you have become.

Consider Helping Your Favorite Website

   Do you enjoy reading a particular website? Rather than simply lurking, or perhaps posting an occasional comment, you can often become a valued part of that website by volunteering to help its often overworked and underpaid staffers. One of my favorite sites, Arianna Huffington's political Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com, put out a call for help in moderating the thousands of comments its blogs and news stories receive from across the political spectrum. (One impetus for the plea: Fox News' archconservative Bill O'Reilly had slammed the generally Democratic- and liberally-oriented Huffington Post for a vituperative, name-calling tone in many comments (talk about the pot calling the kettle black).  Whether or not the Huffpo folks should have simply ignored O'Reilly, considering the source and his own reputation for being "fair and balanced," the site imposed new pre-moderation policies that required a moderator's approval of all comments to its blogs (oh, what the heck, let's call it censorship) before the comment became visible on the site. Comments on news stories are generally not pre-moderated, but if another site user "flags" them, a moderator checks them. All other comments to news stories get posted, but may be deleted as moderators get to them and read them. Guidelines call for deleting comments that are abusive, "excessively" profane, bigoted, contain nothing but conspiracy theories or are incoherent.
   Signing up as a moderator for a few intense hours a day, or a few days a week, is stimulating and can be enlightening about current opinion: you learn how fast it forms in reaction to the news, what its shades are, the prejudices and excesses of the left and the right.
   Sadly, you also learn how illiterate and mentally limited all too many commenters are. The biases, the bizarre and downright stupid conspiracy theories, the name-calling, can give the blogosphere a dismal reputation. It's to Huffpost's credit that it's trying its best to clean up its corner of cyberspace.
   What volunteering opportunities does your favorite website offer? Check them out.

'Cause I'm the Taxman. Yeah, I'm the Taxman.

   I promised to keep you apprised of my adventures in volunteering -- one avenue that retirees are widely encouraged to pursue to stay active, to feel involved in the community and to build new skills.
   Aside from serving as a poll official on election days, and from doing some unpaid political reporting for the Huffington Post website (www.huffingtonpost.com), I'm also doing IRS and California state tax returns for low-income people and seniors as a volunteer for AARP's IRS-sanctioned Tax-Aide program.
   It's an extremely worthwhile enterprise. If you are as perverse as I am in actually liking to do tax returns (a lot easier than in the old days since computer taxware programs were invented), take my recommendation and sign up for a fulfilling life during tax season for Tax-Aide.
    First, AARP puts you through a training class using the TaxWise program approved by the IRS. It's not nearly as user-friendly as TurboTax or TaxCut -- my supervisor, Barry Seid, jokes that TaxWise probably got the contract because it submitted the lowest bid to the IRS -- but in time I've begun to master the tricks of using this program.
    At the end of the training, volunteers take an open-book test. Just about everybody can pass it. Then you can call yourself a federally certified tax preparer, at least on a basic level. H & R Block probably requires more homework before hiring its tax-season temps, but the AARP program seems to be something useful to put down on the resume if you want to do paid work for Block in the future.
    Meanwhile, you get to wear a sort of uniform -- a blue workshirt with the AARP Tax-Aide logo appliqued on.
    Tax-Aide gets plenty of publicity, drawing a steady stream of customers who arrive at community centers clutching their 2006 tax returns and the W-2 and 1099 forms they got for 2007. It can take as little as 10 minutes to crank out these folks' usually simple returns. And they're so grateful, especially when you point to the bottom line -- an appreciable refund. This year, we also tell them that just by filing the tax return they qualify for the economic stimulus rebate -- extra money ranging from $300 to $1,200.
    To volunteers with a middle-class background and a history of high earnings, it is eye-opening to see what the breezy term "low income" really means in dollars and cents. Here are aging single women, families, young laborers, revealing to me that they must try to live in high-cost Los Angeles on $12,000 a year. I don't know how they do it. The hundreds of dollars we help them obtain mean so much to them. And that's why so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, from lawyers to retirees like me, act pro bono publico. Try it.
   

Hey, Why Retire at All?

(Notice that, with my audience in mind, I'm using the largest-size type.)

   My identical twin brother, a lawyer, is 68 years old. He has three young children, ages 14, 13 and 8. I retired last May, but it's doubtful that Larry would be able to retire until the last child has completed college undergraduate work. Larry would be in his 80s! He sometimes sounds envious of my leisured life. But I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't better off, without realizing it.

   Many Americans are vowing not to retire until they're carried out of their offices on a slab (an eventuality that would give new meaning to "working stiff"). They say they realize that full-time work provides structure and opportunities for self-fulfillment. And their jaws drop when they contemplate filling the many hours of free time that retirement would bring.

   These iron Stakhanovites have a point. Health permitting, continuing to work full time -- at the old job or at some new one -- should be regarded as a viable option. Retiring means having to rebuild a life structure from scratch. Not everyone is good at handling unstructured time; that's my daily preoccupation, it turns out. Freedom and leisure go only so far, even (I would imagine) for people whose ambition it has been to buy a home beside a golf course.

   I run, I surf the Web, I do some charitable volunteering, I take photographs and make little videos with my camcorder. It's all good. But it may not be enough.

    For me, a half-time new job, maybe from noon to 5 every day, would be more appealing than a full-time gig that would deny me the 2 months of summer getaway time with my wife Irma at our lakeside cabin in Vermont that I'm getting used to. But a place to go every day, providing structure and offering meaningful work among compatible people, is rapidly becoming as much of a goal for me as retirement used to be.
   

   Which is another way of repeating the old maxim: Be careful of what you wish for. You just might get it.

