A Gathering of Old Men

April 23rd, 2024

I never understood why my dad would go out for breakfast once a month with his former comrades and coworkers from the City Water Department. They were all retired, and they met at some restaurant in West Allis for reasons that were obscure to me. I didn’t ask him about it. I was busy raising my family and working long hours at my own job. I figured that when I retired, if ever, I wouldn’t get nostalgic about my previous career. I couldn’t imagine meeting up with guys that would remind of all those years of toil and trouble.

Guess what I did two days ago?

I had lunch at a local bar and grill with six men that I used to work with. One of them had taken the initiative to get us all in one place for an hour or two. I have been to a few of these soirees before. Often, it is just two or three of us that find the time and energy to meet. Seven people was quite the crowd.

I have been thinking about why we even bothered to have a burger and a beer together. Since each of us retired, our lives have taken different trajectories. Some guys travel now and take trips to Myrtle Beach or Pensacola. Some of my former coworkers help to care for their grandchildren, although perhaps not as much as I do. I am raising my grandson fulltime. Some of the men have medical issues like bad backs or damaged shoulders, injuries that are the long-term results of the work they day after day for years. Some have spouses who are hurting. One man’s wife struggles with diabetes and is waiting for a kidney transplant. The one thing we all have in common is that mortality is daily becoming more real. Time is short.

For most of these guys, retirement is their second act. They spent decades working at the same trucking company that I did. Now, that part of their lives is over. For me, retirement is more like a third act. I was an Army officer before I joined the corporate world. In any case, we are all trying to decide on what we really want to do with our remaining years. We are also trying to make sense of the years that have gone by.

We spent a lot of timing talking about the old days. I don’t say “good old days”, because they weren’t. They were just different. The company was much smaller when we started working there. Things were up close and personal. Emotions flared and people yelled. I know I did. However, we all knew something about each other’s lives outside of the workplace. The environment was often tense and stressful, but it was also deeply human. As far as I can tell, the employees at that company are now just cogs in an impersonal wheel. They are ciphers and they are totally replaceable.

What is the value of reminiscing? It isn’t nostalgia. It is more a matter of reassuring each other that these events actually happened. It is a clumsy but cooperative effort at coming to terms with what we did with what were perhaps the best years of our lives. Was it all worth it? Did it make any sense?

In a sense, all seven of us are survivors. We spoke of many people in the past tense. A lot of the folks we knew are gone, in a permanent way. Some of them died shortly after retirement. Some of them never even made it to retirement. Heart disease or alcoholism or cancer cut them down before they had a chance to look back on their lives. We are blessed in that, even with our struggles, we can still carry on. We still have the opportunity to start anew.

My father eventually stopped going to his breakfast meetings. Maybe he lost interest. Maybe some of his friends moved away. He did. Maybe some of his coworkers got too sick to join with him. Little by little, they all left. I think my dad was the last man standing. He outlived them all.

It’s odd, now that our professional work is done, we still come together. In a way, we need each now more than when we did all those years ago.