Author Archives: Amy Gage

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About Amy Gage

A community relations director in higher education and mother of two adult sons, Amy Gage spent the first 20 years of her career as a journalist and public speaker in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The issues addressed in her award-winning newspaper column, "On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home," remain relevant today. In "The Middle Stages," she continues the vital conversation about women's work and lives, with a focus on the challenges and contradictions of aging, the mixed blessings of forsaking family time for the more immediate rewards of a career, and how middle-aged women can continue to forge full lives even as their priorities and sensibilities change.

Ready or not: Here comes retirement!

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It happened gradually, and it happened overnight. Over the course of two years — and then seemingly without warning — I have become ready, finally, to embrace retirement. Not to cease being physically active (ever!) or contributing as a volunteer. Not even to give up my quarter-time gig as an editor and nurturer of younger writers.

Instead, after more than 40 years of seeking identity and purpose and meaning through work, I have stopped defining myself as a careerist. As “what I do.” The question to answer now is: Who am I?

“Seasons change, people grow together and apart, life moves on. You will be OK, embrace it.”

— “Words From a Wanderer,” by Alexandra Elle

When I left full-time work in September 2022, at age 65, I would visibly stiffen whenever people asked me about “retirement.” Indeed, I defiantly declared in a blog post that my two part-time jobs qualified me as working — still in the game! —  especially since the positions utilized my skills and had professional sounding titles, which felt important to me then. I also defined retirement, in part, as the decision to draw Social Security, and I aimed to avoid that until I hit my full retirement age of 66 years and 6 months.

Fast-forward to today:

  • I left one of my two part-time gigs in early June, the one that paid better but was more chaotic and uncertain.
  • I opted to begin drawing Social Security when I turned 67, on July 4, and will receive my first check in August.
  • I have become more particular about the freelance work I will accept, turning down a potential offer that would have paid well for at least a year but had aspects that run counter to my values.

Back in February, I woke up earlier than usual on the morning I was set to give notice at my second job. As I sipped my café au lait before sunrise, I listened to a podcast about emotional intelligence in retirement. The speakers urged listeners to name their feelings and even state them aloud, like a 6-year-old: I feel sad. No, not that. I found a letter from the Social Security Administration in a neglected pile of mail, and I recognized a different feeling: I feel scared.

As well as humbled, helpless, hopeful. What comes next?

Where do aging people find community?

Twice last week, on consecutive days, I had rich conversations with women about loneliness and the meaning of friendship, about where we seek and find community now that our networks are shrinking, and our family responsibilities — whether raising children or caring for aging parents — are largely done.

One talk was with my widowed sister, who hasn’t worked in years (the workplace being a hub of socializing and people contact) and who recently moved from her familiar neighborhood. She plays Mahjong with her former neighbors and recently joined a cards group. That squares with advice in a New York Times article back in May, which cited research showing that adults on either end of the age spectrum may be vulnerable to loneliness — and can offset it by volunteering and joining groups.

My second discussion was with a longtime friend who is planning to retire early next year. I told her about the “Women in Retirement” group I had visited recently after months of finding excuses not to go. “The women all looked so old when I walked in,” I said, and then we laughed, knowing full well that the image I carry of myself in my head is not the one that looks back at me in photographs.

Starting from young adulthood, self-reported loneliness tends to decline as people approach midlife only to rise again after the age of 60.

— “The Loneliness Curve,” New York Times, May 21, 2024

Both conversations revolved around the gap between our own perceptions of our energy and vitality — the contributions we still hope to make in the world — and the diminishing way that people perceive us, if they think of us at all. My sister’s young adult grandkids see her as “an old lady,” she says, and rarely are in touch. My friend and I, who met 40 years ago in a newsroom, discussed the coming loss of a collegial community at work, even in a part-time job like mine.

Friendship was the topic at the “Women in Retirement” group last week, with a focus on the axiom that we have friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for life (credit a poem by Brian A. “Drew” Chalker). My small coterie of friends for life — the handful of people who know me as myself, not within a role or professional position — are friends I made back in my 20s and 30s.

Am I still capable of forging and investing in such deep and trusting friendships, or has it become easier to blanket myself in the comfort of people I’ve known for years? Time will tell; and time, I now recognize, in one of aging’s many insights, is an ever-diminishing commodity.

How do we reconcile our shifting energies?

