Keeping up with the upkeep

Having recently “celebrated” the passing of another birthday, I’ve given much thought lately to aging.

I’ve decided it’s not impending mortality that makes getting older so hard to take. It’s not the decline in vitality and possibility. The worst part of aging is all the damn maintenance.

Talk about a paradox. We have less life ahead of us with every passing day, but more and more of our dwindling time is spent on caring for our faces and our bodies and our overall health. By the time we take our final breaths, we’re ready to die, just so we can stop fussing with our hair.

It’s so much easier for the young. I watch my sons get ready for school in the morning and marvel at how little effort is required. They roll out of bed, throw on some clothes from the array on the floor, shovel in some breakfast, and they’re ready to go. They barely give the mirror a glance. They’re teens, they’re male, they assume they look fine.

If pressed, I can still do the quick shower and dress and out-the-door in fifteen minutes. (What we call around here “sliding down the Batpole.”) But most mornings require that more attention be paid to the mirror.

We aging men have skin spots to study, wrinkles to sigh over, gray whiskers to shave. The hair on our heads may get thinner, but stray hair pops up in strange places -- our eyebrows, our ears, our shoulders. Fallen hair apparently migrates while we sleep until it finds new and more interesting places to attach. These migratory hairs must be addressed. Throw in a beard, like I wear, and you can easily snip, snip away the entire morning.

(An aside to those men who sport bushy, spidery eyebrows: Dudes, buy some scissors. Really. It’s not funny anymore.)

When I was young, I gave no thought to working out. I got enough exercise shooting hoops and chasing women. I couldn’t gain weight if I tried. Now, I work out every day, and I’ve never been plumper. You’d think the fat would smooth out the wrinkles, but no . . .

Age weakens our eyes, loosens our teeth, flattens our arches, broadens our backsides. Remedial action is required at every turn, and it‘s all so time-consuming.

If personal upkeep is a hassle for men, it’s a hundred times worse for women. Society puts more pressure on women to look their youthful best, but every wrinkle and sag is a reminder of futility. No wonder they spend so much on cosmetics and hair dye and magnifying mirrors and Botox. No wonder it takes them longer to get ready in the morning. No wonder they resent their hairy, slovenly husbands.

As the years pile on, the physical maintenance becomes too much for us to handle alone. We seek professional help -- doctors and dentists and cosmetologists and manicurists and plastic surgeons and personal trainers. We spend our golden years wandering from one waiting room to another, trying to maintain our health and our teeth and what little looks we’ve got left.

Having an aging body is like owning an old car. Lots of dents and dings and strange noises. A little leakage now and then. Too much time in the shop, and we can’t rely on the old clunker the way we once did. But as long as it keeps running, we’ll keep on driving.

We’ve still got many miles to go.

Am I retired yet?

Count on the Baby Boom generation to blur the lines between "work" and "retirement."

Previous generations knew what "retired" meant. You hit 65, and you stopped going to work every day and you stayed home and pruned the roses and drove your spouse crazy. Occasionally, you went on cruises where you overate and got sunburned and drove your spouse crazy.

What you didn't do, as a retiree, was work. It was really the only requirement for membership.

But, no, the Baby Boomers can't have that. Our overworked generation can't just slip the bit and go off to pasture. Surveys find that the majority of Boomers expect to work after they retire.

Sure, that's partly about financial necessity and the fact that many of us invest our retirement savings in undergraduate tuition for ingrates who change their majors four times, but money's only part of the story. Many Boomers say they want to work in retirement, so they can stay "active" and in touch with their community, two things I personally try to avoid.

If you keep working, how can you tell when you retired? Maybe you just changed jobs.

Boomers want to retire from their current hated career, whatever it might be, and take up something altogether different and more wonderful, a vocation that allows flexibility and a home office and plenty of free time to be "active" and stuff. They want to set their own schedules, and not have somebody breathing down their collective necks. It's not the work they want to retire from. It's the boss.

Boomers aren't thinking six-hour stretches on their feet as Wal-Mart greeters, displaying their dentures all day. No, they want a second career that's arty and cool. Something they can do over the Internet, or by turning a beloved hobby into a moneymaker. Maybe something exciting and risky, like online poker or day trading or writing novels.

(Here's what we're all secretly thinking: I'll probably spend my retirement sitting at a computer in my pajamas anyway, playing games and reading blogs, why not find a way to get paid?)

We self-employed types with home offices have pioneered this lifestyle. Sure, we work hard, but only when we must, and the rest of the time we behave like retirees. We take advantage of nice weather and avoid rush hour traffic and futz around the yard. We don't sweat deadlines so much. If we run out of time, we can always work during the hours when any sane person is asleep.

We putter around the house, or go out with friends for long lunches or the flogging of innocent golf balls. We run errands during the workday, when retirees own the roads, and it's a good thing we're in no hurry. Like retirees, we tend to eat at strange hours -- at brunch, for instance, or during the Sunset Special. And, like retirees, we wait anxiously by the mailbox when we're expecting a paycheck.

If you want to know more about starting a "retirement career" in your golden years, just ask us, your experienced home-office professionals. We're here to help.

Happy birthday, Mom

My mother celebrates her 70th birthday today. She and my dad are both retired, and they live in the small town of Sheridan, Ark.

On the phone, she keeps saying, "I never dreamed I'd ever be 70 years old!" I don't know what she expected instead. If you hang around long enough, 70 is bound to happen. And that's fine. Isn't 70 the new 40?

I look at 70 and calculate how many books I can write between now and then. Not that I'm driven or anything.