Staying in the Game: Planning a Second (or even Third) Act
Judy and I have been with our internist Mitch for more than 30 years—hell, we shot all three of his sons’ bar mitzvahs—and Mitch and his wife Susan now are grandparents.
Still, it came as a shock a few weeks ago, after Judy and I each had had our annual physicals, to hear Mitch say he was going to retire in the fall.
Certainly, he was entitled. He is about to turn 70 (though he’ll always be a kid to us) and would be leaving (one assumes comfortably) the thriving multi-physician practice that he and his partners had built on K Street in downtown Washington.
“What are you going to do now?” Judy asked.
“I’m just gonna be an old retired doctor who nobody listens to,” Mitch replied, I hope in jest.
Still, Mitch’s words struck a chord about the need for a second act.
As recently as our parents’ generation, retirement (usually at age 65) meant a gold watch and waiting to die. That is, if you even made it past 65. Average life expectancy in the U.S. in 1950 was 68. Today it’s close to 80, with many of us living way past that, and still being productive.
But what to do with all that extra time?
Folks who work at a job just to pay the bills may have it easier when they retire: “Hell, I’m not punching that damn clock at the office (or the plant, or the school) anymore!” These folks probably have been yearning for the time when they finally could devote themselves entirely to their passions, be it writing, painting,fishing, cooking, woodworking—even poker.
It’s the other people—the highly driven, highly successful ones: the doctors, the lawyers (not sure about the Indian chiefs) who loved what they did for decades, to the exclusion of almost everything else—who may have a problem when age, or company rules, force them to leave their careers behind.
A suggestion:
Plan for a second act that doesn’t have anything to do with what you had done before,or at least is different enough not to seem like you are hanging on where you no longer fit in. (Given my own career as a journalist, I can’t help but think of retired newsies writing press releases just to earn a paycheck.)
Granted, I was lucky. I’m a writer and a photographer. After 20 years as a reporter and editor in the New York Daily News Washington bureau, I was able to segue into a second career with my wife Judy in commercial photography, shooting everything from annual reports to record album covers, to weddings. We shot more than 600 weddings together over another 20 years, earning what I used to call “lawyer money.”
Along the way, I also became the photography columnist of the Washington Post.
But commercial shooting is a younger person’s game, so Judy and I pivoted again, beginning another decade of teaching photography workshops together: in Washington, Maine and in Italy. We also did our first book together, "Serenissima: Venice in Winter" (2008), inspired by our winter workshops in the Floating City
Today, Judy is retired from photography (she even gave her camera gear to our grandson Eliot) and now devotes her creative energy to assemblage sculpture in her studio that we built in our garden. (Widely exhibited, she has a piece in the current exhibit “Art After Duchamp” at the George Washington University galleries in Washington.)
I still teach in DC, but now devote most of my time to books, my column (now the photography blog www.TalkingPhotography.com as well as to portraiture and to creating an ongoing series of studio-lit portraits of flowers.
The important thing is that each pivot, each re-invention, inspired us.
And we never look back.
Not a bad way to be retired.
Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based documentary photographer, author, and former political journalist. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and jointly holds (with the late Lars-Erik Nelson) the 1980 Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents Association. He and his wife Judith Goodman have just completed work on their next joint book, “The Green Heart of Italy: Umbria and its Ancient Neighbors.”
