“Are you retired?”
I get asked that fairly often these days. The short answer is “No.”
Sometimes I’m asked, “How are you enjoying retirement?” and sometimes I play along and explain how I fill my days. Sometimes I say, “When I’m retired, I’ll let you know.”
However it’s expressed, it’s a perfectly reasonable question. I’m of a certain age and not formally employed. So go ahead and ask, it’s fine. But maybe get a refill first. As many will attest, I rarely give a short answer to anything.
At this point in the first stage of writing this piece, I started going on and on about why I don’t consider myself retired. I then moved into a detailed examination of the pros and cons of growing older in New York City — a topic that occupied me on a recent walk from Astoria to Jackson Heights, 40 minutes on a hot early summer afternoon. And I’ll admit, as I often do in the city, I did my thinking aloud, talking it all out in a regular volume of voice as I walked out Broadway (the Queens Broadway). With my headphones on, it might have appeared that I was in a phone conversation with someone, but I was listening to Massive Attack.
By the time I arrived at Kabab King (well worth it) I had an essay’s worth of ideas fully formed and arranged into paragraphs — coherent, detailed thoughts on being laid off, the fruitless job search, the question of retirement, and the challenges of aging in New York. The next morning I typed it up, right here, several pages worth.
Then deleted it.
Or rather, offloaded it to a separate file. I decided instead to focus on a better subject for this story, a man I deeply admired for the way he navigated the city in his later years.
Enter Clyde.
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I met Clyde Robertson in the 37th floor copy room in our offices at 26th and Madison. Best guess, it was 2007-8ish. I can’t say I remember it like it was yesterday (honestly, I’m not 100% on yesterday), but it’s likely that I walked in to make some copies and found him sitting on a stool by one of the two machines, reading the Times, maybe between jobs, maybe while a job was running.
Today, with networked printers, digital workflows, signable pdfs, interactive content, etc., there’s not much call for a dedicated photocopyist. But at that time, our company ran a lot of paper through those machines, guided by hand, some tasks requiring multiple sets of multiple draft chapters of a textbook. For a couple of years or so, instead of tying up editorial and production people with that work, we had Clyde. The copy room was his office now.
He was in his late 70s then, wiry, hair cut close on the sides but long enough on top to be parted, a small rooster tail spiking up in the back. He was shorter than me but not by much, always cheerful and chatty. I might have been among the first to meet him, or among the last, I don’t know. What I know is that he went from someone new to someone everybody knew pretty quickly. And it was obvious that he enjoyed being there, in an office full of people, doing something useful instead of sitting around retired.
I understand the appeal of that.
I didn’t need a lot of copying done and when I did it was just a few pages at a time, so I didn’t put Clyde to work very often. I’d only leave something for him to do if both machines were in use at that moment. But it wasn’t long before I began stopping in to chat whether I had something to be copied or not.
Getting friendly with Clyde led to an invitation me to a special event — a party a loft in Tribeca the afternoon of July 3, after our noon release for the Independence Day holiday. The loft was home to friends of Clyde’s who spent their Julys somewhere in France (that’s how Clyde described it with a hand wave. “Oh, somewhere in France.”). He was living there the whole month, with the overriding responsibility of taking care of the apartment’s astonishing volume and variety of plants (on every shelf, every ledge, every table and cabinet top, everywhere). He remains the only person I’ve known who was a compensated plant sitter.
Clyde had spreads of chips and crackers and cheeses set up around the main room and the kitchen, along with a few bottles of wine, and he was in constant motion, checking on everyone, refilling trays and glasses. As I remember it, almost all of the other guests were assistants who’d gotten to know him in the copy room. I maybe wrong about that.
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By the time of that plant-sitting party, I already knew he had another, more significant additional source of additional income (we didn’t have the term “side hustle” back then):
Cat sitting.
My wife and I had done a bit of that ourselves in our younger days in the city, for a couple of couples who knew we’d happily look after Smokey or Chambertin with a weekend in a nice Manhattan apartment thrown in.
At the same time, we were cat owners ourselves. Shug (named for Shug Avery in The Color Purple) was adopted from the main ASPCA center on East 92nd Street. Belle (Beauty and the Beast) was acquired from the ASPCA Petmobile, a repurposed mobile home filled with ready-to-adopt kittens and puppies, plus first-day pet owner supplies like collars, food, and litter boxes. This particular Petmobile would park in the midtown office area and process adoptions before work or at lunchtime. Adopters would stop by after work to claim their freshly vaccinated pets and whatever accessories they’d purchased.
At some point fairly early in Shug and Belle’s lives with us, we traded off cat care with the graphic designer on my staff. After she married and relocated back to Tennessee, we used a pet service until we had the disastrous experience of being indifferently cat-sat for. Lesson learned: don’t pay in advance.
Then came Clyde and the great relief of again having someone we liked and trusted available for our two. Shug and Belle were 11 and 10 when he started, settled-in adult cats, and he was a great match for them, not a “pop in, feed and scoop, pop out” type. He was more like a real baby sitter, prepared to settle in and stay awhile and become a familiar companion, his timing based on the TV Guide. I once called him to check in and he reported that everything was just great. “We’re all on the couch watching Charade!”
