Composing a Further Life

allow for the variations in patients or a forester for the growth of particular trees. A farmer responds to the characteristics of different fields, and the captain of a ship to the shifting winds. But above all, work is the place where most of us encounter a variety of people, both as fellow employees and, if we are lucky, as those who will use the products of our labor in their lives, cooks selecting lettuces at a farmers’ market, students in a classroom, home owners rejoicing in a remodeled basement.
    I first met Hank and Jane Lawson when my husband and I were in Brooklin, Maine, visiting Richard Goldsby and his wife, Barbara Osborne, at the vacation house they rented for several summers next door to the Lawsons, who were also seasonal residents by then. The Goldsbys and the Lawsons had become friends over a series of summers, and while I was interviewing Dick for this book, he urged me to speak with them about how they were spending their retirement. So during an extended visit to the Goldsby household, I spent several hours interviewing the Lawsons and followed up with a visit to their winter retirement community in Arizona.
    Hank and Jane are both natives of Maine. They have been married for over fifty years and have four children. Hank had good reason to look forward to retirement from his long-term job at the Brooklin Boat Yard, where he worked long hours, often handling heavy machinery. But of all the people I spoke to, he seemed the most ingenious in re-creating in retirement from his job what had been satisfying to him in a long life of hard work.
    Hank’s mother had died two days after giving birth to him, after which his father moved away from Maine, and he grew up in the homes of various relatives. He started doing neighborhood chores of various kinds when he was eight years old. He tried to join the Navy at sixteen, but they sent him back to finish high school, and he was finally sworn in at seventeen, the day after graduation. After the Navy, where he was trained in the maintenance and repair of big diesel engines, he worked at the local boatyard, then in commercial fishing, and then in construction in New Jersey, where his father was living. When he married Jane, however, they found they missed their hometown life in Maine, and Hank went back to the boatyard, where he stayed for forty-four years, fabricating metal parts when needed, and all this in huge, unheated sheds where boats were taken out of the water for repair or for storage during the Maine winters.
    Hank is proud of his skills, but his greatest satisfaction came not from the work itself but from other aspects of his job. When I asked him about this, he told me, “What comes to mind is, not too long before my boss, Joel White, died, when he was already sick with cancer and his son had pretty much taken over, I said to him one day, it would have been about 1996, I said, ‘I know you think that I think that the boats are great and all that, and you’re absolutely right, but that really wasn’t what I was interested in doing.’ I said, ‘I enjoyed doing the work, but more than anything, it was just a lot of fun dealing with the people that we were making the boat for or repairing the boat for.’ I enjoyed that more than I did the actual work itself.”
    “Because you’re a people person,” Jane said.
    “Yeah, and he never knew that,” Hank continued. “He thought, Wow, Hank is pretty much into these boats. I didn’t want to drop an anchor right in the middle of everything and destroy a friendship, because we certainly had a great, great friendship, but I didn’t want him to go on thinking that I was the master boat person that he thought I would grow into. That wasn’t the product for me at all. The product was the people. So I’m kind of happy that we had that little piece of conversation, because I know that I didn’t mislead him into thinking something that wasn’t going to happen.”
    “But you really enjoyed making those fittings for the boats. You were so proud of—”
    “But you know why I was proud? It wasn’t because of the fittings, it was because, when a person would come to pick up their boat, and they had all this work laid out for ’em, I would just, you know, I’d stand off to one side—I couldn’t be in the center of attention, you know—just to see the surprised, happy look on their face; that meant more to me than the damn paycheck. I needed the paycheck to buy my bread; it’s that simple. Joel