Head down against the coming headwind

When I run, I wear a baseball cap. And when the wind is up during a run, I have to keep my head down to keep my cap from flying off my head.

With the holiday season, I feel like I'm running into a headwind. Time to keep my head down and push my way through.

I've never been a big fan of the retail aspect of the holiday season.

These days it feels like it starts soon after Labor Day.

That's because Halloween has emerged as a Big Retail Event.

So now you have Halloween segueing into Thanksgiving, which blurs with Christmas, then ends, finally, with New Year's.

Black Friday isn't the Friday after Thanksgiving. It's every Friday at the malls.

This heightened frenzy on the retail end just seems to raise the overall holiday anxieties. A high tide raises all boats, right?

Certainly, there are parts of the holidays that I enjoy, once I've gotten my head into it.

I like being able to see family, especially my children. I like the spiritual moments when they come. Every year I wait for the Christmas Moment of spiritual fulfillment. And every year one comes along, now matter how cranky I might get during the process.

I'm turning the corner into the stiffening wind. I have my head down.

I don't want to lose my hat.

For that matter, I don't want to lose my head.

Baby Boomer children to the barricades?

The young people taking to the streets in France to protest future cuts in their government retirement got me thinking: Would my kids do the same thing over changes to their Social Security?

No, they wouldn't.

Social Security has a big bull's eye on it right now.

The government retirement benefits that their grandparents enjoyed and that their parents plan to enjoy, could be vastly different by the time the children of Baby Boomers get to retirement age.

The issue in France is like it is around the world. Governments are going bankrupt. One major cost to a government is its pension system.

France wants to try to save money by raising its pension eligibility age from 6o to 62.

Young people and union members took to the streets in protests and strikes. It got violent there for a while. The transport of fuel went to a standstill.

The French National Assembly has voted to approve the change, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to sign it in the face of a legal challenge.

A similar fate faces Social Security.

One way to rein in spending government spending here is to put more control on entitlement programs such Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Social Security and Medicare are especially vulnerable because of the volume of Baby Boomers who are now becoming eligible -- 10,000 a day for the next 20 years.

The worry is that more money will be paid in benefits to retired Boomers than will be paid in payroll taxes by America's workers.

The full retirement age for those retiring now is 66. (You can start collecting at 62, but you don't get the full value of the benefit.) For those born in 1960 or after, the full retirement age is 67.

A deficit panel created by President Barack Obama is considering a proposal that would raise the retirement age to 68 by 2050 and to 69 by 2075.

Baby Boomers will get theirs. I'll get mine at 66 ... 62 if I decide to accept less.

Baby Boomer children may not. My daughter Elizabeth will be in her mid-60s in 2049, David in 2052. And you have to wonder if Social Security will be there then and how much further out of reach it might be for my kids.

When it comes to a retirement lifestyle, I'm a traditionalist

I'm not a very high risk kind of person.

I know what I know and I'm comfortable with that.

Risk for the sake of risk isn't me.

I'll take a calculated risk, but I have to do a lot of calculation in the process.

So it came as no surprise recently when I took a survey as part of some research I was doing for my Baby Boomer Examiner writing and found I was a "Traditionalist' when it came to some expectations for my retirement years.

The survey from Trilogy Communities recently released an online personality assessment aimed at Baby Boomers to evaluate their desired lifestyles and personalities and how those relate to where they would like to live. Trilogy has active lifestyle communities for people 55 and up in Florida, the Southwest, California, and Northwest.

The online assessment tool includes several categories having to do with home, recreation, travel, and interests. It asks, for example, how close do you want to be to your family, and it offers three images to choose from: Within walking distance, within driving distance, within airplane distance.

By having the results come back as being a traditionalist, apparently I'm not willing to take many risks when it comes to what I want to do and where I want to live through my retirement years.

Well, I wasn't much of a risk-taker up until now, why would that suddenly change?

Since retiring from newspapers in June 2008 about the only risky thing I've done is create Broad Cove Media -- my one-man media empire. (I'm not sure but maybe you can count learning how to surf as being a risk.)

I haven't tried to remake myself into something that forces me to color outside the lines. I don't color that way.

Writing for an audience in and of itself is a little risky, but the craft of writing, which I've been doing for almost 40 years, isn't.

Baby Boomers have all the opportunity in the world to re-make themselves.

We're having to remake themselves because of a changing employment landscape or because of how we need to stay engaged professionally, socially and mentally as we age.

But Baby Boomers shouldn't try to remake themselves into something they are not.

I admire the stories about Wall Street executives who retire to become chefs, but that kind of a leap isn't going to be the norm.

It's important that we stay within ourselves.

I'm not going to try to be somebody I can't be.