Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter.  Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million.  But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Update:  I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man.  Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.”  He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house.  And the television.  And the car.  And the other car.  And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending.  While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards.  The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old.  It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more.  He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house.  The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it.  He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship.  Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that.  Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe.  He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

Pop says he saw him.  But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability.  That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly.  He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things.  Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots:  the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area.  A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption.  I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop.  Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it.  When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered.  The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail.  But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business.  He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder.  But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run.  What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback.  Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse.  Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled.  Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished.  They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving.  Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay?  No.  But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates.  And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money.  But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you. 

Pop Wilder spent it all.  Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe.  Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month.  Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month.  And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker.  I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study.  I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake.  There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out:  “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense:  most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you.  And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help?  Maybe.

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end?  Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain.  Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad.  This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5^th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6^th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna.  There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

• there be inflation?
• they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills?   We thought about it, but live next door to a banker?  I hear they bring down property values.
• civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
• I live to be 190? I hope not.
• government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty?  In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.