Speaker 1
So, welcome to Your Next Chapter. My name is Siobhan Mattingly. I am the Senior Living Specialist, and it’s great to be here this morning.

Speaker 1
Your Next Chapter is all about connecting you with resources, friends, and opportunities for older adults, not just for quality of life, but for living life. And I’m so happy today to be here with Jim. Jim is an amazing author, screenwriter, and a whole host of other things.

Speaker 1
And I love his philosophies and insight. I think in some way we’re kindred spirits because there’s a lot of philosophies and stuff that you mentioned in your book, as well as on your website that I can certainly relate to. But we’ll start off. Tell me a little bit about you.

Speaker 2
OK, I’ll start back from the beginning. I was born on a different planet. I was born in Coral Gables, Florida and raised before air conditioning.

Speaker 1
Oh, just think about it.

Speaker 2
And all of our friends there at Avery Heights, there are many of them that grew up without air conditioning.

Speaker 1
But I lived in South Florida. With the cool bands, though, the metal ones that make that really cool noise, right?

Speaker 2
Yeah, I had a little fan about this big, about a foot and a half from my head every night sitting on a chair blowing on me. And that was it. That was staying cool.

Speaker 2
You know, we didn’t worry about it. Nobody had air conditioning. Only people who had, remember how huge that amount of money would be.

Speaker 2
They say, he has a million dollars. And there was one house in a four block area. And Coral Gables was a wealthy suburb.

Speaker 2
And there was one house that had one air conditioner ski out of one.

Speaker 1
That’s like cable and color TV, right?

Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, only movie theaters were air conditioned, not even restaurants.

Speaker 1
But you probably didn’t miss it, though. know how could we miss it exactly know it it’s just we didn’t know it that was life yeah that

Speaker 2
was life that’s what you live with um then i over the years i went to university of florida two years and i i transferred to michigan state university to get a degree in communications only two schools in 1955 offered a degree in communications wow now every roadside garage and chapel offers it

Speaker 1
but I graduated with a degree in communications I worked hard did you I know so did I but so I

Speaker 2
went to MSU which we called MSMU it was the first agricultural college in America and I saw snow for the first time when I was 20 years old oh wow which was fun kind of cool um then I grew up I was married and had two young children 19 months apart my my babies are now 61 and 63 i by the way folks i’m 88 but it doesn’t matter i have no plans for waking up on the wrong side of the grass anytime soon okay so you know anyway um i worked my way up from the from below the bottom of the ladder to a corner office job in New York. I was, I don’t know whether anybody saw, it was kind of a silly TV series called Mad Men.

Speaker 1
Oh, yes, yes.

Speaker 2
Well, that was basically the story of my life. I was much better behaved. I mean, no, my office was not a place

Speaker 1
Waters for closers, right?

Speaker 2
Not for a place for parties or sex. It was a place to work. I was a nice, very proper married man that I didn’t fool around in New York, but I worked in New York. That was my life. And I was always in New York City, except in 1971, I went home and told my nine and 11 year old daughters, I said, pack, we’re moving. And they said, oh, good daddy. Where are we moving? I said, Buenos Aires, Argentina. I said, where is that dad? I said, 6,500 miles away. And I, I went there to be creative director of J. Walter Thompson.

Speaker 2
Wow. And we were there for four years playing with the Peronistas. It was very interesting.

Speaker 1
Nice, though. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2
So other than that, I’ve been at age 45, 46, around there, 47, when I was at the top of the mountain in advertising and had a very good life. I left it. I jumped off totally unplanned and bought an abandoned stack of stone up here in the boonies of New York State and opened a country and conference center. Completely stupid thing to do, giving up a very high level executive job, very well paid for no money in a business I didn’t know.

Speaker 2
But I thought, even though I won’t gamble on a $10, I won’t bet $10 on a football game because I have no control of it. Here we gambled. We put everything we had into a business that I didn’t understand.

