The Retirement Question

By Sam Negri

The truth is not always an obligation. I discovered that fact after I retired. Strangers, usually the staff in a doctor’s office, would ask me what I did before I retired. It was a way of launching a distraction as they poked an IV needle into a vein. I usually answered truthfully and assumed that the person who asked the question would be listening to my answer. I eventually figured out that nobody really listens. Adjustments were required.

The last time I was asked by a medical technician about my pre-retirement occupation, I replied, “I was an elephant trainer.”

“You’ve got lot of good veins to choose from,” she said.

“It really isn’t all that difficult to train elephants,” I said.

“Make a fist.” she said. “Very good. Small pinch. All done. Oh, go ahead and open your hand.”

The next time the retirement question came up I was in the waiting room at the Department of Motor Vehicles and number 369 had just been directed to Window K4. 

The man seated next to me in a plastic red chair observed, “They’re pretty efficient here.”

Anticipating where this was going, I decided to come clean immediately. “Before I retired, I made a living studying Spadefoot Toads.”

“What?” he said with a hint of alarm in his voice.

“Yes, you heard right,” I said. “When it rains they burrow back to the surface to mate.”

“Why are you talking about toads?” he asked. “Who said anything about toads?”

I could tell where this was heading and I wanted to make myself perfectly clear. “Are you being confrontational?” I asked. “Because if you are, it’s important for you to know I have a nasty tongue and Black Belt in Karate.”

He must have been around 75 years old but he stood up with such ease that I knew I had gone too far. “I’m just kidding,” I said, looking him straight in the eye and preparing for the backhand I was sure he would use to send me flying. But he did nothing of the sort. He merely smiled and said, “My dog peed on the living room rug this morning.”

Naturally, I got up and found a vacant chair several rows away.

What I learned over time is that a fine line separates the irrational from the insane. One of my friends went to London for a week many years ago and when he returned to Michigan he started calling his umbrella a “brolly” and his cats were “moggies.” At first he was just having a little fun, a blink here, a nudge there, say, how do you like my new accent? But forty years later he was still ending phone calls by saying, “Ta” and observing that this or that politician was going to “stand” for election and so and so had once “clarked” for Scalia. He had clearly been co-opted by his wayward brain. I wanted to avoid a similar fate.

It was not easy. The main advice I can provide is that one should never lose track of his antecedent. This is what people mean when they interrupt themselves and declare, “I’ve lost my frame of reference.”

When I became aware of the problem, I knew I had to make my autobiography more plausible. My father used to walk around Prospect Park picking up bubblegum wrappers with a nail in the end of a broomstick. It was terrible trying to explain that so I got him a job at the Sorbonne where he was an expert on the Ottoman Empire. That really opened doors with everyone who asked me about my formative years.

But the lure of the precipice was never far off. “My Dad was the original absent-minded professor,” I would tell people. “When personal computers became popular he hated anyone who could remember their email address and password  The thing he loved most was the smell of a wet luxury car after a summer rain. He read Rumi in the original Persian and Nietzsche in literary German.”

The problem with fake autobiographies is that they require concentration. Who can  remember all the intricate details about anything? Sooner or later someone starts asking who Roomie or Kneechee were. I sometimes developed a rash. Life is complicated enough without people asking me still more questions.

Elephants remember everything —everything!—but it is clear that I do not. It’s a disturbing deficit. 

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