Places for the Third Act

There are worse places to set the scene for the third act of your life than Boulder, Colorado.  The Chamber of Commerce promises 300 days of sunshine a year, a statement that if not true at least isn't much of a boast.  You can hardly turn the corner without running into another brew pub serving really good beer.  Restaurants abound, and the norm is for them to serve organic and/or local food to the extent possible.  You can hike, bike, walk, run, ski, and enjoy beautiful and sometimes rugged nature.  You're 30 minutes or less from Denver, 45 minutes to a few hours away from stunning mountain towns.  Entertainment, meditation communities, education - all that and more is here.

I moved to the Boulder area last September after living in the Lansing, Michigan area for more than 20 years.  I miss the people and communities (theater, church, yoga) I left behind, but have otherwise not looked back.  Boulder has called to me since I was six years old, a phenomenon I wrote about in a post in 2009.  That it took me more than 50 years to answer the call is the stuff of life.  But when I turned 60 last month and took my place for the third act of my life, I was in Colorado.  I was home.

I've taken the first nine months here as a sort of "self-funded sabbatical" to make the transition.  It takes a lot of work to move.  You have to transfer licenses and registrations, find new doctors, discover where to shop and where to go for other services.  I'm on my second dentist, my second hair stylist, and my second yoga studio.  I've bought some new clothes more appropriate for a climate where the weather changes four times in a day.  I've joined some groups to help me meet new people and to learn the ropes of hiking the open space, the Flatirons, and the front range.  I've broken into the local theater community and will perform in "Spoon River Anthology" in a couple months.  I've grieved the end of my marriage to a woman I still care about deeply.  I've gently begun the process of looking at what meaningful work I can do to make a living, work that will pay the bills and help make the world a better place.  And I've spent lots and lots of time with my daughter and her family who moved here a month before me.

 I'm not sure how exciting my third act will be.  I hope to work and write and act and do yoga and hike and fall in love again and travel and do any number of things.  But a lot of the act will feature me not doing, but being - resting into the beauty and wonder of a universe that has been there all along, hiding right behind the busy-ness I constructed for most of my life.  The third act will be about resolution, love, and service.  The critics might not approve, but they had too much to say about the first two acts for me to bother with them now.  (Especially harsh was that judgmental bastard in my head.)

"Wherever you go, there you are," so the saying goes.  Well, yes and no.  Some places support you in ways that others cannot, help you live more authentically.  Since moving here last fall this has happened to me more times than I can recall:  I turn around for one reason or another, see the mountains spread in front of me, feel a fountain of gratitude rise up in me, and spontaneously say, "Thank you."  Maybe it's just the sentimentality of a guy getting on in years.  Or maybe it's the sound a soul makes when it is finally home.

Round and Round With the Bard

Basking in the afterglow of Obama's victory and a stunning performance by Christopher Plummer in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra the night before, my daughter Taylor and I found ourselves in Statford, Ontario on November 5 heading to the Festival Theater to catch a matinee of Romeo and Juliet. Knocking around town earlier that day we kept bumping into middle school and high school students buying souvenirs and bad food. So we weren't surprised when we got to theater and discovered that school groups comprised the lion's share of the audience. Past experience had taught me that the behavior of a school audience depends entirely on the play being performed - the kids are mesmerized by funny, plot-driven plays and are bored to tears with heavy, poetic dramas. We had nothing to worry about that day. Despite a few snickers when one of the actors dropped his trousers to change on stage and later when Romeo was all dopey over Juliet, the audience was, for the most part, rapt and well behaved.

The whole experience took me back 40 years. It was, if I'm remembering right, the fall of 1968 when my freshman English teacher took a group of us to the Stratford Festival to see Measure for Measure. I went on the trip, despite the prospect of yawning through a stuffy play, because, well, what high school kid wouldn't rather spend a day on the bus flirting with girls instead of sitting through classes? But when the fanfare played and the lights went down and the play began, I was totally sucked into a world of passion, intrigue, and language I never imagined when I was plodding though the lengthy speeches in Julius Caesar as my first exposure to Shakespeare. The play was bawdy, funny, and thought provoking. As always the acting and the staging were superb. So thanks to Ruth Friedman, my teacher, this small town, white-bread, skinny kid was ushered into a life-long love affair with theater, literature, and the Bard. I'm not sure I ever thanked her, or thanked her enough.

Over the years I've supported the Festival financially, but more importantly I've shared this experience with my first wife, my friends, my sister, my daughters, my current wife, Cary, and, in the late 1980's, with a group of kids from Highland Park Schools. After this year's experience I've decided it's time to "pay it forward" a little more and pass the experience along to another generation of school kids (if I can arrange financing with some of my business cronies and work out border issues). Maybe that, more than anything else, is a way I can finally give Mrs. Friedman the thanks she deserves.

Still basking in the the afterglow of Obama's victory and waiting anxiously for his term to begin, I find myself believing, once again, in the power of one caring person (not just the POTUS, but a teacher or a lawyer) to make a difference.