Speaker 2
And I worked 70 hours a week. And guess what? It became successful.

Speaker 1
Nice. There you go. So you took a risk on you, really.

Speaker 2
It was called crap shooting with your life. But hey, so was Argentina. And that also worked.

Speaker 1
Nice. Nice.

Speaker 2
I mean, I think you do that.

Speaker 1
Yes, you have to.

Speaker 2
And now I live in the same town where that country inn is. It’s actually buried in trees across the street. I don’t see it, fortunately. And home is an art-filled 1940 dairy barn converted to a house.

Speaker 1
Yeah.

Speaker 2
I have an interior pool in my house.

Speaker 1
Really?

Speaker 2
That’s something I’ve done for the last 30 years. I decided having a pool in New York state means you only really get to use it about two months a year. It’s either too hot, too cold, too buggy. Oh, look, there’s a wounded deer in the pool. So I thought to hell with it.

Speaker 2
So we’ve had interior pools for at least 30 years. Really? And it’s wonderful.

Speaker 2
So when it’s 10 degrees outside and there’s a foot of snow at eight o’clock in the morning or seven 30, as it was this morning, I’m in the pool doing my morning exercises.

Speaker 1
Wow.

Speaker 2
30 minutes a day, every morning.

Speaker 1
I love it.

Speaker 2
And friends, I am talking to friends in Avery Heights, right? Yes.

Speaker 1
Well, friends throughout older adults.

Speaker 2
Good.

Speaker 1
Friends.

Speaker 2
You know, part of aging gracefully or not minding aging, you know, if God is good enough to you that he doesn’t give you something you can’t control, We can’t always control illness or the unexplained tumor or something dreadful. If you have just normal aging aspects of life, then you should really work on taking care of yourself. I take care of myself.

Speaker 2
I weigh 10 pounds less than I weighed at the end of basic training in the army. I have two meals a day, all fruit for breakfast, and then a big full dinner around four o’clock in the afternoon. and and then I do 30 minutes of exercise every morning and if you don’t have a pool do it yourself yep take a room in your do something to keep your your body moving and of course you you know be careful what you eat and you don’t drink and god knows you don’t smoke if you smoke I’ll come over there and slap you I mean so you don’t do that and you take care yourself. And I went in to see my doctor recently for a physical, and he looked at me and he said, he’s a very cold hearted guy. He’s been by doctor for 40 years. He looks up and he said, my most boring patient, there’s nothing wrong with you. And I’m lying. I’m not 88. I won’t be 88 for six more weeks. In September, I’ll be 88. But there’s nothing wrong with me.

Speaker 2
Nice. You know, and he said, get used to it. You may live through 100. My children say, oh, God.

Speaker 1
We have a few hundred-year-olds, centurions, I think they call it.

Speaker 2
I think it’s centenarians.

Speaker 1
Centenarians, thank you.

Speaker 2
Actually, I went to a workshop in March and Dan Buettner, who wrote all the Blue Zones books.

Speaker 1
Yes, love him.

Speaker 2
Dan was the guest host and he’s become a good friend of mine.

Speaker 1
Really?

Speaker 2
And the subject was longevity. And I can do a whole talk on Blue Zones. I love Blue Zones. Someday we’ll do that in the future, Siobhan. Siobhan, I’m sorry, Siobhan, right?

Speaker 1
Yes, Siobhan.

Speaker 2
Siobhan, Siobhan.

Speaker 1
Pardon me, I should know that.

Speaker 2
I’m Irish.

Speaker 1
Siobhan’s fine. Siobhan’s fine. Siobhan’s my nickname.

Speaker 2
No, I like Siobhan. Okay. So life is good. So now I write. I write full time. I wrote two fiction novels, pure fiction, which could be very interesting TV series or films if I could ever find an agent to sell them.

Speaker 2
I’ve written two nonfiction books that I know you want to talk about the first one today, Dear All Friends, which I’m very fond of. And then my more recent one is called Embrace Your Age. This is the most recent one. Embrace Your Age. You can be better than ever.

Speaker 2
I’ve also written a TV series that’s ready to be produced if somebody would look at it. It’s about a newscasting show and it’s called The Seniors Old Enough to Know Better. oh wow uh um i’m working on a screenplay i have a new novel underway you know idle fingers are the devil’s playground so i’m yes i’m over busy but that’s okay yeah that’s all right that’s all right and i’m happy to be here with you all today let me see is there anything else i’m leaving out about myself no we’ll we’ll get to the rest of it as we chat so tell me um i like i said i feel like we’re

Speaker 1
definitely connected uh many things i read in your bio and even just now you’re talking about you know uh bachelor’s degree in communications my birthday’s in august so you’re a virgo my so there’s lots of things but what i love is your um definitely your life philosophy and my favorite piece of it was when you talked about this just hit home making your bed I saw this um on YouTube actually uh the Admiral I saw him Admiral any wonderful McRaven every morning I make my bed and there are mornings where I’m like but but it does it just feels there’s something about it that makes you feel like I’ve started my day it empowers you and and I love the fact that it’s like the one thing that you can do. And it’s just, it’s perfect. And when you even when you walk in the room, and you’re getting dressed, you see it all made, it just feels right. And so talk about your life

Speaker 2
philosophy a little bit. You take something messy and make it neat. Yeah, starting your you’re starting your day that way. I’m gonna make whatever’s messy out there. I’m gonna need it up.

Speaker 2
Yes, what you can control. I love that. And it’s good. I think part of that came from I’m gonna back up for one second. I say without any shame or guilt, because my father died, unfortunately, when I was very young. He was the district attorney of the city of Miami. And he died in a one-week period because of a hospital error in 1950. Hospitals weren’t always that smart.

Speaker 2
And I had no older siblings, and we had no relatives living nearby. So I was raised by, Fortunately, a wonderful brilliant woman, my mother. So I say without guilt or shame, I’m a mama’s boy.

Speaker 1
Nice.

Speaker 2
Because she gave me a lot of, well, my whole point of view in life, I realize, comes from her. I can still hear her voice. You can never be too clean. If you can see what you’re wearing, you’re not standing or walking correctly.

Speaker 1
I like that one.

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, it was very funny. And, okay, my, I’m going to, I’m actually going to read one paragraph from dear old friends, which you want to discuss today, which leads into my philosophy.

Speaker 1
Yeah.

Speaker 2
I know, and all my ageless friends know, that although you can’t stop the aging process, you sure as hell can go right on living. up to the last second you can still create still produce still influence still teach still love and instill love yeah you know and that’s what i try to do i if i can condense my point of view it’s it’s never too late to make your life and the lives of those around you better, happier, and more satisfying. Now, I know it may sound a bit Pollyanna-ish, but I do it. Thanks, mom. She said, every morning when you get up, every morning of your life, you’re going to have to face your most severe critic, the highest wall you have to hurdle, the most difficult person you’re going to know. It’s that person in your bathroom mirror.

Speaker 2
And you either can look at that person every morning and go, good God, another day. Or smile sweetly and bravely at that person and say, good God, another day. Another chance to see, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch, to give love, to help others.

Speaker 2
It’s called another opportunity to embrace life. Hey, friends, there’s no guarantees about tomorrow. And the past ended last night.

Speaker 2
Yep. As I often say to groups, because I’m I’m giving weekly lectures to another group, just like you nice people at Avery Heights. Yes. Right now. And I say to every week when I go, I say, remember what I say.

Speaker 2
Right. This very minute as we are talking right this very moment, you are the oldest you’ve ever been. Yes. And you are the youngest you will ever be.

Speaker 2
Yep. So basically, we’re starting life over right now. Yeah, right now. You can’t go all the way back and restart the beginning. But you can start right now and change the ending. Yes, I agree.

Speaker 1
It’s funny you mentioned that quote. I highlighted that. Oh, good. Yeah.

Speaker 2
It’s one I remind myself every day. Why don’t go ahead and give you just so just for folks,

Speaker 1
Give your website just so people know where they can get a lot of this information.

Speaker 2
Okay. I’ll hold this up so you can see my name again because the website is, you know, just www.jamesbflaherty.com. It’s an Irish name.

Speaker 2
It was originally when they arrived at Ellis Island, it was the old Flaherty’s and the old Brian’s and the old Kelly’s and the old Rourke’s. And they said, sure, and if we’d be dropping the O, no one would be knowing that we’re immigrants. Actually, one of my daughters who lives in England went back to the historic name. Besides the fact that she has a very Irish first name, which a name that I gave her 61 years ago when nobody had that name.

Speaker 2
I named her Shannon. Oh, nice. And she, so she is legally Shannon O. Flaherty. Yeah. You know, and when she was older, she said, I love my name, daddy. Where did you get it? And I said, I named you after a duty free liquor airport. And she said, thank you very much.

Speaker 1
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Oh, okay. Hold on. Yeah, good. All right. Well,

Speaker 2
while she’s gone, we can talk. We can talk about other things then. Oh, let’s see now.

Speaker 1
All right, I’m back. So why don’t we talk about your book? Okay. Why don’t you hold up that cover

Speaker 2
and let’s talk about it. Here’s the book we’re talking about today. Dear old friends, stay young, stop thinking old, and love your life every day. Okay. I’m going to show you something that most people that you don’t know either.

Speaker 2
When I originally published the book, it had a different subtitle. I did that. I finally said, okay, I better get more commercial and make the subtitle more to the point so people understand.

Speaker 2
The original subtitle, remember I’m a writer. So writers get, we get involved with the poetry of language. And here was a poster I had for it.

Speaker 2
And the original subtitle says, a loving reminder, The band won’t stop playing till you stop dancing.

Speaker 1
Oh, I like that, though.

Speaker 2
I know. I like it better as a writer. The writer in me is much happier with it.

Speaker 1
Well, you know what? You can always introduce that now later.

Speaker 2
So like, yeah, I still use it as a when I’m talking to people. I like giving lectures because it’s something I said years ago. And I and I makes me happy.

Speaker 2
Like George Bernard Shaw, who had a lot of wonderful quotes. George Bernard Shaw said, you don’t stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing.

Speaker 1
Yes, I saw that on your site.

Speaker 2
I like that.

Speaker 1
Yes.

Speaker 2
That’s very true.

Speaker 1
We need stuff like that. We need inspiring and encouraging. Your website is, I was like, you know, talk about a rabbit hole.

Speaker 1
I mean, and the one thing I thought about you when I was looking at your website, reading parts of your book is wisdom. Like, I truly believe that older adults and that’s why our thing is your next chapter is because I truly believe and we truly believe that, like you said, unless you’re, you know, you stop dancing, you know, you’ve got more to give. And you’re full of wisdom, which I really love.

Speaker 1
And I love the gentle way you approach your audience as well. You’re not coming from way up here. You’re coming from right here.

Speaker 1
And you’re speaking to them, you know, like your book as friends.

Speaker 2
Well, I’m one of them. Although if we go back to dear old friends, I know we’re jumping around a little bit. It’s okay.

Speaker 1
We’re still on the same subject. We’re in the same vein.

