What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [4]
This book began one day in 2006 when I was having lunch with my friend Jim, who makes his living as a ghostwriter for celebrities. We were treating ourselves to the $7.50 two-roll lunch special at a neighborhood sushi joint on the Upper West Side of New York City. On the verge of celebrating his sixtieth birthday, Jim had just had a book deal he was counting on blow up. He was in a morbid state of mind. He wondered out loud about his chances of ever achieving anything approaching the success he once imagined for himself. “How exactly did this happen to me?” he asked.
Four years younger than Jim, I was beginning to wonder the same thing about myself. It was a darkly comic lunch. It ended only after the waitress had graciously poured the fourth glass of water. On my walk home, I began brainstorming book ideas. As soon as I reached my apartment, I phoned Jim and, somewhat whimsically, suggested that we work our way out of our mutual funk by collaborating on a book about people who never had much success before but, surprisingly, achieved significantly after turning sixty. I was aware of other books on late bloomers that profiled famous late achievers, such as Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, Paul Cézanne, Eubie Blake, Isak Dinesen, Harland Sanders—otherwise known as Colonel Sanders—and Julia Child. But I was interested in people who were alive and whose accomplishments before sixty were considerably more average—more, that is, like Jim’s or mine.
While he was considering joining me on the project, Jim got a celebrity book deal and went on, it should be noted, to write a bestseller.
At about the same time, my then eighty-four-year-old mother was making a slow recovery from a quadruple bypass. For months she had been tied to a wound pump and was stuck in her apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. She had always been an attractive, energetic, and resourceful woman with a good sense of humor and wide interests. In addition to raising two sons, she had held a variety of jobs—naval draftsman, publicist for actor Canada Lee in the 1940s, a cosmetics counter manager at Bloomingdale’s, and a country club bookkeeper. At sixty-seven she became a certified paralegal, but ended up spending the last fifteen years of her life in business as an accounts manager for a gold wholesaler in Florida. Much to her unhappiness, she was laid off at eighty-two. Now, uncharacteristically, she seemed to have given up. “What can I do about it?” was her prevailing attitude. “Whatever will be, will be.”
For my mother’s sake and, without admitting it, for mine, I began reading about the recent discoveries of the maturing brain. Everywhere I turned in the popular literature, there was reason for excitement. As my appetite for the newly optimistic views grew, so did my desire to see the proof of these neurological principles in life, in action. So began my quest to find the remarkable, not-so-average-anymore people who are the subjects of What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?
As my mother recovered, she and I kept up near-nightly phone conversations. To motivate her, I plied her with the stories of the late bloomers I was discovering. And I implored her to return to her early passion of painting. One day, she called with news.