Vicarious thrills, courtesy of friend Liam, pictured here with a dozen friends atop Machu Picchu (who got there hiking the 4 day Inca Trail, not your touristy train/bus ride). It was, by the way, Liam's 67th birthday.
Yet another piece of evidence, if we needed any, of the increasingly elastic definition of - how can I put it? - "old." Liam would probably shoot me if I used his name and that adjective in the same sentence.
I'm in Washington this week, attending the first board meeting of the foundation that just hired me - a spring chicken in my late fifties! - to head an institute in Morocco. I'm thrilled.
In the 8 years since I retired from the US Foreign Service, all of my employment experiences have been with US-based organizations. I mention this because the matter of retirement age, employment for seniors (or people older than the 35 that is sometimes listed as the outer age limit for EU jobs), and lifetime employment is seen differently in Europe. 85 year old baggers in supermarkets have not yet appeared in Europe.
Nor would I wish that on societies that generally appear to bequeath a right to a decent life to their elderly.
But Europe simply must find ways to emulate what appears to be a matter of course in the US: considering the resource that the recently-retired represent. If you can schlep up Macchu Pichu, you can probably manage a program for an NGO.