During the four decades when I worked full time, full-bore — setting the “gold standard” for work ethic, one of my managers used to say — I had a standard answer when people asked where I was going on vacation: “Off the clock.” I’ve lived by a calendar and to-do lists for so long that I don’t know how else to operate. The part-time job, the one or two freelance gigs I always have going, the uptick in volunteering: All add up to days that feel nearly as full as the 50-hours-a-week career.

But guess what? It’s catching up to me. At 67, I no longer can summon the energy of a 45-year-old. So: Why do I still take so much pride in staying busy? I hear my late mother posing a question that annoyed me at the time: “You’re always running, Amy. What are you running from, I wonder.” Some part is habit. Some is trying to remain relevant (as though a person my age can do that in our ageist society). Some is denial. An even bigger part is fear.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson recently observed that “democracy is a process, and it’s never finished.” I feel the same way about retirement. To concede that my work life — and productivity, as I’ve defined it — is behind me, to accept that family, friends and volunteering are what can bring me peace and purpose, is to take a giant leap into the unknown.

“There is always something truly restorative, really, finally comforting, in learning what is true. In coming to the end of an illusion, a false hope,” wrote Sue Miller in her 1995 novel “The Distinguished Guest,” which I just finished. If I sit still long enough, I can name the illusion, even as I wince at its futility and hubris — the conceit that I could outrun and outwit age.

Boomers Can Help Biden By Speaking Up About the Realities of Aging

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My then–eight-day illness coincided with President Joe Biden’s stricken performance at the first presidential debate on June 27; and so, I have been thinking about age and the limits it imposes on our energies; and how long it takes some of us to acknowledge its real impacts, as though we might have prevented our physical decline and mental slowdown. As though we are at fault.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The debate’s 9 p.m. start time in the president’s time zone is when most old people (including me) get ready for bed. He was tired! I’ve since heard that Biden had a cold that Thursday night, which explains the weak, scratchy voice. (Or was that the excuse the campaign invented?) Regardless, if Biden felt half as compromised as I have with my upper respiratory infection — when I have misspelled “horseradish” on the grocery list, run over a curb on a day when I had no business driving, repeatedly emailed “Christy” at work when I meant to send messages to “Crystal,” and committed any number of verbal gaffes with my antibiotics-addled brain — then I’d be willing to give the president a pass on his poor performance.

But I don’t think physical exhaustion explains it, unless you acknowledge it as a natural consequence of his age. That’s the conversation that anxious Democrats seem reluctant to have. Joe Biden is old. We don’t have to hide it, mock it or try to explain it away. When performing without the benefit of a teleprompter, or the psychological comfort of his team of aides, Biden acted like what he is — an 81-year-old man who is decades past his prime. And who should not be running for the most rigorous, visible and consequential job in the world.

I doubt whether Biden can be convinced to pass the baton less than two months before the Democratic convention, though the next-day New York Times column by his friend Tom Friedman made an eloquent and compassionate case for why that decision would serve the country. “[T]ime has finally caught up with him,” Friedman wrote. “And that was painfully and inescapably obvious on Thursday.”

Asked to bet today, I’d predict we are careening toward a second Trump presidency, which will be a disaster for the environment, for women’s reproductive rights, for immigrant protections, for an independent judiciary, for public-school funding and so much more. Perhaps, in the meantime, we can salvage a graceful exit for Joe Biden by ceasing to slap our foreheads and exclaim about his perfectly normal signs of aging: the shuffling gait, the search for words, the raspy voice, the stooped posture. All of which I remember from my own father’s decline, a man who, like Biden himself, had once been a sharp-minded attorney and politician, too.

As I stare down turning 67 on July 4, I am mindful that we can best locate empathy when we have experienced another person’s plight ourselves. It’s no surprise that I felt nothing but sadness for Joe Biden, who is nearly 15 years my senior, as he lumbered and stumbled onstage. I saw in him a quality that, until recently, I’ve been unwilling to see within myself — a refusal to concede to age, to recognize when it is time to step back and clear the path for younger people.

My upper respiratory infection hung on for 10 days and took two different prescriptions to kick because I had spent weeks performing like I was 20 years younger than I am. Having assured my retired husband I would scale back my work commitments this year, I instead stubbornly hung on to my two part-time jobs while taking on freelance assignments and contract work that I was afraid to turn down — all at a pace I once readily sustained. Mix too little sleep and too much multitasking with generalized stress, and you eventually get sick.

And if you’re old, you take a long time to get well.

