Work till death! Have fun! Make money! Hurrah!

While I have many years till it is acceptable for me to retire to the couch and watch TV twelve hours a day, I already know that I will never do that. No, instead I will work forever. It is the new freedom. Retiring is constricting and circumscribes your abilities to make money, which is your American right number one, thanks to God. Love you.

Anyway, what the hell do I want to stop working for? I would have nothing to do. I was always bored as a kid, and I'll be even more bored when I'm old, because I will have concentrated so hard on working, I will have never made time for myself, to build my life. Here are some inspirational stories of others, in whose footsteps I can only hope to follow:

Jack Borden would like you to consider working well past retirement age. As a 101-year-old attorney, he has the credibility to encourage it.

Borden, who has been practicing law for the better part of 70 years, still spends about 40 hours a week at his office in Weatherford, Texas, handling estate planning, probate and real estate matters.

Retire? Not while he's able to help folks.

"As long as you are capable, you ought to use what God gave you. He left me here for a reason, and with enough of a mind to do what it is I'm supposed to be doing," said Borden, who also has been a district attorney and Weatherford's mayor.

He arrives at the practice he shares with his nephew at 6:30 a.m. He goes home for lunch at 10:45 a.m., rests in bed for 45 minutes -- doctor's orders after pneumonia a few years back -- returns to work by 12:45 p.m. and stays until at least 4.

That's beautiful. Working right into the coffin. That's America, right there.

Jack- I'm sorry - Mr. Borden, is really onto something right there; God put you here to work. God has a purpose for you, and even for me, and that purpose is not enjoyment. It's about money, it's about service, it's about self-denial.

In Anderson, South Carolina, customers at a Chick-fil-A restaurant might see 88-year-old Frank Childers fixing a door. His wife, Gertrude Childers, 88, might be carrying a tray to a table or refreshing someone's beverage.

When Frank Childers retired from his insurance sales job in 1985, he looked forward to free time and fishing.

"I stayed retired for five years. I got tired of sitting around," he said.

Frank Childers, who had some mechanical experience before working in insurance, took some jobs to stay busy. In 1998, Jon Holmes, the owner-operator of three Anderson Chick-fil-As, asked him to lead his maintenance staff, and Childers has been working there since.

Gertrude Childers, a former mill worker, also was hired in 1998 to be a dining room hostess at one of the restaurants. She works 20 hours a week; her husband works about 30.

They each said they enjoy the work and the people they've met. They don't have to work for the money, they said, but the pay doesn't hurt.

"It's nice to have your own money, because when I want to go shopping, I don't have to ask nobody," Gertrude Childers said, laughing.

These people are at the forefront of the working forever movement. Look, indeed, marvel, at how they've maintained their dignity well past the age when Big Brother tells us it's time to get out of the way for the spring chickens to come in and roost, to take dust baths, to burrow new indentations in the earth so that they may keep warm. No, not me.