Last Updated on February 28, 2019 by CCAR Staff
“What’s next?” the young woman asked with a tinge of fear.
I’ve been desperately searching for that young woman with big dreams who stepped off a Greyhound bus in New York on a snowy February morning. The one whose father said she had more guts than brains when she boarded the midnight bus from Virginia to start a life in the Big City.
With $200 stashed in her bra and a portable typewriter balanced on her lap, she filled the 8-hour ride with visions of possibilities. Uncertainty was part of the adventure.
That woman was not worried that she didn’t have a job waiting, because not finding one was an option she had never considered. She was motivated by an exquisite combination of anticipation and hope that made her feel anything was possible. Was she scared? A little. But in a good way.
She was awed when the desk clerk at the Martha Washington Women’s Hotel handed her the key to her new home, a $15 a week room with a bathroom down the hall – her first time living alone. Wow. What’s next?
It would be several lifetimes later and 3,000 miles west of that tiny room when I wrote my first Senior Moments column. It was published ten years ago on March 4, 2009.
What’s next? I found myself asking once again. Would anyone read it? Would they like it? Would they want to read more the next week?
What was next was a decade of sharing my life with a caring family of readers who have treated me, well, like family.
You laughed at my funny stories of husband George and praised the stories of his many kindnesses.
You empathized as, laughing and sometimes crying, we navigated my elderly mother through her final years.
And you cried when I lost Mom last year, and my beloved George a few months ago, leaving me with the most challenging “What’s next?” I would ever know.
I’m a bit old for a midnight bus ride, but I am working hard at reconnecting with that young woman who looked to the future with a tinge of trepidation and a lot of hope.
Email Patricia Bunin at patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Twitter @PatriciaBunin.
