Lunch with Tony
Tony said life is a hockey game. Three timed periods move quickly and are fraught with change. Birth to thirty years old is period 1. Thirty to sixty years old is period 2; sixty to ninety years is period 3. Hockey and life include overtime. At birth, the most important question Tony wanted answered was, "What kind of 30 year old do you want to be?" Newborn limitations postpone interrogation. When Tony asked a ten year old, common answers included, "Thirty?! It's taken my entire life to get to ten." Tony queried a twenty year old, "Thirty?! That's old; I'll never be thirty." At thirty-two years old, in Tony's dining room, he told the author, "You're a very nice young man but you are also common. By the time you were thinking about your thirtieth birthday, it was too late to do anything meaningful: you were in your late twenties. We've spent an hour in conversation about the twenty-something you used to be. If no one ...