I’ve since quit one of the part-time jobs and am scheduling my freelance work more carefully. But more than once during this extended illness, I have remarked to my husband that I tire more easily, that I must start prioritizing rest. “If that’s aging in a healthy 67-year-old,” I’d say, “how does an 81-year-old president do it?” Those comments now seem prescient, post-debate.

Neither my husband nor I is a huge Biden fan, but we are staunch Democrats and we’re afraid of Donald Trump. We’ll vote for Biden if he stays in the race and are trying to convince our Socialist older son that he should care enough to vote at all. The broader realization, however, is that we aging Boomers lack humility. We’ve been in charge for so long, during such a pivotal time in U.S. history — a period that I now recognize to be an anomaly of liberalism in a self-interested, deeply conservative country — that we can’t see our limitations and step off the stage.

We wouldn’t be in this position now if the Democratic National Committee had built a bench back when Biden was billing himself as a “transition” president, the only one who could defeat Trump in 2020. We wouldn’t be here if he had made more use of a Black female vice president whom, it appears now, he picked for show and to appease a constituency he couldn’t afford to alienate.

But here we are. The commentators who call for this clearly exhausted president to get on his feet again, prizefighter-style, to schedule interviews “in unfriendly places” and to forcefully compete are themselves still in denial. They’re asking him to summon a level of energy that most 81-year-olds cannot muster, let alone keep up between now and November.

Being this sick for this long, I have been forced to cancel appointments, to read and nap, to recognize that my body no longer will allow me to push at the edges of my energy. I can still contribute, but it’s going to have to be in different ways. Biden’s greatest gift to the country, to his family and to himself would be to make way for a successor and offer himself as the advisor and elder statesman that he deserves to be.

Some question whether the president, from his seat at the pinnacle of power, is capable of that level of self-awareness. “What was the combination of moral conviction, personal confidence and selfishness that propelled Biden, despite the risks, toward his decision to seek another term?” asked columnist David Ignatius in a Washington Post commentary that my sister shared with me the day after the debate.

To say that Biden no longer is up to the job is neither to blame him nor to deny the achievements of his administration. In fact, it is ageism — a perverse sort of shame — to avoid citing his diminishing capabilities. We aging Boomers must speak publicly about the realities we are experiencing as we grow old. Only then can we demystify and make peace with this most natural, and inevitable, of life’s progressions.

You Can’t Know a Place Until You’ve Been There

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Leading up to my vacation in mid-April — where my modest goals were to unplug, hike, read and relax — I loved watching people’s faces when I told them where I was going.

“Paducah.”

Is that in Kentucky?

“Yes, Mitch McConnell territory.”

So, what draws you there?

In truth, it was a friend recommending the arts scene and the National Quilt Museum that got me thinking about Paducah (and trying to talk my husband into it). He and I had debated about Memphis, Santa Fe and Asheville, North Carolina, but what we really wanted was a manageable, low-key place in which we could escape city traffic and return to our small-town roots — but still have some interesting things to do. If that meant two deep-blue Minnesota liberals would venture into solid red Kentucky, so be it.

Paducah, Kentucky, sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, and had a catastrophic flood in 1937.

Paducah, the smallest of the nine UNESCO Creative Cities in the United States, seemed to fit what we were looking for. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and it cites Paducah (along with Santa Fe) as a notable City of Crafts and Folk Art. We found that to be true, during a five-day visit that included:

The population of McCracken County, for which Paducah is the county seat, is 67,400. But to find this array of culture in a town of 27,000 — cafés and restaurants, locally owned art shops, bars with bands and solo artists, a river history museum, a downtown movie theater screening Civil War — was astonishing on the southern edge of the Midwest.

Two sides of Paducah

And that’s my point. Had we simply driven through downtown, where the Republican Party headquarters sits squarely in a business district pushing to make a post-COVID comeback, I’d have confirmed my stereotypes about Kentucky (which still calls itself a commonwealth) and kept going. But we got out of the car and stayed a few days — meeting locals, walking the streets, riding bikes, renting a 130-year-old brick “shotgun house” in a weedy, working-class part of town a fair distance from the Holiday Inn where the quilters stay.

We frequented an “all are welcome here” coffeehouse, Etcetera, one of the few eating establishments that didn’t shut down on Sunday in this heavily Christian town. (The closest Unitarian church, which I would have liked to attend, was 97 miles away in Clarksville, Tennessee.) Etcetera attracts colorfully tattooed young people and has a resident cat who sleeps in a heated little house on the patio. The backyard neighbor keeps two lovingly restored Studebakers in his garage, and I was only too happy to hang out and read while he chatted up my husband about classic cars.

