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Elder Statesman
This is Jerry, the day I ran into him on the beach, where we were two of maybe thirty people crazy enough to come out in scorching September to hear an Afro-Latin concert on the sand.
Sometimes I talk to Jerry after services at a banquet table at the back of the First Unitarian Church of Miami. He tells me that the best thing about his life is watching his kids—he has three, including my friend Joel. There are a lot of things in Jerry's life that haven't worked out too well, and now he's living with a roommate and working at a telemarketer's job, but he's belonged to this church for around thirty years, and now he says to me, "I'm an elder statesman. People are lining up and wanting to talk to me. Pay their respects."
I'd like to think that the moral of Jerry's story is that in the end we are whoever the hell we say we are.