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THE MID-LIFE CRISIS: LIFE IS LIKE A CLOCK
It was a drizzly night in San Francisco, and Enrico’s Coffeehouse was virtually deserted. A look of desolation hung over the marble-topped tables as Enrico Banducci sat rapping at the bar with two old friends, relating tales of bygone days. The former owner of the Hungry i nightclub, he is a man of immense vitality. And even when the topic turns to how he feels about aging, his responses are direct and forceful.
Looking in the mirror distresses him, Enrico says. “If you’re pale you think about health. You think, ‘What’s happening to my body?’”
“You start reading the obits,” remarks one of his companions, “and anybody dying at eighty makes you feel better!”
“But the worst thing,” says the other fellow, “is the subtle onset of hypochondria. I remember running up the stairs not long ago and saying to myself, ‘This is heart-attack gulch 1′ I was suddenly conscious of it.”
Enrico nods in agreement, recalling the night he was just about to leave the nightclub when the phone rang. He raced for it, taking the stairs two at a time as usual, and crumpled and fell on the last step.
“From that day on,” he says ruefully, “I knew what my father meant when he said, ‘Your legs go after thirty-five.’
When you’re young you can take the steps four at a time, and if you fall you just bounce. But when you fall at forty-four you get hurt.”
The next shock came when he was forty-seven and about to close the Hungry i. His secretary asked him what he planned to do next and commented with concern, “You know, you’re kind of old to start a new venture.”
“Oh, my God, it really set me back,” Enrico recalls. “I said, ‘Old? Are you kidding?’ My age thoughts had never hit me before.
“J think it’s other people who bring you down, more than yourself. I hadn’t even noticed I had gray hair before that. What she said really set me to thinking, and I started to count the years I had left. Up to that moment I wasn’t counting. But then I started relating it, and I thought, ‘Gee, twenty years ago I just opened this place, and that was like yesterday. Now twenty years are all I’ve got left. Tomorrow I’m dead!’ You start giving yourself a sentence.”
His first impulse was to jump into something new immediately to prove he could repeat his former success. Eventually, ; however, he decided he had enough money to get along on and no need to prove anything. Now he spends his days at the coffeehouse, a business he had already owned, but he thinks differently about the time he has left:
“Every single day is important, whereas before it wasn’t. I told my son, ‘Gregory, life is like a clock. We’re born at six o’clock in the morning, and at six o’clock in the evening we die. So I’ve had breakfast, I’ve had lunch, and I’m at about two-fifteen on the clock of life. I’ve got one great big dinner left to order. That’s it! When it becomes six o’clock I lower my head with the sun and I’m gone.’
” ‘Whew,’ my son said, ‘the way you put it, Pop!’ ”
Pausing reflectively, Enrico added, “It’s a strange thing when you start counting the years. I don’t know if anyone else does that… or if it’s just me alone.”
*7\93\2*
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