The option of non-retirement

By Herbert Vego

 

YOU must have known of job retirees who wish they have not retired but had no option but to retire. The typical ones are the police and military personnel who still feel too young to hang up their uniforms at their retirement age of 56. And so they find ways and means to get non-government jobs or engage in business while looking forward to a monthly pension.

Retired senior citizens (60 and up), on the other hand, engage in time-killing hobbies or in pursuit of happiness that their busy years had denied them – as in traveling far away to visit long-lost friends and relatives.

I am writing this in the hope of inspiring fellow seniors and the youth who would one day take our place.

For me as a freelance journalist, retirement is not an option even if I have already spent 51 years writing for a living. Although already 70 going on 71 years old, I am in no mood to stop. But it’s not due to fear of going hungry but of descending into dementia

Writing keeps the brain well-oiled. It forces me to remember forgotten words by consulting the dictionary and thesaurus. Like muscle, the brain atrophies when idle.

I also participate in karaoke singing, belting old favorites like Greenfields, Mona Liza, Yesterday, and Yesterday When I was Young.

Indeed I often remember my youth while sighing over the question, “Where have all the good old days gone?” It seemed only yesterday when I was struggling to be a successful journalist.

I delight in looking back to that distant day in 1969 when, as a teenage Journalism student, I visited the office of the defunct Weekly Nation magazine in Quezon City to contribute an article. It surprised me that the editor was Consorcio Borje (now deceased), whose short stories I had read in high school. He looked very old, probably 79 or 80.

His brother David was likewise an aging reporter at the defunct Daily Express when I began pounding the entertainment beat for the same paper in 1972.

I was to learn later that the Borje brothers had asked to be allowed to work as long as able on the pretext that quitting might facilitate their appointment with the Lord.

Now I imagine myself in their shoes, having turned septuagenarian. The will to write for the rest of my life must have helped me survive and recover from a number of serious diseases like emphysema and pneumonia. Moreover, I heeded the advice of a vitamin advertisement “Bawal magkasakit” by way of eating nutritious foods.

Spending money on hospital and medicine I would rather be spared of. It is no joke that people have died of cardiac arrest after receiving their medical bills.

And I was saying in a previous column, I refuse to be stressed by the World Health Organization’s daily tally of COVID-19 cases. Stress may lead to distress and depression, any of which could be harmful.

But of course, it is a “given” that as man rises in age, his vitality eventually falls.  It says so in the Bible: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty if our strength endures” (Psalm 90:10).

There could be no adventure without traversing the path from womb to tomb. That’s why the young ones beg of us young once to tell them what adventures we have lived through.

 

A REASON FOR RAZON’S ENTRY IN ILOILO

THE third richest man in the country, Enrique K. Razon Jr., has certainly heard of the “leveling up” pledge of Mayor Jerry P. Treñas. He is now part of that ascent.

I remember that Razon, 60, quietly flew into Iloilo City on June 28, 2019 to be at the inauguration of the newly elected city officials – Mayor Treñas, Congresswoman Julienne “Jam-jam” Baronda and Vice-Mayor Jeffrey Ganzon – at the Iloilo Convention Center. He opted to remain seated with ordinary mortals in the audience.

Razon is the businessman behind MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power), which has taken over Panay Electric Co. (PECO) as the new 25-year electricity distributor in the city.

Further good news is that he is interested in expanding his port-operation business to the city and province of Iloilo. But first, who is Enrique K. Razon, Jr.?

Enrique Anselmo Klar Razon Jr. is a Filipino billionaire and the chairman of the International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI), the Philippine port-handling giant; and of the world-class Solaire Casino and Resort in Manila.

There was a time when he accepted a rare TV interview because he could not refuse the interviewee for being an old friend, Solita “Winnie” Monsod. Her most memorable question was how he had made a billionaire out of himself.

“Work, work and work,” he answered, insinuating that he had boosted the ports business that he had inherited from his father in 1987. It is now the largest corporation providing container-port terminal services in Manila, Subic, Batangas, General Santos City; and abroad in Poland, Brazil, Mexico, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

“Yes, I take risk,” he added. “I may lose but I recover my losses from the earnings of my other ventures.”

Razon has the knack to pick the right people to run his many projects.

He did right in appointing Roel Z. Castro as president and chief operating officer of the MORE Power. Castro had done a good job holding the same posts at Palm Concepcion Power Corporation, a coal-fired power plant in Concepcion, Iloilo.

No less than the Iloilo Economic Development Foundation (IledF) – an alliance of Iloilo City’s varied business associations initiating economic reforms — has lauded Castro for MORE Power’s dynamism in its continuous anti-pilferage campaign aimed at ridding the city’s power distribution of too much system’s loss.

Amen to that.