The Road to Dotage

-- By Tom Phillips

What a pleasure it is to run into one’s self in an unlikely place.  A few days ago I was browsing in the Northshire bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, filling time while my wife looked for a gift. In the psychology section of the second-hand book nook, a title jumped out at me: “The Delights of Growing Old,”[1] with a cover drawing of a rakish, unmistakably Parisian gentleman, nattily attired and puffing a cigarette. His name was Maurice Goudeket;  I’d never heard of him, but within a day he became something like an alter ego.    

Like Goudeket, I am in my early 70s, a writer and journalist, finally released from the need to seek gainful employment; comfortably retired, healthy, and happily married. He was a Parisian and I’m a New Yorker, but we live the same way: