The barber cutting my hair said, “So you’re retired, was it difficult to do?” It made me think a bit. (I really should do that more than a bit, but…) I replied “I can’t say it was”. The ultimate “I’m going to retire” came after a gradual incline towards it. It’s like a lot of decisions we make, they are partially made for us due to the circumstances. We then come to the fork in the road and unlike Groucho Marx’ we can’t “take the fork”. It began actually in 1991 when the courts of Philadelphia Common Pleas was being reorganized. One of its reorganizing steps was to revamp the Jury Selection Commission on which I sat. In simple language one non-professional replaced the four lawyers sitting as Commissioners. In the era of saving money wherever they could in government it was surprising it had not been reorganized long before that. So that was the first retirement. It left my law practice, which had really been run by my secretary, para-legal, Judy Higgens, most of the time anyway. The years ’92 and ’94 brought some other changes, the first the giving up alcohol and the second giving up some blood vessels in my legs to be used to by pass a blockage in the ventricle vein in my heart. The latter caused time off and a good deal of it was spent in Florida. We had come down to Florida in ’90 to see John then in Veteran’s Hospital. He never got out of the hospital and the Lord called him home on April 7th of that year. His son Richard owned the home where John had been living in St.Petersburg in an area called “Shore Acres”. They, he and his wife Shirley, kindly invited us to use their home in our visits to Florida and so we did then over the next six years. I continued to practice in the field of Family Law, enjoying the work where we brought children or a child to parents for Adoption, and struggling with the side where the parents fought over who got the child and/or the property. Both involved innocent children, one to bring them to loving and anxious parents, the other to Solomon like divide the child or children between the parents. Our visits to the home in Shore Acres came more often and of longer periods. In 1996 our guest for Easter in Shore Acres were Jerry and Betty Hopkins, grandparents with us of the Twins, Sean and David Hopkins. However, Jerry developed some symptoms, which caused Betty to decide they should head home to see his cardiologist. He too had had a by-pass recently. Our plans for the activities with them fell apart. With time on our hands we decided to take a look at some houses in the area since we had been talking off and on about owning our own place here in sunny Florida. We did so. We found one we liked within a few blocks of Rich and Shirley’s home. It had a wall large enough to fit our new breakfront, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, living area, kitchen, central air and one car garage. The price was right so we signed an agreement. I wrote in the Jottings for April 1996: “… we signed an agreement to purchase a property with a view towards seeing it more often, and some day maybe permanently. We have a dividend of having the property presently rented.” As you can see when this was written in April of 1996 we still were not speaking or thinking of retiring.
There was no “difficulty” in finally making the decision to quit the law practice. In May of 1996, I wrote, “Our plans are unsettled as to the precise time of a move (to Florida). We are contemplating making it our home at least partially in 1999, the year I turn 70. We are planning on spending more time here in the winters between now and then but still keep an anchor back at 7435 (Dorcas St. Philadelphia) until we feel comfortable here. The distances between us and children, and grandchildren continue to make the decisions difficult, but not impossible. I can now report… we will settle on 1644 Connecticut Ave. NE on May 5th” One month later the thoughts of 1999 etc. had disappeared and I reported “…come December 31,1996 I will give up the formal practice. I will have spent 38 years as a licensed practitioner in Penna. I had four more years’ prior thereto in the USMC as a member of the DC Bar and legal officer. ..I feel great having finally made the decision and am joined in this feeling by June. We both look forward to seeing the world, our grandchildren, and reaping the benefits of having stuck around this long” It certainly wasn’t difficult to decide. But unsaid at the time for whatever reasons both June and I also remember that at that time I had another incident which helped make it easy. I had been representing a woman Lawyer the mother of a child less that a year old. The husband and father was also a lawyer! The nit picking that he particularly presented, even at times without his own counsel’s knowledge or agreement, led me to ask a very simple question: “Why am I continuing to do this? Why do I need all this aggravation? In fact I was taking it home with me and that was definitely a “no-no”. I have a pension, the few fees I would pick up would only now create a need for time which would interfere with plans to enjoy the summer month, etc.?” So without any ‘difficulty’ I decided no more practice. Judy as I recall had already contacts and information on where she could find employment, and in fact I think she was doing only part time work by this time. The 1999 date disappeared and we moved to Florida in 1997 into a renovated 1644 Connecticut Ave, NE.
In rereading one of the ’96 Jottings I came across a quote which I have often thought about when I sit down to write these notes. It was from John Mortimer’s biography, “Murderers and Other Friends”. He is a Barrister, playwright, novelist, but is best known as the creator of “Rumpole of Old Bailey”. He states, referring to another book, “The book contains a lecherous old journalist, author of an appalling column called ‘Jottings’, which he fills with random and frequently pretentious thoughts”. I laughed when I read it, and still do today but often feel sure some reading these ‘jottings’ refer to them in the same manner. (My editor commented: “I wonder who?”)
So these are my ‘memories’ of how and why I retired. Memory is a mystery. I have recently came across a number of writings, columns, etc. about the mystery. In reading Augustine’s Confession you find it’s largest book (we would call it a Chapter) is on memory. Sometime ago I read a book by John Horgan, entitled, “The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation”. I learned one of my favorite writers Garry Wills, author of a biography of St.Augustine had now published a new translation of “St. Augustine’s Memory”. Then in the NYTimes Magazine for July 27th appeared an article called a “Bad Trip Down Memory Lane” A study by a Harvard psychologist on the “recovered memory”. She attempted to discern whether the memories of child abuse by those who had suddenly recalled it happening was a reality or a fiction. It is the “repressed memory” problem. She conducted tests on them and then on people whose child abuse was a known fact. Her conclusion from the test was that the repressed memories were fictions, not fact. The attacks that followed her findings from organizations protecting people abused as children and so forth, led her to decide may be she should use a different alleged repressed source. So she turned to alien abductees who suddenly years after the event recalled having been abducted by aliens. Her findings like wise resulted in the conclusion that the so called “repressed” memories where imaginary i.e. false. The onslaught of criticism again engulfed her. She has since given up and has gone to Managua, Nicaragua, to the Harvard affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute to study how trauma affects people, but the trauma will be verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines. Incidentally the researcher was a woman named Clancy and all this was done at Harvard University. But even the Harvard aroma was not enough to quell the uproars. The mind is a mystery and the most mysterious part of the mind is memory. “Though the term ‘false memory’ is slippery and inadequate, there is now little doubt that the phenomenon exists. A rash of satanic ritual abuse claims in the 1980’s and ’90’s —claims that were never substantiated but destroyed families and ruined reputations — demonstrated fairly conclusively that both adults and children sometimes report things they think happened that didn’t”. (Bruce Grierson, NY Time Mag. July27, 2003). John Horgan, author of “The Undiscovered Mind”, refers to an “explanatory gap”, i.e., the explanation does not make sense, or as he puts it “…the inability of physiological theories to account for psychological phenomena.”
All this ruminating about memory seems even more relevant at this time since we are reminiscing about the now departed Bob Hope, whose theme song was “Thanks for the Memories!” And we do often thank the Lord for giving us this faculty in which to store joy and sorrow which are at our beck and call at anytime. It may be a mystery but one I can live with.
Until next time pax tecum!