Speaker 2
Right. Right, right. To talk about, dear old friend, why did I write it? My whole life, and to this day, I’m not sure why, because I was not, I look back at myself at 14, 15, 16, and I was not a star of, wow, look at that brilliant kid, you know, and I didn’t, I wasn’t the captain of the football team or the president of the class. I was good old Jimmy. I was Jimmy because my father was Jim. And everybody knew me and liked me, but I wasn’t number one in popularity. I was a very good kid. We were all good kids, of course. There was no such thing as drugs. Nobody had sex in high school. No, but you know, I remember people say, we saw Dan and he was smoking a cigarette and everybody was shocked. That was shocking in high school in Carl Gable, Florida. Granted, I wasn’t growing up in New York City. I was growing up in a beautiful, soft suburban town of about 3,000 people back then.

Speaker 2
And there weren’t multi-trillionaire sports stars with mansions and yachts around. It was just a nice growing up town. But got off the subject there.

Speaker 2
Oh, I know, I know. Anyway, I was talking about why did I have old friends? I know you said you wanted me at one point to talk about the one, the first one I mentioned in the book was Jane Prettyman. And I had heard about her before I, when I entered high school, she taught sophomore biology and everybody said, she’s very interesting, but really tough. And when we met Jane, she was probably an, a wretchedly old woman of about 45, you know, and, and she said, I want you to know that if you can make a B in my course, you’ll make a B in college biology. And she was right. She was that good, that advanced a teacher back then. And I remember she was funny as hell. She wore test hats. She’d come in for a test and she’d have an inverted, like a Chinese coolie hat on with pigtails down to her ankles. Or once she wore a gorilla mask in the class. She was amazingly, she kept our attention always glued to her. One day she, after my father died, and that was a picture in the front page of the Miami Herald because it was so well known. She called me because shortly after that, I was in her class. And she said, Jim, do you need any, would you like to earn a little money after school? I have some chores to be done around my house. And I said, oh, yes, ma’am, I’d really like that. So I came over and she would give me silver to polish or I could wash her car. She had a big Lincoln Continental with a spare tire on the rear end.

Speaker 2
and and we would talk and it turned out she’d actually dated my father before he met my mother but she was a wonderful woman and and i was sitting there one day in the hot florida day moaning about my poor life being fatherless at age 14 and a half or whatever i was yeah and she said, I know losing your father was a great loss for you, Jimson, but your mother’s loss is much greater. She’s lost her lover. Now, you have to understand, I was a bit of a prude. I still am a bit of a prude, surprisingly. I don’t always admit it. And I remember kind of being shocked by that but then she explained Jane helped me understand the importance of relationships and and long-term commitments and things back then and I was 14 15 and a and a very young 14 15 I wasn’t like 15 going on 20 no I was 15 I was 15 going on 13 you know and then I realized Thinking back, I had a lot of, not a lot, but I had two or three other, like a couple of neighbors that were in their 40s and 50s that were, I guess, very fond of me or they saw something in me.

Speaker 2
As I got older, my friends got older. When I was in my 20s, I had 50-year-old friends. When I was in my 30s, I had a lot of friends in their 60s.

Speaker 1
Wow.

Speaker 2
And in the 40s, I had a lot of friends in their 70s. Yeah. You know, and it was not, and it was wonderful. They pushed, they criticized, they complained, they say, turn left, turn right, don’t do that.

Speaker 2
How can anyone be that stupid? Or that’s amazing you did that. I’m proud of you.

Speaker 2
And the net net was they made it good to be Jim. Because I listened to them because I thought, damn. they’re wiser than I am yeah yeah they they’ve been there you know I’m I’m still and I still felt like a kid when I was in I actually had worked my way up I was in a corner office job in Manhattan when I was 33 years old wow you know that was a big deal I you know and it’s funny growing up growing up in the 40s and 50s, big money wasn’t something you knew about.

Speaker 2
All of our kids, I’m talking to all my friends out there and Avery and our friends online that are listening to us, all of we are from a different generation. Remember, without social media, without television, nobody really knew everything at once. You know, now the kids, unfortunately, I think, know too much and they are bombarded with too much.

Speaker 2
And so therefore they are concerned about the world situation and climate control and politics. And maybe life was simpler and easier back then because you went to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic and you pledged the flag in the morning. You know, I mean, it was a very normal.