By the way, as people familiar with The Color Purple know, Shug is pronounced like the first syllable of “sugar.” But for some reason, Clyde always called her “Shrug,” and said it with a little headshake and shrug of his own, like he couldn’t understand why anyone would give that name to a cat. We saw no need to make an issue of it.
I learned a lot more about Clyde once the cat-sitting started and we could talk outside the office, not worried about someone impatiently waiting to put him to work. He told me he’d had a long career at J. Walter Thompson, retiring as head cashier. And he told me he’d been in the army, in Korea, something he still seemed to find surprising himself. “You wouldn’t have guessed, would you?” he said.
He told me he’d shared a rent-controlled studio on 13th Street with another man for over 20 years (“not a boyfriend,” he added). He told me he felt fortunate to have a good landlord because he really didn’t have any place else to go. And it came out that he’d made a thorough assessment of activities and discounts and free or inexpensive meals the city offered to senior citizens. For example, one senior center served a spaghetti lunch on Wednesday that one should avoid, so wait until Thursday and go to this other center that did spaghetti much better. That kind of thing.
He had several other steady cat-sitting clients besides us, mostly work colleagues. One lived in Brooklyn. Most of the others, including us, were on the east side of Manhattan, conveniently walkable from the Freeman office or accessible by the M15 bus. We actually found ourselves riding that bus with him a couple of times as he was headed back downtown from a cat gig.
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In preparing for this story, I reconnected with a former work colleague who was also a cat-sitting client of Clyde’s. The scan of his business card at the top of this story came from her. L’Ami des Chats! I have his card as well, around here somewhere. I know I’ll find it when I’m looking for something else. I can’t imagine I’d toss such a thing away.
In addition to the card, my colleague shared another key resource for this story: this article in the New York Times featuring Clyde. And there he is! How could I have missed this? I’ve read that paper every day for decades. The article was published in February of 2012, after he’d left the copy room and both of our cats were gone, so after we saw each fairly often. Otherwise, he would have told me about it himself. He would have told everyone about it.
The story is about a much-loved drop-in center in Chelsea run by the nonprofit group SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders). Clyde was a regular visitor and the face of the article, the representative interviewee, and, not surprisingly to me, his take on the place has a lot to do with the food. He talks about going to the center regularly in the evening for dinner because the center closer to him closed at 5. The article mentions his time at J. Walter Thompson and his military service. He tells the reporter that he was proud of completing basic training because he was “considered a sissy back home.”
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Shug and Belle died a year apart, each at 19, each of complications from diabetes and hyperthyroidism. Each underwent surgery and needed regular injections. We spent the money on them. It started with Shug. We were away and Clyde came in to find her unconscious. He got her to the veterinarian’s seven blocks away and called us.
Clyde felt awful about what happened but I kept reminding him that he saved her. I called Dr. Andy and he gave us the option of getting her treated or letting her go. If we’d been there and taken her in ourselves, we might have decided differently. Actually no, I don’t think we would have. Oddly, her non-biological sister, Belle, developed the exact same health problems, and we spent the money on her as well. Each lasted another six years after the initial treatment.
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Just as I’m not exactly sure of when I met Clyde, I’m also uncertain when we last saw him. I don’t remember which came first, our apartment being without cats or the office being without Clyde, but both situations seemed to have happened close together. I do remember that at least one of the times we found ourselves on the M15 with him was after we were no longer a client. He was heading home from a job. L’Amis des Chats was still in business. He asked if we’d gotten new cats and I told him if we did, he’d be the first to know.
And then, over a decade later, on that walk in Queens, thinking about aging in the city, here he came back to mind.
I looked for him on one of the sites I used to research my own ancestry, and found out a little bit more about him – his birth date, information about his parents and sisters. The 1950 Census has him working in a stockroom in San Francisco, so it would seem he was living out there already before he went to Korea.
The site refers to him as deceased but doesn’t include a date and there’s no death certificate attached. I don’t feel the need to track it down or to try the number I have for him in my phone, which matches the 917 number on his card. In the event that the site is wrong and he’s still alive, he’’s’d be 95.
It’s likely there are people in my LinkedIn/Facebook sphere that knew him, and knew him better than I did. If anyone has anything to share about Clyde or if I got anything wrong, please email me at redhillconsultingservices@gmail.com. Or we can see if this page works.
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So, if I’m not retired, what am I? Since I was laid off, I’ve been saying I’m involuntarily self-employed, and I suppose that’s true enough, but it’s getting a little stale. I’ve had some copywriting work and am hopeful of getting more. And I am exploring part-time options. I could see myself as a tour guide or docent or at a front desk. Maybe someone else will see me doing one of those things as well. I I’m stubbornly holding out to be paid, like Clyde, but I don’t think there’s much demand for a congenial senior citizen copy room attendant these days.
On the other hand, I think we’re still someways away from an affordable, reliable home robot that can handle pet care. Like Rosie from The Jetsons. So there may be some opportunities there.