Dear Friends,
An old friend of mine once gave me some sage advice, advice that while free, was worth a king’s ransom. George was smarter than a whip. In fact, you could say the man was a genius in his own right. The way I met him was that he went to the same church as I did and through the grape vine I found out he was a sawyer. I had need of sawing done so I called him and we became friends. George had worked at IBM and had risen to high station, without credentials or letters, but by outsmarting the engineers he competed with who did. We were loading lumber on my pickup when he stopped and gave me a deep look. I halted to listen to what he had to say. He explained that he and his wife had planned on getting a motor home and traveling the US when he retired. They had everything planned out, except…
I was chatting with George one time when he was sawing some hard maple. He pointed at a piece of junk. I looked. It was the pumpkin from an old Subaru. He told me it would be the gear box for a winch he was going to build. I laughed at the thought. Well, two weeks later I came by to get the lumber he had sawn for me. His wife said he was still in the woods but would be out soon. Just then I heard the characteristic putt putt of a John Deere 1010. So I headed out to the sawmill to meet George. He came out of the woods with a huge hitch of green hemlock logs… strung together on the homeliest looking winch trailer you have ever seen. Fabricated from one inch iron pipe welded in a frame, with that Subaru pumpkin in the center acting as the gearbox to the winch, holding the whole hitch of logs.
I have found that people who are overly intelligent tend to eccentricity (that is the only way I am similar to them) in that, George was the exception. Although he was overly intelligent, he wasn’t terribly eccentric. Pretty staid in fact. You could say that George was wise as well. One way you can tell if someone is wise is by their life. If their life is a shambles, filled with drama and chaos, one can be fairly safe in concluding they lack wisdom. Someone who’s life is fulfilled, their wants and needs well met and their dreams reasonable and within reach, is probably fairly wise. Pragmatically judging by the outcome. (Although as Solon told Croesus, one can never judge the happiness of a life until it is over.) Judging pragmatically then, George was indeed a wise man.
He had planned on seeing the country. Most people from the hills don’t get very far. Those hills nestle us and most have no need to see the flatland. George had wanted to see more than just the state he grew up in. Not as a bum, but as a retired person, living in luxury in a motor home, meeting new people and experiencing the life he had put on hold for so many years while he worked to build up a nest egg… that would enable him to fulfill that dream. Over the years he had many opportunities to retire. He hadn’t really considered them though, because continued working grew the nest egg, and how could that be a bad thing? Moreover, IBM offered him bonuses to stay instead of retiring, they wanted to get rid of the deadwood, not the live root. So George stayed on and made tons of money.
One thing that all the money in the world cannot solve is, a health problem. George had everything well in hand for his retirement. Oh, he was ten years older then he had planned initially, but had gobs more money than he had imagined as well. Nevertheless, His beloved wife got cancer. She couldn’t even consider traveling the nation. How would she get her chemotherapy? How could someone racked with cancer stand constant traveling anyway? No, their carefully planned retirement had been ruined. Had George retired when he was younger, he would have had plenty of money… and ten years to enjoy it with his beloved, before she came down with cancer. His advice was, “Don’t wait to enjoy life until you are rich. Retire when you can, to do what you want, when you can.” God bless you and yours.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