Speaker 2
God-fearing, one-nation-under-God-under-flagged upbringing, which I’m glad that I had. And I’m glad my children came along early enough that they had that more than not, even though they had a crazy-ass father who dragged them 6,500 miles to Argentina and made them live in English and Spanish. and to this day they they still are fluent in spanish that’s we all are after when we got there i said after a year when you all speak spanish well enough i mean we’re going to take a vacation and go around the continent which we did we climbed over the rocks of machu picchu and we scrambled the equator and we did all those things wonderful you know and it gave them an international

Speaker 1
point of view, which I like. Jim, tell me about, summarize the book, and then tell me why, as an

Speaker 2
old book, I should read the book. Let’s go back to the book. I wrote the book. I realized one day when I was 42 years old, so friends, that was 86 years of 46 years ago, 46 years ago, how much I loved my old friends, how much I absolutely adored them. And this book is dedicated to the Traynums, Carl and Honor Traynum. And I sat down one day, not writing a book, I sat down to write a love letter to my friends. And it went on and on and on. And suddenly I looked at it and it was 60 pages long. And I read it and I smiled. I said, that’s lovely. Knowing I couldn’t send anybody a 60 page letter. I thought, isn’t that sweet? And I filed it.

Speaker 2
And then life got busy and I forgot it. And about three years ago, cleaning my office, I found that file and I got it out and I read it again, smiling. And I thought, hot damn, my attitude hasn’t really changed, except there’s a big change. I’m one of them. I’m a dear old friend now. And that’s why I can talk about this subject because at my age, I don’t look at everything from the standpoint of the 42 year old. Yeah. You know, I have a more realistic viewpoint of what happens to you, you are going to get older, a matter of how, how well are you going to cope with it. And so when I found it, I thought, and I didn’t have any plans to write any nonfiction books, because I was really deep into writing novels in those days. I thought it was great, Great fun to write a novel.

Speaker 2
I’ll get into that later because it’s very exciting when you write a novel. You become those people. You have to speak their language and walk their walk and do everything.

Speaker 2
But I thought, I wonder if I could just update Dear Old Friends, add a few comments, but keep much of the basic thinking in it. And I wrote this book. And I kept the same title because I had written on it Dear Old Friends as a title.

Speaker 1
Mainly because your friends, you were always younger and they were older.

Speaker 2
Oh, they were always older. Much, much, much older. I’ve lost all those old friends, of course.

Speaker 1
Yeah.

Speaker 2
You know, because they’re good. I know I quote there in one of my old friends, Ruth West. She was an ancient hag, probably about 80.

Speaker 2
Then a wonderful, wonderful woman. And she said, you don’t put an age on people, do you, Jim? And I said, no, I really don’t. You know, even now I mentor high school seniors now and then.

Speaker 2
I go and talk to them about what’s ahead for them and why I want them to shape up or ship out. I’m not the easiest human being in the world. You know, my children said you were everything, but you didn’t make a salute.

Speaker 2
But that was about all.

Speaker 1
Now, who’s your favorite? Who’s your favorite old friend?

Speaker 2
Oh, it’s very hard because there were so many. I’ll say Carl and Honor Trainham. So one day I found, this was this unplanned event in my life, when I found an abandoned stack of stone here in Armenia, New York, where I live, which is, we call it anemia or amnesia.

Speaker 2
But it’s right on the Connecticut border. We’re right next door to Sharon, Connecticut. So if you go to the northwest corner of Connecticut and you see beautiful villages like Sharon, Lakeville, and Salisbury.

Speaker 2
And we’re right one mile from the border of Sharon.

Speaker 1
Wow.

Speaker 2
But Emenia is kind of a blue collar town. It’s a boonies town. On the other side of us is Millbrook, New York, which is money and rich and all mansions.

