Growing up, “bonus” meant the red tin of fruitcake that my dad received at Christmas from the Farmer’s Alliance boss. Every year. Without fail. No one in our family savored fruitcake. But no one in our family threw away food either. So Mother engineered thin little slices to eat with ice cream or to serve Mrs. Kubin with Monday morning coffee.
I liked the tins with their old-fashioned pictures—a cowboy roping, a stately white house with a horse and carriage in front and a Victorian couple walking through the snow. Holly at the bottom. Company president E. C. Mingenback (you’ll remember that my sister and I referred to him as Mr. Stingyback) bought the tins in bulk from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, for all the men. Not the hourly-wage “girls.”
Given what we all thought of fruitcake and given the stress and distress that our dad experienced in his working world, those tins did not seem like bonuses. They were an insult, a taunt, the most ungenerous of thank-yous. My dad deserved much more.
The Latin ancestor of “bonus” is literally “good.” Its cousin is “bounty.” And we use those words to define payment beyond what is expected, a gift, a perk, a premium, a reward. The product of generosity or, in the reverse, a kind of bribe to encourage harder work or better behavior. In the simplest framework, just a little unanticipated extra.
And that last definition is, I think, what my friends R. and C. intended when they framed their winter letter around the doings of their past “bonus year.” Teachers, political operatives, out-there social justice advocates, travelers, R. and C. are 80ish. Grandchildren and medical capers, they wrote, defined their “bonus time.” An accompanying Xeroxed photograph featured their current selves with an inset image of the two of them locked in a kiss, forty years earlier.
So I’ve been puzzling over “bonus years” for a week now.
I’m struck first by the reality that too many good, talented, contributing people never get bonus time. No matter if they “earned” it or simply as an unexpected extra. The most vibrant member of my high school debate team died at 19; Mother’s best friend Rachel at 42; Dave at 63; cousin Gary at 73; Ivan Doig at 75. C. lost a wildly creative son in his 30s. Millions of young men and women recruited into military uniforms. And across time, across the world, billions taken early by hunger and massacre. Good lives shortened by diseases that seem random and by human decisions that are incomprehensible. No years added to their lives for exemplary behavior. Contributions and artistry never realized.
Then there’s the next reality that when we do live longer—those hours can be tricky, difficult, confusing. More than we want to acknowledge, horrifying. We all think now, especially, of dementia and its cruelty—giving us years when we can no longer contemplate, contribute, care for ourselves. For sure, illness and debility is as human as sailing into this final stretch of life in good health. But for those coping with such trouble—and their families—the years are no bonus. No perk. No premium. Far far worse than a fruitcake tin.
Awarding ourselves bonus years has, I think, another side, another liability. These are not pasted on extras, not somehow “dessert” after our ordinary lives. This is life. However many years we live, they are all part of the trajectory of our corporeal selves. How we live the years beyond—say retirement–is as much a part of our being as our career days, our child-rearing time. If—as is true for many of us—we are not putting our shoulder to the wheels of commerce or any eight-to-five position any longer, we still have living and work to do. For sure the work of “being,” of investing what we’ve learned into contemplation and conversations with those around us. Or, indeed, figuring out how to help children and grandchildren or others—help that we likely had little time to provide earlier. In other words, these years aren’t “extra;” they are part of long curve of many lives.
I suspect that, for much of their hard-living, unconventional lives, R. and C. didn’t anticipate being old-old. That pivoting to grandchildren and their needs and successes remains an unexpected chapter. Both gifts and mystery that they didn’t truly foresee. That’s pretty human too. At 40, even with stellar examples of old age in our lives, it’s hard to see ourselves there. And if we engage in such envisioning, we feel the terror of awful illness. Or, we envelop ourselves in some great magical realism and find ourselves hiking into the mountains or basking in an Italian square. I think it is harder for us to imagine “ordinary” days. And yet, for many of us, as for my friends, in the midst of slow changes to hearing, eyesight, joints, we are granted sweet routines, precious ordinariness.
But – ordinary—in this life—is extraordinary. The very fact that we are alive is a gift. I’ve never gotten over Bill Bryson’s quotation in A Short History of Nearly Everything:
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
In that sense, every year of my life—including this one that brought me two new knees—is a bonus. A life that I didn’t earn. Furthermore, a life of remarkable security and adventure and love—rare in the panoply of human experience.
Finally, I’m intrigued by R. and C.’s deliberate inclusion of that earlier photo—a glimpse of their younger, passionate selves. If, if we are fortunate enough to arrive at these final years, we often want—desperately–to remember that we were young. To celebrate ourselves when we were beautiful, vibrant, powerful. Memory care units post photos of their residents from many years ago. Obituaries often include young adult images. No matter how much we intellectualize the worth of age, we struggle against a universe that validates youth far more. In spite of ourselves, we long for earlier chapters, earlier adventures, earlier tender moments? In other words, do most of us now, find these years—these bonus years—rather like my father’s red tin of fruitcake: a dicey, insufficient reward for the lives we’ve lived? ©
