Age 50 / Age 60

This is my last week in my 50s. Looking back over the past 10 years, I am grateful for a great many things, lots of travel, three additional grandchildren, the conclusion of a career and the continued health of everyone in my family.

Where I Went

I spent my 50th birthday in Charleston, SC, a great city even if it was one of the coldest weekends they'd ever had. Wonder Woman hired a photography teacher as a guide. The three of us spent a day walking all over the old part of town with our cameras. I learned a lot and managed to take some photos I still enjoy looking at.

We took several other trips, flying to New York City, Colorado Springs, Anchorage, Santa Fe, Austin and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Wonder Woman started running competitively again when she turned 50 in 2017. We spent many weekends at races and places where she likes to train. She ran a lot in the Francis Marion National Forest in the South Carolina low country and in the Uwharrie National Forest in central North Carolina. We spent a lot of time in southwest Virginia, an area we fell in love with when he hiked through there on the Appalachian Trail.

Three New Babies

On my 50th birthday, I already had 10 grandchildren. I wasn't sure if any of our kids planned to have anymore. Our youngest daughter, Jennifer, surprised us first, and she had Tristen, a wee little man who vacillates between being earnest and very silly whenever it suits him. Anna really surprised us, since her only child was already nine before she decided to have another baby. She had James, a blue-eyed, blonde headed handful of a little boy who brings me nothing but joy. Finally, Elizabeth, who has three boys and also waited a long time before having another baby, announced to us that she was expecting. To everyone's delight, she had a little girl, our Evie, who already dances, plays the piano, does gymnastics and martial arts. She is amazing.

Work

I wrapped up a 27-year career as a civil servant in 2020. I'd spent seven years as a correctional officer in a state prison and twenty years working in IT for the county school system. I opted for the security and benefits (a pension and health insurance for life) over chasing higher paying jobs in the private sector. I spent a couple of restless years being retired and then went back to work in 2022 at the small private university where Wonder Woman Works. I'm only a few days away from retiring from there too, this time with a better plan to make use of the time.

Family

This was the decade when I suddenly realized that everyone was aging right along with me. All the big movie stars I'd enjoyed for most of my life are now relegated to playing old people in their films because, well, they all got old. Our kids are either in their 40s or getting ready to hit that milestone. Our two oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school. My ageless mother managed to not only walk across Scotland in her early 70s, she went to Spain and hiked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago a couple of years later. My Dad had a more difficult decade. He's now the caretaker for my step-mother, who has memory related issues and needs a lot of attention. My siblings continue to make me proud. One of my brothers, Todd, lives and works in Marin County, California giving nature tours at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. My other brother, Matt, a physician assistant for the State Department, did a tour in Athens with his family and is starting a tour in London this year. My only sister, Mitzi, a Methodist pastor, continues her ministry as the type of Christian who believes in loving all people, feeding the poor and helping the immigrant — you know, the stuff Jesus preached about.

I don't know what the next decade holds in store for Wonder Woman and I. In a few years we will be able to be retired together, and I can only imagine the places she will want to wander to. She's already talking about visiting the Alps and making the long flight to New Zealand. Her running career continues. She intends to run twelve 5Ks in one day just next month. We will probably become great-grandparents at some point in the next ten years. I'm going to keep writing and helping where I can in the struggle against fascism. Life is good, if challenging.

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Most of my working life has been spent working in education, mostly for a K-12 school system in a large, mostly rural county but also for a small, private university. The goal of both organizations was conveying knowledge to build an educated citizenry. There's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved and by their very nature, bureaucracies sometimes lose sight of their intended purpose in their struggle to be self-perpetuating. Mostly, though, the people I've worked with have put the focus on doing what it takes to help students learn.

School systems more moving parts than you might imagine. The biggest group of employees is the faculty, the people who have to get up in front of the students and teach them. I've known so many good teachers. The one characteristic they all shared was a palpable sense of excitement when they were preparing to teach a lesson they thought their students would get into. A lot of thought goes into lesson planning. People usually teach subjects they enjoy. When they think they have a good strategy to really get their point across, they act like athletes before a big game. I always tried to be patient and listen to them share when I could tell they were fired up.

There are support staff in multiple categories required to operate a school system. When I went to work at my first school, my county was in the process of connecting to the Internet, so I got to usher man, many people into the information age in my IT role. I always made a point to get in tight with several workers at each school: the school secretary because they know everything, the lunch ladies because if you take care of them, they will take care of you and finally, the custodians, because I always needed their help a lot more than they needed mine. There are also other areas to support at the county level, like the huge maintenance department, a bus garage, HR and finance and all the administrators. There were many specialized systems I had to master for those different departments.

