Composing a Further Life

to leave,’ ” she told me. “It was because the routine of administration and management, as much as I’d loved it for thirty years, was just becoming a little too taxing. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to hear about the problems and who didn’t do what. But I did enjoy sorting through ideas, and one of the things that is attractive to me right now is that I get asked, not a lot, but you know … What do you think about such and such? So that I feel like I’m exercising my mind, I’m still in the game in that sense, run ideas rather than execution. Because execution is for somebody else at this point.”
    Ruth and I switched the conversation to a friend who was staying with a postretirement job that she appeared not to like that was not financially necessary. “So why does she keep doing it? If she really didn’t want to do it, you and I both know she would stop,” Ruth said.
    I agreed, but I commented, “The question is whether she would stop without a model of what her next thing would be. I think maybe she’s sort of looking around to find out? In a sense you’re doing something kind of brave, because you’ve stepped out of one job without a clear sense of what you want to do next, and you’ve taken it easy to see how it develops. And maybe it will develop into something, maybe it won’t. I think a lot of people are worried about the vacuum. A lot of people feel that way about marriages, too. They find the next person before they get out of a bad marriage.”
    Ruth chuckled. “Yeah. Well, I may be postponing the anxiety, if I have any, with this four-, five-month remodeling thing. But then there really is nothing other than taking it easy. You know what I mean? There is nothing lined up after that. It’s been good not to feel obliged to have an opinion.”
    Ironically, one of Ruth’s trademarks as an administrator was an emphasis on having clear goals, an emphasis developed early on as a caseworker when she was assigned to make a weekly visit to a single woman with six children who was more or less coping on welfare. All these years later, Ruth still remembered her name. “One of the things I learned from her was if you do not know where you are going, you do not know that you have done anything, and that was what the record showed. I was just a nice, friendly person who came to visit her every week, and she didn’t know why the hell I was there. So finally I say, ‘One of our goals is that you’re going to use birth control effectively. You don’t want to have another baby, right?’ ‘No, I don’t want to have another baby.’ Huh. Well, guess what, I go off on vacation and I come back and what’s happened? She’s pregnant, she happily announced. I look at the record and I see I’m not the first person who said that to her, and I’m not the first person who’s gone on vacation and she’s gotten pregnant. I’m saying, ‘Mm-hm, this is my baby I guess.’ I’m the one who had decided that she shouldn’t have a baby, she had never said she was going to do that. So I learned a lot about having realistic goals, and I learned a lot about where my power ended and hers began. And I said to myself, ‘Okay, don’t set goals for other people that either they can’t carry through or they don’t want to carry through, or you can’t make happen. If you can’t make it happen, it’s not a goal.’ So she was a—I learned a lot from her. She helped make me humble.
    “I raised hell at the agency because I was saying, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing. Why are we disturbing this woman every month when we don’t know why we’re there? She’s not—She’s polite, she’s never going to tell us to leave.’ I would take the kids on shopping trips, so she was getting something out of this. But she didn’t know why it was that we were supposedly helping her. She didn’t think she had a problem, I don’t think. She was happy. So yeah, that was an important thing for me to learn, and I’ve tried ever since to—whether I was working directly with the client or working with somebody else who’s working with the client—to be sure: Do you know what you’re trying to do? And can you really do it? There’s no point in putting it out there as a goal if you can’t make it happen. That doesn’t mean you should be shortsighted in your goal. You should be ambitious, I think, but you should also figure out, how am I going to get there, and who’s it going to