Speaker 2
There is a very rich part of Emenia, however, buried in the woods. And I found this abandoned stack of English stone full of raccoon droppings. no functioning anything no utilities the grounds and gardens over and I fell in love with it and bought it and the owner somebody I had never met of course and his lawyer made some stupid things and I at one point called my lawyer in New York and said cancel it and he said but Jim I know you love this place I said cancel it the people are idiots and I can’t be pushed I get to a point when I say no they’ll they’ll i said something a new window will open a new door will open there’s always something new out out there if your mind is open to it right yes so he called he canceled it and the next day he called me and he said there’s a gentleman in my office who would like to meet you and i said what i mean stanley never did this the attorney i was working in new york and i said fine. So he came over with this sweet looking white haired gentleman sat down, Carl Trainham, and his wife was Amy Einstein Spengarn, who was a daughter of the owners, Joel and Amy Spengarn, a very wealthy, very liberal, highly intellectual Jewish family from Manhattan.

Speaker 2
Wow. Joel was the first Jewish professor at Columbia University and was also, by the way, I know I’m stepping away from the basic story of Carl. Joel wrote a letter. He was a very influential liberal and he wrote a letter one day and I saw the original. Here is the beginning of the black movement in America. A letter that said, I have a dream of a unified colored republic.

Speaker 2
And Martin Luther King said, hey, catchy phrase, and made that the slogan for Black America. And Joel used to invite all of the leading Black scholars in America to Troutbeck, and they formed NAACP right there across the street. And he was one of the officers of it.

Speaker 2
So the House had a very interesting liberal history. Anyway, Carl came in. Carl Tranum came into my office that day.

Speaker 2
He and Honor had been married on the front lawn of Trump when I knew them better. And he said, tell me what happened. So I told him the story of the back and forth.

Speaker 2
And he said, well, no wonder you were angry. He said, do you mind? Just a slight sound of his Tennessee boyhood.

Speaker 2
Not much. He was too educated to keep that accent. He said, do you mind if I make a telephone call, if I can set the deal back on the right track, would you still go ahead with it?

Speaker 2
And I said, certainly. And in that soft way, he said, yeah, you idiots. I can hear it.

Speaker 2
He very sweetly told the lawyer and his son, who at that point was the owner. And the deal went through and I bought the stack of stone. Oh, what did you do with it?

Speaker 2
I turned it into a, I kept the original name of it, Troutbeck, Troutbeck, which is the name of a village in the Lake District of England. And I opened a country and conference center.

Speaker 1
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2
And I worked 70 hours a week and it was successful. And I owned it for 30 years. And then God was good to me in 2016 before COVID came around and said, Jim, even though you’re an idiot, I think in your 80 years old and you really shouldn’t be working like that. Sell it. And I sold it.

Speaker 1
I was going to ask you because you mentioned it earlier and I was going to ask you.

Speaker 2
Well, it’s very much a part of my life. I mean, that was 30 years of my life. And for the first for the first 15 years of that to build a business, I was there 70 hours a week.

Speaker 1
Wow.

Speaker 2
And then I could back away from it. We started traveling and we had a villa in Acapulco. I mean, life was good.

Speaker 2
Jim has not suffered. Jim had nothing. Another thing, you know, people say, oh, Jim, you must have had a trust fund or something.

Speaker 2
Jim had nothing.

Speaker 1
Wow. Jim worked.

Speaker 2
Noel Coward, who’s a wonderful British wag, an actor and a writer, had a wonderful line years ago that I totally embraced heart and soul, and I still do at my advanced age, work is more fun than fun.

Speaker 1
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2
And I loved it. How long can you float around a pool with a margarita in your hand? I can do that for 30 minutes.

Speaker 2
I did it now and then. But I held with it. I don’t do that anymore.

Speaker 2
Anyway, Carl and his wife, Honor, became my best friends. My mother said she was jealous until she met them. She said that I understood because they were exactly the age of my parents.

