Mark Patinkin ’74, recently back from his Reunion, takes the time to put things in perspective in the Providence Journal: http://www.projo.com/lifebeat/markpatinkin/Mark13_06-13-09_BLEM5B2_v10.27640cc.html.
The text can be found by clicking below!
Mark Patinkin: Age gives us more choices
01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, June 13, 2009
A warm front had moved in just before the reunion began. The campus had a beauty that reminded me of why I was drawn to it when I first visited in 1970. It felt like a refuge, which is what college is meant to be, and it did again now, as I arrived for my 35th.
They put the class of 1974 in one of the dorms where once, thin walls, loud music and beehive-living created happiness. Now, as I unpacked, I wondered how I could have spent four years in such a cell-like room.
Things change.
During past reunions, I mostly remember folks talking about work. Children, too, of course, but work was even part of that discussion. It was a challenge to afford the life we wanted to provide them.
This time, in a class whose average age was 57, I noticed something different, and as much as anyone, a friend of mine named Nick reflected it.
He looked good, which is part of his job. He’s a television news reporter. I still remember the two weeks we looked for jobs together in the August after graduation. We drove across country, me knocking on the doors of newspapers while he went to TV stations. We didn’t care where we ended up. It wasn’t about place, or friends, or family. All that mattered was the job.
He found one and has spent the last 25 years in a prominent Southern city. He’s built an impressive career in a tough field. You could argue he’s at the height of it.
And he’s leaving.
It’s not for a bigger job, or any job at all. He grew up in Chicago, still has relatives there and misses it. Having gotten married later than many of us, he has an 8-year-old child. He and his wife have decided that the most important thing they can do right now is give their boy a connected childhood among family, in a city they love. She has a job that will get them through while he looks.
Folks were asking if he’s anxious about finding work. Of course, he said. But the timing was right; they’ve enrolled their son in a good school, and they want to be settled by September.
I don’t know what it is about age 57, but a lot of that seemed to be going around.
There was a class panel with people talking about recent life decisions. You might expect the focus would be on professional achievements. It wasn’t.
One of the panelists called himself a Wall Street survivor. He had been a portfolio manager, but a few years ago, the air-conditioning broke in his office during a stifling week, so he took his laptop to work in Vermont. It got him thinking. In time, he gave up Wall Street and today raises grass-fed beef in Litchfield, Vt., as part of the local food movement. Despite it being a more modest arena, he said he looks forward to work more now. He never had a customer on Wall Street call him and say, “Thanks for doing what you’re doing.” He gets those calls today.
Others told similar stories, like Greg, who was an editor for a newspaper in San Diego, but moved east a few years ago to Middlebury, near the college, so he could be by friends, trout streams and ski slopes. He now works as a PR consultant, making less money and living in an apartment, but he said it’s not about the square footage.
Then a primary care physician talked about finding his patients happier in the second half of their lives. In the first half, he said, there is less choice. Folks, he said, rush to find jobs and relationships and for decades, put their energy into building both.
“Twenty years later,” he said, “you wake up.”
He used a phrase that seemed to reflect this 35th. People, he said, were making choices more on what they wanted to do than what they felt they had to do.
Someone said it was a switch from our parents’ time, when corporations took care of workers until age 65 and beyond. Perhaps, he said, we’re charting different paths because lifetime security is mostly gone.
There was one other notable moment. The moderator asked who had been divorced. Over half in the room raised their hands, and one said something that resonated. After his own divorce, he became the primary parent to his two kids. He also came to terms with being gay, and struggled over years to find his footing in a new relationship.
Then he said something that applies whatever your orientation.
“The journey to intimacy,” he said, “is difficult.”
And yet at this reunion, in many ways, that seemed the priority — deciding not how far you could go, but how you want to live.
By Sunday, the temperature had cooled a bit. It was a cloudier day, and it made the campus feel less a refuge. Perhaps it was just as well. It was time to go back to the world.
I headed south on Route 89, thinking about choices.