I took the cramped hotel elevator down to the front desk to complain about our room.

“Some spoons on our wall are missing.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“The spoons nailed to the wall in our room. I see one, but there are empty hooks where other spoons are supposed to go.” I showed the clerk a photo I’d just taken. Trish thought the previous guests may have stolen the other spoons to do drugs.

The clerk seemed confused and said, “I don’t think I can get you more spoons at this hour.”

“I don’t want any more spoons,” I said. “I just didn’t want you to think I’m a spoon thief.”

“No sir, I imagine not.”

Trish and I checked into a “historic” New York hotel. The website photos were promising, but we didn’t spend enough time looking at the reviews.

The room was large and weird. On the wall opposite the missing spoons was a picture hook with no picture. The dim yellow lighting made everything jaundiced rather than cozy. And the radiator squealed like a leaky balloon.

Trish finds something to like in almost everyone and everything. After 30 years, I’ve learned that’s less annoying than it is useful. She looked around smiling, “What a fun quirky room.”

“Mm-hmm,” I managed.

“It’s only a few nights,” she said. “But if you want, I can find us another place.” Trish’s New York meetings were only two blocks away, which is why she picked this hotel. She had a packed schedule and no time to commute.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” I said, hoping she’d know I was lying and come to her senses. There was a Four Seasons just 20 blocks away. How bad could midtown traffic be at rush hour?

Thirty years ago, when we were first married, I might have loved a place like this. Back then, discomfort felt like adventure.

It’s funny what counts as hardship before you’ve seen any. Before anything real goes wrong.

PLEASE EXCUSE THE INTERRUPTION

Accidental Wisdom isn’t becoming one of those “click here to continue” sites. But AARP published the full essay this week, and I’m genuinely excited about it. They kindly let me share the opening with you here.

I’ll be back in two weeks with a new essay—the entire thing—unless The New Yorker jumps the gun.

In the meantime, here’s the link to the rest of the essay.

I dyed my hair today.

Not dyed exactly. It’s called “camo.”

“Your hair is 60 percent grey and 40 percent black,” my stylist explained. Camo will flip that around. You’ll take five years off, guaranteed.

For $60 I got five years back. Looking at the photo above, I might have overpaid. I don’t hate the look, but the swoop in the front makes me look like a middle-aged cockatiel.

I haven’t gotten Botox or skin peels like some of my friends, but I do darken my hair, lighten my teeth, and try to slim my stomach with intermittent fasting every day and Spanx on the holidays. I don’t think my wife would leave me if I didn’t do these things. In fact, no one would even notice. So why bother?

I guess if I stop, I’d be admitting something I’m not willing to say out loud. At least not yet.

I’m sixty-two. People say I look five years younger, but they’re just being polite. When they say I look fifty-seven, I know they’re really saying I look sixty-two. My goal is to hear someone say “mid-fifties.”

Mid-fifties means relevance. Mid-fifties means the corner office, where people do what you tell them to. Mid-sixties pushes you into the boardroom, where people write down what you say then do whatever the hell they want.

Mid-fifties isn’t really about how you look. It’s about where you stand. At fifty-five, people assume you’re on your way somewhere. At sixty-two, they assume you’ve been there and should be getting the hell out of there.

I shouldn’t complain. It was my choice to sell my business and move on. And I don’t miss the heavy workload. I chose to step off the track. But is it wrong that I want the optics of still being on it? Sitting on boards and writing essays is one thing. But it’s not the same as beating quarterly revenue projections.

This afternoon, fresh haircut and all, I stopped in a women’s store with my wife so she could get a dress for her upcoming business trip to Hong Kong. I sat in the husband chair, and the owner offered me a drink.

“Retired?” she asked, handing me a club soda.

What the hell? Is she even looking at my haircut? Why would she think I was retired?

I complained to Trish later in the car.

“I sit on four boards and write essays six days a week,” I said.

“Well honey,” Trish said calmly, “It’s 3pm on a Friday and you’re at a dress store with your wife…”

I just looked at her.

It’s easy for her to say. She’s in her late fifties and looks great. She’s also a CEO. Just because I sold my business and don’t have a job doesn’t mean I’m retired, does it?

Oh shit, it might.

I have an embarrassing memory from when I was in my twenties. I was on a rooftop restaurant looking out over Chicago’s skyline and I thought to myself, someday this will all be mine. It was a trite thought and I’m grateful I didn’t say it out loud. But now I sometimes wonder where that guy went. Is he dead? And if so, is that a bad thing?

It never became “all mine,” but I did okay. I built a business, a career, a family, and now I advise a few businesses and nonprofits. And while writing may not be the same as beating revenue projections, it’s not a bad gig.

Some days I wonder if I walked away too soon, like when former coworkers ask if I’m bored.

Other days I think this is exactly what I worked for. #livingthedream.

Depends on the day.

Either way, I’m not going to stop the camo.

That shit works.

Not on my age. But on the story I’m telling myself about who I am.

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One of my best friends regularly calls me a snob. It only bothers me when he’s right, which is less than half the time.

He also calls me “schmuck,” but that’s when I beat him in tennis. When we’re doubles partners, he’s nothing but gracious.

The two of us and four other friends rented a house with a pool in Palm Springs for a three-day adult tennis camp.

My kids thought it was hilarious. “Be respectful to your counselors,” they said. “Make good choices.”

The six of us acted like high schoolers at the house, smoking weed and drinking wine, pushing each other into the pool, and singing to Pearl Jam at the top of our lungs. That last part was probably just me.