Jacuzzi's Revenge, or: The Hapless Apres-Ski Victim

     In principle, I want to go skiing with my expert-skier wife, Irma, as much as possible. Skiing together brings us together. However, a recent trip with her to the giant Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort 68 miles north of Vancouver, B.C., regrettably works toward persuading me to stay home next time. God may be telling me that skiing may not be my thing, after all -- or, at least, that any retiree should handle apres-ski activities judiciously.
    As a skier, I am at best a low-intermediate, or perhaps an advanced beginner, even though I have made a fair number of trips to the slopes since 1962. Just last year my wife's coaching lifted me from my longtime plateau of mediocrity to where I began to have hopes of advancing. It doesn't help, of course, that I'm 68 years old, but I'm still pretty athletic -- but as a distance runner, if not as a skier.
   So all in all, I had high hopes when we started out for Whistler with my wife's club of aging but good-natured skiers for a seven-day holiday, including six days on the mountain. The first two days went well enough, though I did not enjoy the subfreezing cold and the north winds in my face when riding up a lift. I piggybacked on my improvements of last year and was getting the hang of turns with modern short skis on trails and open slopes.
   But that second evening, Irma suggested that we put on our flimsy cotton bathrobes and leave the confines of the Four Seasons Hotel to jump into its steaming outdoor jacuzzi for a little spa action that would soothe our quadriceps and other skiing muscles. (She almost forgot to wear her bathing suit.) Well, we left the hotel in those white cotton robes and walked 50 yards to where other couples were soaking in the steamy spa. My God, it was cold. Then, the robe came off. It got colder, then suddenly hot when we ventured into the spa.
   Though we had done the same thing a year earlier at Park City, Utah, with no unhealthful aftereffects, this time the folly of it all got to me. I spent much of the next three weeks flat on my back, diagnosed with acute bronchitis during a visit to an ER back in Los Angeles, then suffering despite doses of antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory and Costco-sized bottles of Mucinex. Only now have I begun to run again, virtually starting from scratch after losing most of my hard-won conditioning -- and some of my lung capacity.
   Lesson (cough, cough!) to blog readers: Pick a sport you're good at, and stick to it. If snow and cold weather are not your element, stay where it's warm.

So, What Do I Have Against Golf, Anyway?

  Don't get me wrong. Tiger Woods is fantastic. Everybody else in the PGA is a faceless bore.
  My bias against golf began in childhood, when I played miniature golf in L.A. I could never get the ball past the slowly whirling windmill and through the tunnel to the green. The windmill blade always batted the ball back at me.
  Golfers are sportsmen and sportswomen. OK. But are golfers athletes? Not when their polyester-clad butts are running around in those funny little carts. Not even when they walk (especially when the poor caddy is carrying the bags), because the walking is not aerobic.   
   Speaking of polyester, what's with the yellow or the lime-green pants, not to mention the plaid? Is anyone with fashion taste allowed on a golf course?
   Finally, I consider golf the Republican Party at play. Though JFK played golf (and tried to keep it hidden, because the Democrats were always criticizing Eisenhower for spending most of his presidency on the greens), I know few Democrats who golf.  CEOs and insurance salesmen golf. They are not Democrats. I cannot identify with them.
   And the only thing more boring than watching most golf tournaments on TV is listening to amateur golfers -- like my twin brother, Larry -- talk about golf.
   The only entertainment I ever got from golf was when Edward R. Murrow on "Face to Face" was interviewing the great Ben Hogan and his wife, live on CBS. "Mrs. Hogan," Murrow asked, "is there anything you do before a tournament to wish your husband luck?"
   "Well, sometimes I kiss his balls," Mrs. Hogan said. "His golf balls, I mean!"

 

Staging Long-Desired Reunions

  On Dec. 16, accompanied by wife Irma Hawkins and twin brother Lawrence Kirk, I rang the doorbell of a handsome home in Porter Ranch, Calif. A lovely, silver-haired woman answered the door. "Marion Vree!" I said. My brother nearly collapsed with surprise -- and joy. Like me, we hadn't seen our Hamilton High School a cappella choir teacher, now named Marion Vree-Brown, since 1956. I looked her up (another Google triumph) and quietly arranged this holiday meeting with her and her personable husband, retired engineer Harry Brown. To insure that Lawrence would be with me but would be surprised, I staged the ruse of telling him his muscles were needed to help me pick up a heavy present for his family. It was heavy all right, but not in the conventional sense.
   The reunion was a thrill for Mrs. Vree-Brown, 87, and for us. For other choir grads out there, I'm happy to say  that she reports herself in generally good health.

   (Click on the "My Retired Life" photo album link at right to see a photo.)

   Dr. Vree-Brown (she holds a music doctorate from USC) spent just 6 years at Hamilton, then 27 years at Los Angeles Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. She retired in 1985.

   The point I'm making here is that retirement frees one to think about looking up people there's been no time to think much about for decades in the working world. Think about whom you would like to see again, and to thank for inspiring you. It could be a former teacher, even a former boss. Don't let another day go by to get in touch.

Can't Relax! Can't Relax!

   Retirement has been billed all our lives as the great chance to relax at last. And it's true that it's great to have the pressure off. But for myself and probably hundreds of thousands of other Type-A's, there is new pressure -- pressure to feel useful. All the hobbies in the world can't fill the huge amount of time suddenly available. I'm glad that I don't have to chase news stories anymore, and I feel no guilt about it. However, there's definitely guilt about being so idle. I'm spending all my time thinking of how to assuage the guilt and make myself socially valuable again.
    However, staying idle always will be Option A. And it's good to remind ourselves that there's nothing wrong with it. We've earned it. Ease the pressure, and the answers will come.
  Or let us hope so.