When The Warranty Is Up And Your Pull-By Date Has Passed, You're On Your Own - The Honorable Badge Of Courage

When Bill Baxter went in for his yearly physical - well, not exactly yearly since at his age what ails him would either improve or do him in, so why find out before the time came? - Dr. Sherman said, 'You're in fine shape, Bill, heart of an athlete and prostate of a young man'. 

'Numbers don't lie', replied Bill, a man who ordinarily never paid attention to actuarial tables, IRS life expectancy projections or Treasury Department expectations for bond maturity.  He had always been a come-what-may kind of guy, taking life as it, mining its treasures, putting up with its frustrations, and accepting tragedy; but now, suddenly, someone had flipped the channel.  He was no longer looking at the future with any enthusiasm and was spending more and more time dwelling on the past. 

What bothered him most was his sexual insignificance.  God's greatest irony was to create men with a lifelong interest in sex, but to afford them only a few short decades to do something about it. 

'Stop thinking about younger women', said the doctor. 'Recalibrate your objectives' which meant someone like Sadie Birnbaum, a woman with a leathery Miami Beach tan, a relic from the old days of Collins Avenue, mink coats, and the Fontainebleau who greeted him warmly and invitingly in the elevator every morning. Yes, sex with Mrs. Birnbaum might be in the cards, but the thought of lying next to, let alone on top of this antique was shuddering, a waste of Viagra, and a hundred elevator trips later staring at the engineer sign-off card. 

The problem was that Bill had had a younger woman - an early Christmas present he called her, a brand new tricycle under the tree.  What could be more jubilant? 

The affair went on until the ornery bits showed up - his wife, the girl's biological clock, the rumors in the typing pool - and they parted one tearful Saturday morning in May.  He remembered the date and time because it was all downhill from there. Pull-by date long passed, God's irony in full swing, and the long slog until the end before him. 

'Get ahold of yourself', said Dr. Sherman, shaking hands with Bill and escorting him out the door.  'It happens to the best of us'. 

Cold comfort from a young man, thought Bill as he made his way onto K Street.  What did he know? and all the way home in the taxi, he tried to sort things out.  Recalibrate? Hah! Sadie Birnbaum?

After many years of service, a colleague was offered an emeritus position - a pleasant although smaller office, an honorarium instead of seven figures, and an invitation to all board meetings.  It was the company's way of reducing the payroll, freeing up corner office space, but acknowledging fidelity and fellowship.  

The colleague, like an academic on sabbatical at a lesser university, had only to produce a few desultory papers, an to focus on efficiency, corporate management, human resources, and workflow, his bailiwick when fully employed. 

The man never realized that he was being put out to pasture - the tiny windowless office should have done the trick, or the no-response to the weekly policy papers he produced, or the infrequent invitations to backend, insignificant meetings of board 'adjutants' - and so he kept at it, coming in at 9 every morning, taking a short break for lunch, and staying on until the Salvadoran cleaning crew came in to mop up. 

This continued for many month, a year or more perhaps, over which time he was completely forgotten. 'Who?' was the best recognition he could muster, but he kept at it.  The job was his whole life, his justification for being, his raison d'etre. 

And then one late morning, an errand boy with a delivery who mistook the man's office for that of the intended recipient, found him dead as doornail, slumped over an array of papers on his desk.  Apparently he had died sometime the day before, but no one noticed, and the cleaning ladies assuming he was snoozing, mopped around him. 

'He died in his traces', said the President of the company at his memorial service, and went on to cite his many notable achievement in office management.  The few mourners gathered nodded in agreement, but looked at their watches, and hoped that the ceremony - already short and peremptory - would soon end. 

'Is that my fate?', Bill asked himself when he heard the tale.  Certainly not that particular end.  No, his existential conundrum was far removed from his colleagues unusual perplexity.  

Yet the image of the poor bugger slumped over papers no one would ever read was a metaphor. 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?', wrote William Butler Yeats in his poem The Second Coming. Perhaps that was what it was, thought Bill, until he remembered the words of his Yale professor who explicated the text saying 'Yeats envisions a monstrous, exhausted figure emerging from the cyclical collapse of history' not exactly Bill's situation, but he needed something heady to grasp on to.  

'The warranty period on your I-phone has expired, Mr. Baxter, but don't worry, we can get you to an agent as soon as you provide us with some supplementary information', said the Apple representative who was sugar-coating the steep charges for anyone foolish enough to let their warranty lapse. 

Metaphor again, though Bill. Not only has my pull-by date passed - that's bad enough - but my warranty period as well.  'I'm on my own'. 

Now, many years ago when he was a young man, this is the way life was.  Before employment, job security, investment portfolios, and trust funds you were on your own.  No net if you fell from the high-wire, nor did you ever want one.  Life was to be taken as is.  Risk, impossibility, danger were all part of evolution - growing up - and Bill was ready.  

What had happened? Where had all the self-confidence and logical positivism gone? How had he turned into a weak-kneed Nellie before he knew it? Yet here he was, just like himself as an adolescent facing the unknown, tethered by nothing now that warranty and pull-by were long past. 

'I don't feel anything like the old me', he said. 

Old age was a matter of dribs and drabs.  T.S. Eliot had it right:

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?

 

'I deserve a medal', said Bill. 'So do we all', referring to that generation nearer to the end of life than its beginning.  

He eventually righted his emotional ship and sailed on, captain of the barque at least.