Sugar Mountain

I was internet talking with an old friend this morning, a psychologist in Wisconsin who shares my affection for Michigan football (I hear there’s a game tonight) and Neil Young. One thing I’ve always envied is that he was actually at Young’s performance at the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor in November of 1968, which yielded the recording of Sugar Mountain, one of Neil’s better-known songs.

The Canterbury House was a hole in the wall venue that probably could hold 200 people at most — you can hear a chair scraping on the floor at the end of the song, and maybe it’s his.

I was four miles away from that performance that night, although at the time — I had just turned nine — I had never heard of Neil Young, or even Michigan football for that matter. But 55 years later I’m thinking about all the ways peoples’ lives intersect across time and space.

Anyway, in the course of our chat this morning he mentioned he was startled to realize that I’m 64, just like in that other song. We got to know each other, via Michigan football and Neil Young, in the mid-1990s, and in his mind I’ve always remained more or less who I was then, which was somebody who sure as hell wasn’t 64, which 30 years ago was a lot older than it is today.

He asked me if my law school has a mandatory retirement age, and this reminded me of how a particularly massive shift in American law and society — the elimination of mandatory retirement ages for almost all employees 30 years ago — has remained relatively under-appreciated in terms of its importance, or even of its existence. I’m always surprised to discover that even otherwise very well informed people often aren’t aware that mandatory retirement in America has been pretty much eliminated, subject to a few exceptions (hi Major Kong).

So this is a thread to discuss that subject, and also Michigan football and/or Neil Young if you’re into those kinds of things.

I’ll start out by noting that the movement of the entire baby boom into the traditional retirement years is causing a pretty massive issue in academia in particular, where tenured positions are increasingly filled by people in their 70s and 80s, given the lack of heavy lifting in both the literal and metaphorical senses. This is a big problem, and it’s going to get bigger over the next couple of decades, as higher education goes through various financial crises, some driven by external events — baby busts, fascist distaste for thinking — and some internal (spendthrift self-dealing upper administrators for example).

You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain.