HOPES, DREAMS, AND DELUSIONS

When you are growing older and long past the traditional age of retirement, there is still a spark – a belief that somehow you will resume some kind of a career. It is not, for some, as the saying gores: a snare and a delusion. It is reality. I have two friends – one two years older who still heads an important organization for monitoring the media. The other, is perhaps better known because he remains – at just four months younger than I – an iconic (wow I am getting tired of that word) journalistic figure on TV News. And of course, there is Mike Wallace, who continued to work on “60 Minutes: well into his nineties.

I remember meeting with John Knight, president of Knight-Ridder newspapers and when I met him, still working after two Pulitzer Prizes. He remained as editor-in-chief of the Miami Herald. Interviewing him in 1976 I commented that it must be a distraction to sit in his office, surrounded by pictures of himself and Presidents, to look out on the beautiful palm-fringed scene and the causeway leading to Key Biscayne. “Once you get used to the view – it’s just another place to work,” was his reply.

I commented, lightly I thought, that he was “well into his eighties.”
He bristled. “I am not well into my eighties. I’m only 82.
These men are unique. It would be folly of any elderly (nut still ambitious) man to try to emulate their success and their vocational longevity.

Folly.

Yet, here I go again. The other day I had lunch with a young entertainment-business lawyer whose father, a cinematographer had worked with me in my palmier days.
He asked me what I would like to do. Do?? I’m lucky to be sitting there talking to a successful man who was less than half my age.
“I’m serious,” he said. Would you like to get back into “the business?”
There is not room for me – I’m the wrong demographic”
“Nonsense, there are many people who still admire and remember you.”
Flattery always works.

I agreed that perhaps, just perhaps if he could get the funding for a pilot, I might be persuaded to put a show together.
We talked a bit. He suggested travel. I suggested Home Exchange.
Why not? Let’s put together a pilot of a typical home exchange, complete with the two exchangers – I would be one of them of course – visiting each other. There would be footage of me the exchanger, fitting into the neighborhood, making new friends, shopping for food, finding the best boulangerie and seeing the sights.
Sometimes, and I have said this before, you and the person you exchange with get together. There is usually overlap at either end of the trip.
Do I have the stamina to do it? Does the audience have any interest in seeing an octogenarian and his wife trudging around a small city in Holland, or visiting the zoo in Lisbon that is directly behind the place where we are staying? Perhaps we could meet the people, like Ricardo in Lisbon who showed us ancient Celtic monoliths in the middle of nowhere or Trees and Dick who made sure we visited Delft and also saw “The Pearl Earring” at the museum in The Hague.

Maybe I could do it. Maybe I can still crank it up.