What's your second act?

Musing on next steps with an old friend at Ain't Normal Cafe

Yesterday, the day after we learned about our new (old) president being reinstated to the White House, I met an old friend and colleague M. at Ain’t Normal Cafe (lol) on College Avenue in Oakland near the border with Berkeley. I got there first and perused the dozen or so small steel tables and chairs, painted a gay yellow, near the young, staked Coast Live Oak that is too spindly to cast shade yet. In years to come, she will—assuming they don’t starve her of water like they did the baby Redwood tree that was there before—spread her massive boughs over the heads of patrons, protecting them from what can be a searing California sun, especially in summer.

We are in November already, and the light is growing wan, but it’s still beautiful here, and at mid-day, it was too hot to sit unprotected in the sun. I selected a small table inside to wait for M. who arrived about ten minutes later wearing a fantastic pair of big, blue-framed glasses. I noticed immediately she’s dying her hair. She’s older than I am, and my grey is getting pronounced at 56. She’s 62 and looks fantastic, even sexy. She wore a black and grey sweatshirt that hugged her torso and displayed the curve of her slender waist and fun, baggy pants that kind of peaked out at the hips, giving her a slightly humorous and very curvy silhouette.

It was only 12:30 p.m., but I joked that considering the circumstances, we would be forgiven for having a glass of sparkling wine. She seemed more than game, but at the last minute opted for a chai latte, and I was grateful actually and got a cappuccino.

I hadn’t seen M. in a decade, and it was a revelation. She has a strong personality that I was sometimes overwhelmed by in the past, but I welcomed her intensity yesterday. Her energy and intelligence are like a blast of fresh air. Also, her honesty and transparency.

She told me about the dissolution of her second marriage, about the great guy she’s dating now—an old friend from her past. That story excited me and made me feel hopeful. She had sworn off of dating and relationships and boom! He appeared and boom, even though they’d had “awkward sex” a decade before, the flame burned bright this time around. She is older than I am and not washed up at all. She’s sexy, satisfied, and when she showed me a picture of her man, I nodded and said, Oh yeah. I see.

And I did. He’s sexy too, with long hair, a strong nose, handsome dark eyes, and a bohemian je ne sais quois that was emphasized by the camel leather jacket he insouciantly wore. And he’s loaded, she said. He’s a doctor and doing just fine, and it’s the first time she’s not earning more than the man she’s dating or married to.

She also made me feel better when she told me she was laid off two weeks ago and that every woman she knows in marketing is laid off, especially in tech marketing and especially around our ages. She said she and tech broke up, that she’s sick of tech—it’s cold and mercenary. She was funny and made me laugh, and she displayed no self-pity, no shaky confidence.

We talked, of course, of retirement strategies, and we seem to be roughly in the same boat. We can retire, but we’ll be in pretty straitened circumstances—unless we leave the country. She got really excited, exclaiming, oh yes, you’ve done this before! I remember, we talked about this ten years ago! And we dove in again to a discussion of passports and citizenship and the rest of it.

She said, where would you go?

I said, I don’t quite know yet… Almost anywhere is significantly less expensive than here, and I have EU citizenship through my Irish grandparents. My kids have EU citizenship through their Italian grandfather on their father’s side.

I know I’m supposed to be thinking just of myself now and my second act. What do I want the rest of my life to look like? I’ve been working with a therapist on codependence issues, and my task is to meet life one-on-one: just me and life, and stop filtering my experience and my plans through everyone else and their needs.

But, I can’t help but think that if I go to Europe, I can make a toehold there in case my kids need it in the decades ahead. Things feel precarious here in the U.S. and of course in the world. Of course, they have before. I’m sure the Crusades, the Black Death, the world wars (and all war), slavery, forced migrations, the decimation of the native American population, all genocides, feel and in fact are apocalyptic to their victims.

Even a walk through my local cemetery, St. Mary’s, is eye-opening and humbling. The entire cemetery is full of babies, children, youths, and young adults who all died in the time before vaccines and modern medical care. Having a child in the first place was a fraught business, with sepsis, hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and clumsy anesthesia taking countless women’s lives.

But I’m getting off-topic. What I’m trying to say is that it was vivifying to meet a friend around my age, another single woman, a creative, a bright spark, who’s also trying to find her way in this brave new world—the expanse of time between our years of working and the grave. Between “retirement” and our last breath, we get a chance to create a new life, even a new self.

In my case, it’s the first time in my life I don’t have anyone to care for. From the age of five when I was putting my own mother to bed, to the years of parenting my siblings (including attending their parent-teacher conferences), to caring for my own children, to caring for my mentally ill ex-, to caring for my father… suddenly, I’m done. My parents are gone. My children are launched. My ex- is with his family in Venezuela. The only entity that needs me now is my old pooch, my dear golden retriever, Daisy, who is 17 this month—preposterously old for a dog this size.

I’m in no rush to dispense with her, obviously. I’m just enjoying our last sweet days together and watching her closely for signs of pain or untenable discomfort, at which time I will steal myself and mercifully end her life, and it will be no picnic I tell you. Maybe you know what I mean.

After that, I hand my son’s 18-year-old cat to him, and we set to work, my son and I, remodeling the kitchen in the flat I’m in and then renting it. It’s the largest flat in the four-plex we bought together last year, and the hope is once it’s rented I’ll be cash-flowing sufficiently to pull up roots and try something new. Go join the folks in my digital-nomads-over-50 Facebook group and have some fun, or at least explore the world and some new ways of being. I have friends to visit in Taipei, Mallorca, Budapest, Rome, Naples, Madrid, Cairo, Mexico City.

And I have tango. In fact, I have a teacher in Buenos Aires named Roque Bravo (how’s that for a name?) who’s wonderful, and a dear new friend named Christine who lived for 20 years in Zimbabwe working for the World Wildlife Fund. I’ve always liked ex-pats. Now I get to be one again. And I have an in-built tango community in the most exciting cities in the world. Istanbul has a huge tango scene. Maybe that’s the first one I visit. I’ve been enthralled by Turkish tango for years. Now I get to go see why.

My God. What am I doing here? Oh yes. Daisy.

I feel less afraid today. In fact, I feel excited.

I need an income, but I’m not going to work for Instacart as I was dreadfully considering the other day. I don’t have to succumb to some pity-party and pretend I don’t have options. Yes, things are tight. Yes, I expected to be working a few more years. Yes, it was awkward and uncomfortable to dip into my retirement at risk of penalty the other day. But there are certainly worse things in life. I can figure this out. I’m not helpless.

Meeting M. yesterday made me feel excited for all the possibilities. It’s a quiet time now. My job now is simply to care for Daisy and my garden. Enjoy my beautiful flat and the warm sunlight streaming through it at this time of day. It’s to watch my young Garry oak grow, to watch my young Pacific madrone reach for the sky and unfurl pine-green leaves and dangle panicles of tiny, bell-shaped, pink flowers, and thank my lucky stars. Thank God, in fact, for all that I have and am and do, and for all that is to come.