Everything Old is New Again (Including Me)
Don’t read this if you’re under fifty.
Everybody gets old. All you seniors out there know that. When my wife Sarah died, I thought I might as well die too. We’d been married for thirty-one years. Met her in ’46 and married her five years later. We always thought we’d travel after I retired, to California where we’d walk on beaches and laugh together. We were Jersey kids. We liked the ocean.
I kept working for another dozen years, all the while thinking, no kids, soon no responsibilities, now what? There I was, hanging around in Montclair, the land of my birth, babying my factory. Occasionally , I’d drive past my dad’s old place; the place where Sarah and I met. I was a bar back, back in ‘46 and she was the hat check girl. A long time ago. Now the place is a church. Happy days gone by.
But then one day, I just couldn’t anymore. I sold the factory and thought, now what? After a few months, when I still hadn’t died, I sold our house, packed up my essentials and moved to California, Santa Monica. I decided I’d do the retirement thing Sarah and I always thought we’d do together.
Why am I telling you all this you may be thinking. After all, I’m just some old guy you never met and probably never will. Here’s the reason. Someday you’ll find yourself closer to the end than to the beginning, just like me. Maybe you’ll feel like you’ve had all the good times a human deserves to have. Well, I’m here to tell you, you could be wrong. Life just might come along and grab you by your collar, or your lululemon halter top and drag you back into ‘looking forward to things’ again. For me, one new friend was all it took. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by youthful people who were just beginning to come alive–all in a bar called The Decent Nookey. Can you believe it? Boy, all of a sudden, everything old was new again.
Interested? You can hear the whole story in Len Koepsell’s new audiobook, The Golden Flyswatter, available soon on Spotify. Guaranteed, it’s enough to get your heart beating. You might even believe in second acts, cassette tape recorders and hanging on to the music you love…again.
