Clara Caufield: Indian elders are lucky enough to remain valued

Monday, August 12, 2019  

Most Americans, of my generation (1960s – 2000s) have always worked hard, toiling hours to provide for selves and families, including our parents and grandparents, who started working like dogs as teenagers, continuing for decades. No one else stepped up.

Now entrenched in retirement, I listen to fellows dealing with this new life experience. In my case, after 53 years of unremitting labor (having started working at 12), Social Security advised to take the monthly benefit, since no matter how hard and long I work after 65, I am at the “maximum”. “Why not?”, I decided: having earned and deserving it, still able to make a little extra without penalty. For me, Native Sun News Today comes in. Thanks again, good friends, for providing extra income opportunity. Besides, it gives distraction. What? I often muse, should I scribble about this week?

When you have worked all day long most of your life, it requires adjustment to suddenly doing nothing. How do people handle that? Some, like Tim and Jackie Giago, self-employed newspaper people for years, don’t. They just keep going and going, having purpose and reason to keep working as do my rancher friends who will ‘go’ until they drop. Others turn to hobbies. Will I ever write that book? We all have one in our heads: the trick is getting it onto paper.

People wiser and smarter have investments: IRA’s, 401 K’s; real estate, insurance, savings accounts etc. and there are many of those. Not me: somehow, I thought to keep working forever, a slave or mule to someone, earning and then spending every nickel, sometimes more. Basically, a financial dummy.

Two of my wiser fellow retirees tell about their plans: going on adventures such as buying a motor home; exploring the coasts; visiting warm climes and distant relatives; fishing in Mexican seas; purchasing a little ‘investment’ cabin in the mountains; maybe even a poker tournament in Las Vegas.

Many others of us now live on "fixed" incomes. Those are who I write about. Some, such as Vietnam Vets, though declared 100 percent disabled, are very challenged. One friend somehow tires to manage on $417 per month while others get the princely sums of $800-$900. It’s even hard to rent an apartment for that amount. The Vet has resorted to living with the ‘Beast’, because she has a house (providing a roof over his head while he offers male companionship). Is there another word for that?

Thankfully, I’m not that desperate, but still learning about a fixed income, with little margin for financial error or catastrophe. But, if so, there is always the handy pawn shop where my saddle has resided or the PayDay loan joint, both charging ridiculous interest rates.

Other than financial management, comes the challenge of keeping busy – filling up the days. One of my good friends slaved for years as an award-winning convenience store manager, rising at 5:00 am to get to work by 6:00 am and then spending 8-10 hours trying to supervise hopeless workers, many of them with low work ethic, loathe to clean or re-stock and she was ever "on call."

Since retirement, due to health issues, she first slept in each morning, catching up on about forty years of missed sleep, only to rise and think “What’s next on the agenda?” After checking emails, maybe pestering equally bored friends with an early morning phone call and tending to the garden, her day stretched out. After trying on-line surveys (don’t fall for that!), she is now redoing her house and "making" things, very creative, not bored but busy. And her husband, still working, appreciates her being home to make lunch.

Some succumb to bars – especially old bachelors – wading down each day, claiming designated seats, nursing a ‘tall one’, staring at the TV, often muted. At least the bartender is glad to see them for the dollar tip. Long since run out of new stories or conversation about their exciting lives, they sit morosely until going home to eat, often Food Bank stuff.

Clara Caufield can be reached at acheyennevoice@gmail.com