Missing Work

Retirement is something I never wanted, can ill-afford, and don’t enjoy now that it has been foisted on me.

Pablo Casals, the great Catalan cellist and dedicated political activist, said that “to retire is to die.”

It’s an arguable sentiment. I have several friends who are retired and seem content with their lot, some deliriously so. They seem to enjoy their not dreading Mondays, which leads me to suspect that they perhaps didn’t enjoy their life’s work as much as others might have. Personally, Mondays have never bothered me, although I did like having them off when I worked in theater. (We worked the other six days.)

A lot of my retired friends seem to spend a lot of time at the golf course, building birdhouses, fishing on various rivers and lakes, and trying to make a haircut, lunch with a friend and a trip to the dry cleaners an all-day adventure. A lot of them start drinking very early in the morning. Many seem always to be planning vacations, although I’m not sure from what.

And we’ve all heard stories about the retirees who failed to awaken on their first day off, their company-awarded gold watch on the nightstand being the only thing in the room still ticking.

Casals at age 93 had significantly cut back on his worldwide touring, but was still practicing his cello three hours a day. When asked why, he said, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

The three-hours-a-day time frame is exactly what I’m looking for, although four would be just as acceptable, in a job that would bring in a few bucks and make my days seem more productive. The prospects are not good.

Although my health issues are not debilitating, there are some physical restrictions which I must consider and pay heed. I’ve been advised not to run, lift anything that weighs more than 30 pounds, or do anything that might restrict my breathing. Of course, those are activities I’ve tried to avoid since first entering the work force as a nine-year-old drummer. In the intervening fifty-seven years, I have worked a variety of jobs including that of being a day laborer, a ranch hand, and chef/owner of three restaurants. The rest of my employment experiences have taken place behind a desk, seated on padded chairs with armrests.

Such is the writer’s life.

The best job I ever had was as the host of a radio show on KFAC-FM (92.3) in Los Angeles. It was a 100,000-watt commercial classical music station and I had a one-hour, once-a-week jazz show. It was cleverly called “The Jazz Hour” and it was sponsored in part by Mercedes-Benz. Its format was music and talk, and over the course of more than 250 shows in five years I hosted such artists as Benny Carter, Joe Williams, Henry Mancini, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Steve Allen, Terry Gibbs, John Lewis, Jack Elliott, Count Basie, Shelly Manne, Joe Zawinul, Mike Campbell, Charlie Haden and Jon Hendricks, to name just a few that are popping to mind as I write these words. There are many scores more.

The job paid a great hourly wage, I had complete autonomy in my selection of music and guests, and it provided full SAG/AFTRA membership benefits and health insurance. My announcer was Fred Crane, who had the opening lines in 1939’s Gone With the Wind as Brent Tarleton, one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors. My radio gig ended in 1987 when a group, ironically fronted by Jascha Heifetz’s daughter-in-law, bought the station and changed its format to rock ‘n roll.

I miss that show.

Currently I do this: ponder the world, entertain the oddest of thoughts that pop into my head and make notes about them, plan menus for no reason other than to entertain myself, write out recipes, work on my memoir and put together this blog each week. I do three or four crossword puzzles each day and spend more time than is necessary or prudent on Facebook. I garden a little, cook a little, perhaps drink more than a little. None of those things create income and at least two of them actually create outgo. (If the garden is tremendously successful this year, however, I’m estimating a savings of upwards of $3.67.)

Without regard to compensation, I’ve always been in a position to have to reinvent myself, adapting to needs defined by others. Once, interviewing before a panel of eight or ten suits at Knapp Communications, the Los Angeles-based publisher of Architectural Digest and Home magazines, I was asked what qualified me to write and edit a proposed series of magazines about kitchens and baths. I answered that in every place I had ever lived there was at least one of each. I got the laugh and the gig. Then I wondered aloud to the committee that other than the quite obvious connection between a kitchen and a bathroom, maybe each room deserved its own publication. They saw great wisdom in my proposal, agreed, and in an instant I had doubled my work.

But now that I’m old and want to remain seated for my next career move, it is time for another reinvention and I see clearly the job I want to pursue, although I’m not exactly sure how to go about it. (Offers of help will be appreciated, even compensated if anything works out.)

I’d like to create brand names for patented prescription medicines.

What got me to thinking about this is that a couple of years ago I had a pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot in the lung. Those things can kill you; in fact, that’s really their only purpose. But modern medicine provides antidotes in the form of really painful injections of the anticoagulant Lovenox in the lower torso area known clinically as “each-side-of-the-navel-and-below,” that leaves one oddly bruised. After weeks of these daily treatments, one graduates to an oral medication called warfarin, also known as Coumadin. The main side effect to this drug is that if you happen to fall and split your head open or cut your finger while slicing a tomato you will probably bleed to death. I’m not kidding, it says so right on the box: Do not fall down headfirst or slice vegetables while taking this potentially lethal drug unless you’ve pre-paid your funeral expenses.

I believe that we have limited space for information in our brains and that when we reach full capacity, new information that might come our way pushes out the old. It seems to be rather indiscriminate and apolitical. Prostrate on a hospital gurney, a doctor introduced me to a plethora of medical information about my latest condition–the blood clot that failed its mission. As I was trying to absorb that information, I sensed that everything I remembered about the 1959 Chicago White Sox was rapidly unspooling out of my brain stem to make room for information about anticoagulants. As a life-long, die-hard Cubs fan I know I shouldn’t have cared, but I cherished my memories of Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, and Minnie Minoso, who I saw throw out a runner at first base from shallow left field. Eight-old-boys just don’t forget such things, even without the benefit of instant replays on Jumbotrons or Webgem highlights on ESPN.

SO, BACK TO THE POINT, if there ever was one.

I think I have a decently creative mind and if given the opportunity I could be successful working for Big Pharma making up clever names for their drugs.

Armed with a small shelf of medical texts–Gray’s Anatomy, Physician’s Desk Reference, Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary and Dunmore and Fleischer’s stunningly entertaining Medical Terminology:
Exercises in Etymology, all of which my mother kept on her nightstand because she was a devoted and well-versed hypochondriac–I could take the approved scientific name of a newly developed drug and expertly transform it into a catchy little name that would have millions of television viewers calling their doctors to see if they needed it as part of their health regimen.

A good Latin dictionary and some Scrabble tiles would help me amass a lexicon of unpronounceable words filled with the requisite number of Xes, Ys & Zs and end in the obligatory “in” or “ol.”

I assume such a job would be fun and, considering that the average Big Pharm CEO makes in the neighborhood of $85,000 an hour and that the average cost of a pill for anybody on a fixed income hovers around $638, the pay should be pretty good.

On the other hand, I’m thinking about taking up the cello. After all, that would give me twenty-seven years to “notice some improvement.”

Photography by Courtney A. Liska