At different times throughout the year, you might find Diane Lawton working security at the Ocean Gateway terminal, bartending before plays at Portland Stage, monitoring the Maine Bar Exam or cradling babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at Maine Medical Center.

She’s not cobbling together an income to make ends meet. For some of her jobs, she doesn’t even get paid. After a career as a clinical social worker, Lawton retired nearly 10 years ago.

“If you’re used to working 40-65 hours a week, you don’t want to just sit quietly and watch ‘The Price Is Right,'” said Lawton, 73, of Portland.

Nearly 58,000 Mainers age 65 and over made up about 9% of the state’s workforce at this time last year — a number that, aside from a dip during the pandemic, has continued to grow over time, according to census data provided by the Maine Department of Labor.

While the recent increase in sheer numbers is partly because more baby boomers have moved into that cohort, the portion of retirement-age Mainers who are working part time also has grown — by about 15% since 2016 — and is about 40% greater than the national average, according to an analysis by Geoffrey Sanzenbacher of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Noël Bonam, state director of AARP Maine, said more older Mainers started to go back to work as a result of the pandemic because they both realized how quickly they could become isolated and wanted to help with staffing shortages.

Now, the increased cost of living is another factor, he said, whether people simply want to maintain their lifestyles or need the additional income to pay their electricity bill. With more benefits and supports poised to disappear, he expects more older adults will return to work.

It helps that in Maine, especially in summer, there are a lot of part-time jobs with flexible hours that offer people opportunities to spend time in places they love and meet others with common interests.

“That’s the fun thing about retirement,” Lawton said. “You get to decide what fun things you want to do.”

We talked to a few people with some of the state’s most enviable gigs about how they landed their jobs and why they’ve chosen to spend their retirement going to work.

A LITTLE BIT OF THIS

Data from the Maine Department of Labor showed that a greater percentage of retirement-age workers are in the educational services and retail fields than the rest of the population.

When Maine’s signature retailer has a massive store open 24/7, that has to count for something.

Lawton has worked in the women’s department at L.L.Bean in Freeport, “clocking 10 miles a shift walking back to the stock room,” she said.

She met someone there who told her about the twice-a-year bar exam gig, overseeing a room of nervous law school grads for a couple hundred bucks a day, with breakfast and lunch included.

“It’s amazing the stuff that’s happening out there, once you get going,” she said about finding part-time work.

Another friend recruited her to volunteer at Portland Stage, which each season hires 200 ushers to work at least one performance of each show, and in exchange, they get to see it for free.

Lawton loved last season’s “Conscience,” about Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, and is looking forward to an upcoming one-woman show about Eleanor Roosevelt and the classic “Our Town.”

But she said the payoff is greater than the price of a ticket, between interactions with staffers and people involved in the plays, as well as those she works alongside, like the retired French teacher who handles the bar tabs while Lawton serves the cheesecake and pours the wine.

“It’s just a nice, stimulating, interesting little place to spend time,” she said.

FOR THE FANS

Mike Halbig might have landed the most coveted minimum wage job in Maine, as one of only two people hired this year to join the fleet of 30 ushers at Hadlock Field, home of the Portland Sea Dogs.

Chris Cameron, the minor league baseball team’s vice president of communications and fan experience, said nearly all of the ushers return every year, and some have since the team’s first season in 1994.

Recommendations from current ushers make up much of the large file of applications he has on hand for when there are openings. Halbig’s came from his former neighbor, and he knows he lucked out.

“It’s not an easy gig to get into,” said Halbig, 69, of Old Orchard Beach, who retired after 24 years in sales and account management for greeting card company American Greetings.

In the winter, he works at Rodgers Ski & Sport in Scarborough, which dovetails with his cold-weather activity of choice. When he went looking for an opposite-season job, the lifelong Mets fan — a Long Island, New York, native who came to Maine for college — turned to his favorite summer sport.

His first season with the Sea Dogs, however, started on a cold and soggy note, but Halbig’s not complaining.

“You dress for it,” he said, something he’s accustomed to from skiing.

Halbig and the other ushers — who include a retired hotel manager, lawyer and school principal — get to the park a half hour before the gates open for a pre-game meeting where they find out if there are any special activities that night or groups coming in and get assignments for where they’ll be positioned.

After checking bags at the entrance, Halbig — as the “newbie” — usually serves as a floater on the third-base side of the park, managing frenzies that form around foul balls, keeping kids from climbing on the dugout and relieving other ushers when they go on breaks.

“The fun part is the fan interactions,” Halbig said, whether that’s with little kids or old acquaintances who happen be in the stands.

“If I’m going to occupy my time, that’s the kind of environment I want to be in,” he said. “I don’t want to dig ditches at my age.”

LIFE OUTSIDE

Lori Safford didn’t expect that running an alternative school in Alaska would mark the end of her career — of one of them, at least.

When she first moved back to Maine to be closer to her kids and grandkids, she spent a year finishing her dissertation for a doctorate in education, but then the pandemic hit, and the jobs she was applying for disappeared.

She ran her own landscaping business for a while after that, but on a bike ride from her house in Auburn to Range Pond State Park in Poland in the spring of last year, she saw a sign that the park was hiring and thought it sounded perfect.

She was right.

“I love it,” said Safford, 70. “It’s just a beautiful place to work.”

After spending most of her first season in the entrance booth, she asked if she could get out in the park more this year and worked with the manager to come up with interpretive programming.

Now an assistant park ranger, she monitors the trails, picks up litter and makes sure the outhouses are clean and visitors are safe, but she also leads a meditative nature walk on Wednesday mornings and connects families to the flora through an adopt-a-tree program.

Safford has worked as a nurse, is a soul midwife and certified sexton for natural burials and, in the winter, sells lift tickets and works in retail at the Lost Valley Ski Area.

But she’s particularly grateful that her job at Range Pond can overlap with another important role — as grandma.

She said her sons and their kids have come to the park from Portland when she’s working and mingled among the swimmers she’s monitoring.

“It has enhanced my life being here, and I’m not just saying that,” she said. “I believe it.”