Almost two months had passed since that rainy night when I felt, with painful clarity, that my presence in my daughter’s house was superfluous. During that time, she called me only twice. The first time was to ask if I was okay. The second was to find out if I still had the old drill in the garage. I answered politely both times. I didn’t reproach her, I didn’t tell her I missed her, I didn’t ask when she planned to invite me over. I simply stopped clinging to a life that no longer included me.
The encounter that changed everything
One Wednesday morning I was sitting in the park when a man about my age settled down on the bench next to me. His name was Mircea, he was sixty-seven years old, and he had been a music teacher. He used to go to the park almost every day with a chessboard under his arm.
“Do you play?” he asked me.
—Very bad —I replied.
—Perfect. Me too.
We laughed. That’s how it all started.
A new network of friends at 64
Through Mircea I met three other people. We started meeting on Wednesdays to play chess and on Fridays at a small café downtown. When they learned I had a guitar stored at home, they insisted I bring it. It had been almost thirty years since I’d played in front of anyone.
The first night I played in front of them, my fingers trembled. But something happened that I hadn’t experienced in a long time: no one looked at their phone, no one looked at their watch, they all listened to me . It might seem like a small, insignificant detail. For me, it wasn’t. For me, it was everything.
