STARTING OVER by Arthur Kahn

My observation is that when most people reach their early 60's their lives have more or less leveled out. Sure, this is a vast over simplification, but let's face it, When you're in your early 60's you've been working for over 40 years, give or take. Many people look forward to retirement as their own private Nirvana. For most, it's a pretty mundane Nirvana. For example, people who sew look forward to sewing for more than 2 or 3 hours a night. Golfers? I'm not a golfer (whew) but the people I know who golf seem to be unable to not golf. I'm not a fan of the sport (although I'm probably one of the few people who enjoy watching golf on TV – go figure) but those I know who golf derive true joy from it.

What I've described could be called “anticipatory retirement”. You're staring at the not too distant future. A future in which you reap the supposed rewards of having earned the chance to step off the whirling dervish that most people think is the whirl of life.

Me? Not on your life. My first (there were many) “mid life crisis” started in my mid-40's and ended right after my 50th birthday with a heart attack and open heart surgery with a pacemaker chaser.
At the time, I was working for a lawyer in Albany, N. Y. His self professed management style was “terrorist”, this all before we knew what terrorism really was. Mind you, I was not the greatest employee. A few days before my infarct ( the technical term for my heart attack was myocardial infarction – which feels really good on the tongue when you say it) I had been berated upon the discovery of hundreds of pornographic pictures on my hard drive at work. Thank God he didn't know, or suspect, that I would stay late at the office and have cyber sex or phone sex. Now, I'll grant you that, as a lawyer, I should have known that there is no right of privacy at the work place. Unfortunately, my life worked on the principle that lust trumped everything.

After initially surviving the heart attack (there were a few hairy moments, such as a precipitous drop in my heart rate after I was brought to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, NY) it was decided that I needed to be chauffered to Albany Medical Center for a cardiac catheterization to determine if I needed heart surgery. The result was that I was scheduled for a coronary artery bypass graft (CABGx2 – pronouced cabbage), a double bypass. Better than three or four, no?

So, I'm lying in the hospital. I'm not too far from my office. I got along well with the staff, other than the terrorist, so I called and asked if they would mind bringing me a decaf iced coffee from this terrific coffee place near the office, The Daily Grind. One of them showed up a short time later, iced coffee in hand. With a letter “from Dennis”, the terrorist. With that she made an abrupt departure. As soon as I read the letter I understood the hasty retreat. Instead of a note of encouragement and perhaps a check, I was fired. Canned. Terminated. And, of course, no more health insurance.

Sometimes it pays to have other, more serious issues to deal with when faced with a crisis in one part of your life. Since I was about to undergo open heart surgery I mercifully couldn't dwell on what was, in the moment, an ordinary crisis, compared to what was coming. Open heart surgery is pretty serious stuff. What they do is put you on a refrigerated table to lower your body temperature to about 88 degrees. Then they put you into a coma (I had made a pact with the anesthesiaologist that he wouldn't catheterize my junk until I was out) and then they take a surgical steel sawzall and saw your sternum apart. They then take a rib retractor, separate your ribs and expose your heart. Next they hook up your major blood vessels to a pump. Then they kill you.