Prologue

It’s damn time I told my story. A tale forty years in the making. Its themes? Immaturity, maturity, friendship, relationships, deceit, regret, lost love. Youth wasted on the young.

Nothing new under the sun, but it is my story. My memoir.

I’m not going to bore you with a complete history—where I was born, my parents’ parents, who came over from what European country, all the generations and effort it took to get to little old me. That part isn’t much different from most folks. There’ll be some flashbacks, but they’ll be germane to the story, I promise.

Your memory fades when you age, but certain ones stick out, like a gleam of glass on a rocky shore. And like the glass, the memory is well-worn from being revisited and turned over in your mind so often. I’ll start this tale with a day that shines in my mind like that piece of glass. I was a young buck of thirty, and thought I knew everything there was to know about life. As I soon found out, there was still much to learn.

It was the day I first walked into The Sunset, an assisted-living retirement community, as an old man...