Speaker 2
And they lived in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. And I miss them so much that we went down and bought a home on top of a mountain in St. Thomas. And I lived there for 10 years.

Speaker 2
Not full time. I would go down for two weeks at a time, three weeks at a time. But they were very, very dear.

Speaker 1
You really lived an amazing life. So what’s next for you? What’s next for you?

Speaker 2
Well, you know, as I say on the line under my name on the next book, The Embrace Your Age, I say an optimistic octogenarian with a bright future. I think it would be easier to get the Pope to come to Armenia to bless dinner than to get a literary agent these days.

Speaker 1
Yeah.

Speaker 2
You know, especially at my age.

Speaker 1
Yeah.

Speaker 2
Okay. I’ve been invited to give a TED Talk in October. I heard that. Which TEDx Talk, not TED Talk, TEDx Talk.

Speaker 1
Where is that? Whereabouts?

Speaker 2
I’m going to be giving it in a suburb of Seattle.

Speaker 1
Wow.

Speaker 2
So I’ve got to fly out to Seattle and.

Speaker 1
Good for you.

Speaker 2
Which is fine. Yeah. Because it adds credibility to me.

Speaker 2
So if I go to an agent and say, hey, I’m a TEDx speaker and I have got all these properties, at least look at them for God’s sake. So I can get somebody to look at it. Who knows?

Speaker 2
Maybe I’ll have a TV series on air. I would like to do that. Yeah.

Speaker 2
You know, it’s not a matter. You know, I confess I should feel guilty about it, but I don’t. I’m not the young, starving writer huddled in a dirty garret somewhere writing. No, I’m a very comfortable elderly gentleman in his art-filled barn with a pool.

Speaker 2
And I made a very smart decision 23 years ago that all of my friends are wildly, wildly envious. And I said, you were idiots. Some of you, because you could have made that decision and you were too stingy or too stupid to do it.

Speaker 2
I hired a woman, a darling woman from Mexico, who is now an American citizen. So we go to vote together. And when I was very sick after bad surgery in Mexico, she came in and took care of me.

Speaker 2
And I started calling her the nanny. And to this day, Esther Lopez Hernandez is her name. And more common sense than anyone I’ve ever known.

Speaker 2
She’s with me 23 years later, still with me. And she introduces herself to people. She said, hello, I am Senor Jim’s nanny.

Speaker 2
And everybody says, can we come to dinner, Senor Jim? Because the food is brilliant. I told the hospital, I’m very close to Sharon Hospital, Sharon, Connecticut.

Speaker 2
I said, if you run out of OR space, you can always come to our house because it’s that clean all the time. Good for you. But so it’s good.

Speaker 2
Life is good.

Speaker 1
It’s been amazing to chat with you. Hold up the book, the one we were talking about, Dear Old Friends. And tell us, where do you find that? Where do you find the book?

Speaker 2
You can find all of my books on Amazon under my name. You go to, you know, books and go to Amazon.com and look for James Flaherty, F-L-A-H-E-R-T-Y, James B. Flaherty. And you either look for Dear Old Friends or Embrace Your Age. You can find those books.

Speaker 1
I don’t know.

Speaker 2
Do we have any more time or do you want to do anything else?

Speaker 1
I think we’re good. We’re at the end.

Speaker 2
Oh, we are. Oh, OK.

Speaker 1
We’re definitely going to have you back. I definitely want to talk about Embrace Your Age next time. Okay.

Speaker 1
I’m like sitting here like in awe. I’ve got all sorts of stuff highlighted and all sorts of notes. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1
The wisdom that you have in life is contagious, and I appreciate it.

Speaker 2
My pleasure. Remember, friends, you are as old as you think, so don’t think old.

Speaker 1
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2
Think tomorrow.

Speaker 1
Yeah, and we’ll see everyone next time on your next chapter. Thank you.

Speaker 2
Thank you. …