The school based professional staff also had various requirements. I worked with physical and occupational therapists to set up computers for students with special needs, including blind students, students in wheelchairs and other impairments. I helped the medical and mental health folks with securing sensitive information and configuring software for testing and medical devices. During the tension - filled weeks of high-stakes online testing, I had to be on standby in case any network issues affected connectivity.

Certain departments had the needs for software that pertained just to their roles. There are music programs for the band director and scoring programs for the coaches. We even had an AS-400, an IBM computer that contained all the district's financial data.

While my job in public school didn't often involve interacting with the students, my higher ed job did. As much as the "get off my lawn" types like to grouse about how horrible young people are these days, that has not been my experience. I've found that most students are polite, good listeners, and they just want to be able to use the tech they need to complete their assignments. Sure, some of the more inquisitive ones have tried mightily, and occasionally succeeded in getting around security safeguards, but then so have I, right?

I like knowing that a good chuck of my life has been in the service of helping people learn. I've done IT work in the medical field, banking and manufacturing too, and none of it was as rewarding as helping teachers and students. After spending the first decade of my adult life in the infantry and as a prison guard, being the helpful computer guy brought me a lot more joy. It really does take a village to produce well-rounded and educated citizens. I was glad to be a part of a good one.

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I'm sharing tonight a repost of a piece I originally wrote last summer about the very real attack by the KKK and Nazis on leftist labor organizers in Greensboro, NC, resulting in five deaths and 10 wounded. Maybe you think that all the recent talk of Fascism and Nazis and white supremacy is a bit overblown. It is not. There are people organizing for change right now who have weathered gunfire and violence from what used to be the extreme right wing. Today, those people are closer to the mainstream.

In November 1979 I was a junior high student in Jacksonville, NC when I heard on the news about what the media initially called a shootout between the Ku Klux Klan, a group of Neo-Nazis and Communist labor organizers in Greensboro, three hours away. I remember being confused that the Klan and Nazis, who in my mind were relics of a dark but distant past, were still active and engaged in violence. And, I'd never even heard of Communists on American soil. It was a tumultuous time in America that month. It was when Iran took more than 50 Americans hostage. Inflation was over 10% and rising. President Carter was not the revered statesman he is today, but a beleaguered man presiding over a country that felt lost.

As it turns out, on that day in Greensboro, there was no shootout. Instead, there was a massacre planned with an active police informant that involved carloads of Klansmen and Nazis, who the police knew were on the way to what turned into a killing ground in a public housing project. With television cameras rolling but no law enforcement present, the forefathers of today's alt-right movement gunned down the labor organizers from the Worker's Viewpoint Organization, who were graduates from Duke and Harvard and in a couple of cases, medical doctors. Having previously faced down the Klan at a China Grove, NC rally. The left-wing activists underestimated the willingness of the fascists to engage in violence and paid for it with their lives. Aside from the five who were killed, 10 more were wounded.

The state and federal government both tried to convict the planners and shooters involved in the massacre. There were numerous eyewitnesses. The Klan was infiltrated with informants. There was ample videotape. In both trials, however, all white juries refused to convict those responsible for the violence and death on the streets of Greensboro. We aren't talking about 1960s Mississippi Burning times. One of these trials happened when Michael Jordan was in college in NC.

Two decades later, when I became involved in activism in North Carolina, some of the same people who had naively been involved in the Greensboro anti-Klan organizing were still committed to trying to do things like establish a death penalty moratorium, ensure affordable housing, ending the nuclear arms race, ensuring same-sex marriage and stopping the US led war in Iraq. My mentor was a Ph.D. economist from Temple University who had worked for 10 years as a lathe operator in a mill while trying to organize workers. His wife was a leading neurosurgeon who had taken a break from medical school to work on a textile mill to organize the people on the looms. Their lives had been upended by the events of 1979 and Kim, the wife, never quite recovered the fire in her belly to organize, Chip, her husband, remained actively working with low wage workers and community activists until his death in 2014.

I was horrified when the Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville in 2017. I know what these people are capable of doing. They've shown us. Hopefully, those who oppose them won't fall into the same trap as the anti-fascists did in 1979. This stuff isn't from the distant past. It's from the here and now.

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The recent stories of the resurgence of tuberculosis, first in Kansas and now in my home state of North Carolina, stirred up some long forgotten memories for me.

North Carolina tuberculosis cases rising for first time in decades following one of the worst outbreaks in U.S. history | The Independent

It seems strange to recount now, but when I went to work as a prison guard in the 1980s, the unit where I worked housed a category of offender known as a health law violator. These inmates were invariably chronic street alcoholics who had contracted tuberculosis and been non-compliant when it came to taking their medication. The state of North Carolina in all of its infinite wisdom decided at some point in the distant past that the best solution to this problem was to make it a crime. They would arrest these men and send them to the prison where I worked where they would receive treatment for TB. When they were no longer contagious, they would be released.

