Take a seat.
An author page exists for a simple reason: to give the reader some basis for deciding whether what they are reading is worth their time. What follows is an honest attempt to provide that.
The author was born in Scotland and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of eight. His background spans several fields — trades, union leadership, business consulting, debt factoring, and insolvency practice.
He holds three degrees: a BA in Government and Politics, an MBA majoring in the Ethics of Corporate Governance — for which he visited five countries, including New Zealand, to study the subject properly — and a law degree, completed because understanding it made him better at organising the legal work around him. None of the three were acquired to get a job. Each was a response to the needs of the work or what he needed to understand more fully. An above-average memory has served him well across all of it.
He learned in his early teens that he had been adopted. It was, in his family, a secret — though it should not have been. His adoptive parents deserved to have great pride in what they had done. By the time he became available for adoption, several others had put him back for reasons of his appearance alone. His parents did not hesitate. They took him home, managed the practical circumstances with quiet determination, and got on with it.
The discovery of his adoption settled rather than unsettled him. It also inoculated him, in a useful way, against prejudice. He could not rule out being Jewish, American, German, or any number of other things. Prejudice, in those circumstances, had nowhere to stand.
His biological mother was Annie Smith of 25 Lyon Street, said to be the toughest street in the Gorbals, which was said to be the roughest suburb of Glasgow. She had beautiful handwriting, a possible connection to Glasgow University, and a family shop in the same tenement building where she lived. The Smiths were Episcopalian — the one exception on a street that Glasgow’s City Council had populated almost entirely with unwanted European Jewish and Irish Catholic families, apparently expecting conflict. What actually happened was community. The Jesuits had a presbytery on the corner opposite number 25, and ran St Joseph’s School nearby. The Jewish families, the Catholics, and the one Episcopalian family with the shop made a life together on the same street. Annie Smith passed at around seventy-five. Much of her story remains a mystery, and may always do so.
Ancestry research has since confirmed what the author had long sensed — that his background is Scottish and Irish, running back at least a thousand years, with indications his ancestors were there long before then. He lives in his comfortable home beside the water, that answers, without his ever having planned it, to the old rune: “He lives in his comfortable home, beside the water” -where a man of that lineage might quietly settle. The runic resonance is not decorative. It reflects something that appears to have travelled with him regardless.
He holds an equal respect for all religions. Every adherent to any faith carries a knowledge — a conviction — that there is something larger than themselves. He has never found a reason to rank that knowledge in any of its forms above another. Throughout his professional life, he employed people who disclosed a similar belief, which may be spiritual, not religious. Among them, at various times, up to five solicitors.
He is an active retiree, married, and based in New Zealand. He has been well positioned to observe what retirement looks like from the inside — the conversations it generates, the topics that surface, the things people wish they had thought about sooner, and the things they are glad they did.
He has also observed, more than once, what follows when someone’s central purpose has been a spouse or partner who dies first. Too often, a shortened life follows. This is not a warning against close relationships. It is a quiet argument for having a purpose of one’s own — something like a passion, that remains useful regardless of what changes around it.
This project is, in part, an expression of that belief.
The author does not present himself as an authority on retirement. He presents himself as someone who has paid attention to it, thought carefully about it, and considers it important enough to become his purpose and be worth the effort of this website.
He is quite aged himself. He knows, therefore, what he is talking about — and pays close attention to the research on what makes the difference.
Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here for you, as is your welcome.