Owen Kim Blaisdell, Paducah Ambassador
One of 60-plus floodwall murals

In short, we found our people: the retired schoolteacher outside the Republican headquarters who directed us to Kirchoff’s, the best bakery downtown, with the bonus of a women’s clothing section in the adjoining coffeeshop; the helpful owner and bike mechanic at BikeWorld near the 135-acre Bob Noble Park (also close to the 55-acre Stuart Nelson Park, once the segregated recreation spot for Blacks and now host to the annual Emancipation Celebration every August 8); the young couple restoring the shotgun house next to our AirBnB, who’d wait to blast their music until we left.

We met other folks with whom we were more careful, like the proprietor of a cramped antique shop who piped up when I saw a campaign sign from 1980 in which Ronald Reagan commanded that we “make America great again.”

“I didn’t know that all started with him,” I told my husband. “I thought ‘It’s Morning in America’ was Reagan’s theme.” The proprietor, standing tall, proclaimed Reagan to be a great president. She showed no interest in our viewpoints, likely detecting our disdain, and said her daughter is a Democrat “only because they give her money.” We smiled and moved on to the Four Rivers Corvette Club showcase across the street.

Dogs have to wait at Kirchoff’s Bakery & Deli, too, where a line stretches out the door on Saturday mornings.

On those blissful early mornings when I sat with my journal and a fresh cup of coffee, I pondered how Paducah felt different from my heart-of-the-city home in St. Paul, Minnesota:

  • No recycling containers, anywhere. We even asked a cop.
  • No apparent mass transit system, though I did see one bus stop.
  • No food co-op; and granted, Paducah is small, but Northfield, Grand Marais and St. Peter, Minnesota, all have them.
  • No bookstore downtown and likely no zoning laws. Parking lots take up a lot of precious space.
  • No consistent infrastructure for walking or bicycling. Sidewalks in our neighborhood were in disrepair, and some just ended mid-block. The only painted bike lanes I found were out by BikeWorld.
  • No recovery meetings for women, though the sunburned men wearing bill caps and work boots welcomed me warmly to their meeting. The sayings and the steps were all comfortably familiar — “just spoken with more of a twang,” I told them with a laugh.

Those men’s generosity, their acceptance, helped me avoid a head space where I crossed my arms and complained about what Paducah isn’t or what it lacks (“another Dollar General store?”). That’s too self-satisfied, too sanctimonious, plus it’s the antithesis (or should be) of why we travel. Not to confirm our ways of thinking or insist that others conform to them, but to challenge our habits and beliefs, expose ourselves to something new.

Quilting artist Barbara Ann McCraw has an exhibit at the National Quilt Museum called “Life Stories.” Twenty-two percent of Paducah’s population is Black.

No sooner had I decided to observe rather than judge the differences in Paducah, than I was confronted for what felt like the umpteenth time by a person who declared they could never live in Minnesota because it’s so cold. “How can you stand it up there?” Try as I might to describe the beauty and variety of the four seasons, to explain that you learn to dress for the cold, to cite the social services and amenities that our high tax rate affords us: I could see it. They would visibly shut down.

Whether on the plane, or at Ann Patchett’s bookstore, Paranassus Books (our one stop in Nashville), or in a conversation where I was trying to show genuine interest in Paducah and its confluence of rivers or the stunning Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area that straddles Kentucky and Tennessee, the person who had a preconceived notion about Minnesota clearly wasn’t interested in learning more.

And that’s a shame, because I’d like to show them my home state with the same joy, vigor and gracious hospitality that they showed me theirs. I never thought I would visit Kentucky. I’m too mad at Mitch McConnell and the legacy he’s left us of a conservative six-member super majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. But if politics were a reason to avoid travel, I’d go nowhere but Minnesota in the Upper Midwest.

Beauty is easy to find in Paducah.

If Kentuckians want to write off Minnesota for the weather, the best I can say is, “Your loss.” I’m glad I visited Paducah, grateful to have pushed past a stereotype. The docent in the National Quilt Museum described the difference between 18 feet and 18 inches in examining the artwork on their walls. “At 18 feet,” she said, “you see the vision. At 18 inches, you see technique.”

From 18 feet away — or, actually, 744 miles — my vision of Paducah was that of a backwater, no place I’d ever care to visit. From 18 inches, right up close, it was a special community, with a lively arts scene and friendly people. A town I would return to, and one I recommend.