It was a grim situation, made even grimmer by the conditions of their confinement. The men were housed in a single cell segregation unit, the same type of housing used for prisoners convicted of disciplinary offenses. The health law violators only got to come out of their cells for an hour a day, always wearing a mask. They could mix with each other, but not with anyone else from the population. They were not allowed visitors. Eventually, the law was changed and by the time I left that kind of work in 1993, the Department of Correction had gotten out of the tuberculosis treatment business.

I don't know if anyone has figured out the logic behind the recently announced cuts to medical research by the fascist government of the United States. Not only are we getting a certified lunatic who admitted that a worm had eaten part of his brain as a cabinet secretary in charge of Health and Human services in Robert Kennedy, Jr., we are apparently just giving up on cancer. Not to worry because the US has also stopped AIDS eradication in Africa and assistance with other worldwide diseases because…I don't know. Fuck all those brown people. Right?

The tuberculosis comeback should scare people. You see, the prison where I worked in the 80s was originally built to house nothing but prisoners with tuberculosis, not health law violators like I dealt with, but run-of-the-mill bank robbers and cat burglars who just happened to also have TB. There were that many of them. It was only a mile away from a gigantic sanitorium the state operated to treat regular citizens who had the disease.

I remember a time, also back in the 80s when the US government also didn't give a damn about sick Americans, specifically sick gay Americans during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. St. Ronald Ray-gun couldn't even be bothered to say the name of the illness out loud. That's what we are headed back to now, except the American fascists are uncaring about all the non-billionaires. They plan to let idiots of all stripes forego vaccinations. In the face of a pandemic, no one will have to take any precautions against spreading disease. I know this sounds like the rantings of a crazy person, and two months ago, you would have been right if you thought that. Now, I am right. We are screwed, and eggs are still expensive.

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During my year-long project to see if it was possible to manufacture happiness, one of the exercises I undertook was to make a list of my own rules to live by](https://louplummer.lol/my-rules-for-me/). One of those rules was Buy Less Stuff, Go More Places.

Studies have strongly suggested that memories are more difficult to form when your surroundings don't change. I made the same 30-mile drive to work for twenty years, and the hour and half it took out of my life each day was essentially lost time. I listened to plenty of good books and podcasts in those drives, but the landscape might as well have been a blank slate. On our recent trip to Florida for the Miami Marathon, every mile was fascinating, even if it was through a typical neighborhood. The architecture and landscaping was so different from what I am used to.

This is a hard rule to follow when you have disposable income because you're old and have paid off your bills. Yes, we go plenty of places, but the Amazon delivery mobile has us programmed into their GPS. A couple of points though - We do not have an expensive home, nor do we want one. If anything, we want simpler. I also drive an old, old car. It's not a classic, or anything close to it. It is just ancient. Those two facts alone save us a few thousand dollars a month. This year, we may not take a vacation that includes airfare. We will probably opt for some place in the Appalachian Mountains instead - one of my favorite places on earth. Among our "fly to" vacations, I've prepared heavily for Northern Ireland and Santa Fe. I'm not sure what prevented me from taking full advantage of NYC and Colorado Springs. I had a good time in both places but I left a lot on the table.

The places I like to go to are more often the places we can drive to - or places we can park and hike to. Some touristy sites are fun to visit, but I enjoy exploring a new patch of woods a lot too. Whatever I do, I want to do it with Wonder Woman. Sometimes I feel like she has a stronger sense of adventure, but I think we're actually evenly matched. Her personality is such that she is usually happier to let me pick out the next adventure (I'm not fooling myself, either. I read about why that is true in a book). When I'm feeling tired, and she expresses a desire to do something, it just seems odd, out of the ordinary. It's just that I feel tired more frequently than she does.

I do sometimes feel guilty for buying things. A decluttering spree made me less inclined to buy several types of items: clothes, pots and pans, used books, random personal care stuff. I try to be mindful about what I buy lately. I ask myself if an item will help me feel happier. Will it help me reach a goal? What triggered my desire for it?

Anyway, I think I need to let go of some of the guilt, as long as I am willing to be a good steward of our the money we have and as long as I would always rather go somewhere new, than go shopping for something flashy. I don't need flashy.

I love to track things. I have an app to bookmark places. In the past 10 years, we have visited 76 parks, stayed in 44 hotels/VRBO, visited 28 coffee shops, 14 book stores and eaten in 352 restaurants. I want to at least match that in the next 10 years!

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