Robert B. Gordon, Sc. D.
I've decided to take time out and do three things in this essay. First, I
intend to give my far-flung readers some very personal information about
myself. I think it would be helpful for readers to know the rather unusual
environment in which I work. Second, using that as a background, I am going
to try to explain the amazing change that has occurred in my life since essay
#1 was written 14 months ago. I sincerely hope that my experience will help
others who will some day be 87 going on 88. Finally, I want to have a heart-to-heart "talk" with
readers about how the flow of information between us may be improved.
MY RETIREMENT YEARS
I have given
other glimpses into my life but what I want to do here is to concentrate
on my retirement years. We do hear from retirees all
around the
globe but, for most of our readers, retirement is many years ahead.
My career as an essayist came very late in life. For all but the first four
of my professional years I held supervisory positions and dictated thousands
of pages of correspondence and reports. I retired in1980, bought my first
computer in 1981, and learned to write software in the Basic language at
a local Junior College. Using my program called MAGIC for Moving Average
Generated Investment Criteria I started to write a monthly investment letter
on mutual funds using data created by my software. Over the next 15 years
I generated about 1000 pages of data and comments on a tight time schedule
at the end of each month. Two of my old customers have sent e-mails asking "are
the you the Bob Gordon who?" etc. We had a nice chat about old times
via e-mail.
My health remained good until age 73 when I had 6 coronary bypasses. We moved to Sun City West shortly thereafter. It is a very fine adult community of more than 30 thousand aged 55 or over. At age 78 I experienced a near life-ending experience. My long battle with pollen and food allergies escalated into18 months of starvation, despite eating 6 huge carefully controlled meals per day. At the time I was on a wheat rotation diet, eating it only every 5 days. I ate a small piece of cake on a fifth day (I still remember it) and from that moment I was allergic to everything but water. I lost a third of my weight and never regained most of it. I have eaten no wheat for 9 years and still rotate all my foods in a very difficult regime.
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