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shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (3:17–19). This grim description of early agriculture in an arid climate continues to overshadow work of every kind to this day and may influence for the worse the way tasks and workplaces are designed.
    Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our work that is hard to evaluate and keep in focus. Even those with the strongest sense of vocation may sometimes be heard to say, “My job won’t let me do my work.” Thus speaks the doctor who is concerned about insurance forms, the priest who must worry about budgets and the state of the church roof, the teacher who finds endless hours wasted on paperwork and committees. It is not easy to shed the job and continue the work, but this is one common aspiration for retirement.
    At the bottom of the economic pyramid, men and women with little education often have very little choice in the work they do, working because they must at arduous and sometimes demeaning tasks, often at the lowest-paying unskilled jobs. It is ironic that the jobs that offer satisfaction and fulfillment also offer the highest pay. The labor movement has struggled to improve wages and working conditions but has not paid much attention to changes that might make work more satisfying—the emphasis is on shorter, rather than more meaningful, hours. This may be one reason for the movement’s decline.
    The use of skills seems to be a central component in the satisfaction people find in their work, especially the kind of skills that involve a measure of improvisation, addressing problems that call for specific and often creative solutions rather than repetition of standard solutions, even when these require high degrees of training. A carpenter modifying an existing building is always adjusting procedures to fit what is there, as a physician must allow for the variations in patients or a forester for the growth of particular trees. A farmer responds to the characteristics of different fields, and the captain of a ship to the shifting winds. But above all, work is the place where most of us encounter a variety of people, both as fellow employees and, if we are lucky, as those who will use the products of our labor in their lives, cooks selecting lettuces at a farmers’ market, students in a classroom, home owners rejoicing in a remodeled basement.
    I first met Hank and Jane Lawson when my husband and I were in Brooklin, Maine, visiting Richard Goldsby and his wife, Barbara Osborne, at the vacation house they rented for several summers next door to the Lawsons, who were also seasonal residents by then. The Goldsbys and the Lawsons had become friends over a series of summers, and while I was interviewing Dick for this book, he urged me to speak with them about how they were spending their retirement. So during an extended visit to the Goldsby household, I spent several hours interviewing the Lawsons and followed up with a visit to their winter retirement community in Arizona.
    Hank and Jane are both natives of Maine. They have been married for over fifty years and have four children. Hank had good reason to look forward to retirement from his long-term job at the Brooklin Boat Yard, where he worked long hours, often handling heavy machinery. But of all the people I spoke to, he seemed the most ingenious in re-creating in retirement from his job what had been satisfying to him in a long life of hard work.
    Hank’s mother had died two days after giving birth to him, after which his father moved away from Maine, and he grew up in the homes of various relatives. He started doing neighborhood chores of various kinds when he was eight years old. He tried to join the Navy at sixteen, but they sent him back to finish high school, and he was finally sworn in at seventeen, the day after