WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
Have you ever been taken aback by the question “what’s your story?” either in a reflective moment or in a social situation when meeting new people? It can take a while to update your story to the latest version of you—I can almost visualize the processors in my brain whirring away in an effort to synthesize the recent input of my life and incorporate it into previous, more youthful phases of my life.
If the answer is expected before you’re through processing all the changes that come with your new status of elder statesperson (finding a new sense of purpose, saying goodbye to loved ones and introducing the younger versions of yourself to the old geezer you’ve become), your brain can freeze up with the complexity and it can take more than a minute to come up with an answer.
A moment of truth arrived rather suddenly for me one day (denial is a powerful thing!) when I looked around while at work for someone who might get my TV cowboy reference to Hopalong Cassidy. I was only getting blank stares and it hit me that I was usually the oldest person in the room, no matter where I went.
“Hopa…what”?
“Come on”, I said, “Hopalong Cassidy? Howdy Doody? Come on, you must know who Roy Rogers is”?
Still, their faces looked as though I was speaking gibberish and I had a disorienting feeling that I had been dropped into an alternate universe.
“Hey, why are you looking at me like I’m a creature from a “galaxy far, far away…. Oh, come on…. Star Trek?”
“Oh, yeah, we know Star Trek—a movie, right?”
IF SOME OF THIS sounds familiar and you are feeling a tad bit disoriented, you might enjoy finding out how the fictional men and women in the short story collection “Older Than My Boss” handle this occasionally treacherous passage of life and make decisions that move them forward. In the end, they all find a way to update the answer to the question, “what’s your story”? How about you, is your story up to date?
“Older Than My Boss” by Carolyn Gaye: https://www.amazon.com/Older-Than-My-Boss-Collection/dp/1480881635
About the author
Carolyn Gaye knows what it’s like to be getting along in years. She is so old she literally belongs in a museum — she has a master’s degree in museum studies and in developmental psychology from San Francisco State University. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, before getting married and raising two daughters.
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