No one asked a serious question the entire weekend. If someone had said, “How are you really doing?” we would have assumed he was having a stroke. Or called him “Mr. Feelings.”

At camp, we got worse. We made fun of the head counselor, who introduced himself by listing every semi-famous tennis player he’d ever coached. We also skipped the mandatory morning stretch sessions, which was a terrible idea for a bunch of stiff old guys.

We had the big championship on the last day of camp. There were around thirty pairs of campers, and the head counselor put the six of us friends in three pairs. The guy who calls me a snob was paired with a buddy in finance. I was paired with a guy I didn’t know as well. We’re on different sides of the political aisle, but sitting in the hot tub in our bathing suits, we agreed on pretty much everything.

We had never partnered before, so I wanted him to like the way I played. But he played so badly in the first game that I briefly wondered if I didn’t like him after all. Then I realized how stupid that was. And anyway, if one of us had to suck, I was glad it was him.

Then I fell apart. The new serve they taught me wasn’t working, and one coach watched my backhand and said, “What the hell was that?” My partner started making his shots, and I started missing all of mine, especially the easy ones.

Oh shit, I thought, now he hates me. Now I’m the weak link.

It’s a ridiculous conclusion from a missed backhand, but the feeling goes back to high school, when you could break one unspoken rule and end up banished to the theater geeks or stoners.

I spent time with both. Mostly the stoners after I lost the lead role in The Rainmaker to a senior named Norman Gorman. Not that I think about that forty years later.

It was our last match, and we had to win. We played against a husband-wife duo dressed in black. The wife didn’t hit hard, but she never missed. The husband was a beast, crushing his shots, but only making about half. “Keep hitting to the husband,” my buddy whispered. “He’s all over the place.”

We were just a game behind and we worked the husband, who kept overhitting. Then it was the wife’s serve. The lighter she hit, the harder we missed.

We lost.

“You played great today,” my new friend lied. “I sucked.”

“No, it was all you,” I lied right back. “I couldn’t hit shit.”

We both knew what we meant.

I’d hang out with him again.

The guy who calls me a snob and the finance guy won the camp championship. I was happy for them, mostly. We all fist bumped and man-hugged before we went our separate ways. It was a three-hour drive home and we each drove separately. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to drive together. Asking to ride with someone seems needy.

Guys drive alone.

A couple days ago I phoned the buddy who calls me a snob. I had no particular reason to call, and he seemed happy to hear from me. I’m not sure how we became the kind of guys who do that. We just call if we haven’t seen each other in a while. We talked about work, his daughter’s company, and my wife’s new job.

We never say we miss each other. That would be insane. We just check in about nothing and stay on the phone a little longer than we need to.

We eventually said goodbye, but before we hung up, he reminded me about tennis camp. “You really sucked out there.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Schmuck.

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I was at a party talking about an upcoming trip to New Zealand. Someone pointed across the room and said, “Go talk to my dad, he just got back. He’s narcoleptic, but he’ll talk your ear off about the trip.”

I went over. “Your son says you just got back from New Zealand. Which island do you recommend?”

“Well, we loved the north. It was—” And with that, he closed his eyes and his head tilted to the side. I thought he died.

After a minute, which is a lifetime when you’re watching a stranger sleep, he opened his eyes and looked at me. Patient, unhurried, as if he’d simply stepped out for a moment. I was the one who was rattled. He just picked up where he left off.

“The south,” he said. “Definitely the south.”

What the hell? Didn’t he just say the north? I was so thrown I started blathering about every vacation I’d ever taken. He fell asleep again somewhere around my 2011 trip to Peru and I scurried away.

It’s usually harmless when I ramble.

Sometimes it’s not.

When I was admitted into rabbinical school, I became a finalist for the national Wexner Scholarship. Being a Wexner Fellow would be a huge honor. I left my corporate career to pursue this rabbinic path. My friends said it seemed early for a midlife crisis. If I won, I could say, “See, I belong.”

I felt like an imposter during the initial interviews, but the further along I got, the more confident I became. Now I just needed to crush the final interview. Then I’d call my wife and say, “I got it!”

The last session was wrapping up. One of the older rabbis asked, almost in passing, “Mark, how will you address the intermarriage problem?”

I knew that question was coming. I’d been intermarried for years. My parents too. And we were all doing just fine. It wasn’t a “problem.”

Still, I knew my job was to politely dodge the question. All I needed to say was something banal like, “I want to help all people find joy and meaning, no matter their upbringing.”

That’s it. Zip-zap. I’d get the prize and be forever known as a Wexner Fellow.

But something cracked open. I thought, here’s my chance.

“The problem with intermarriage?” I asked. “The only problem with intermarriage is that some people think it’s a problem.”

I gave a five-minute dissertation on how intermarriage is beautiful, enriching, and statistically helpful. One of the younger rabbis tried to rescue me, but I kept talking anyway. I watched myself speak and couldn’t stop.

I finished my rant and they said, “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

I walked out of the room, and the rabbi who sponsored my candidacy pursed her lips and nodded softly. We didn’t need to speak. I left the building, alone.

I still have the rejection letter. It didn’t say “why did you talk so much?” It didn’t have to.

I replayed that interview for years. I’d be in the shower or driving to the grocery store when it would hit me. Maybe I didn’t belong. Who was I to become a rabbi? Some days I don’t even like people that much. I told myself I didn’t really want the award anyway.

The rabbinic program lasts five years. That’s a long time to sit with a mistake.

I try not to babble when I’m feeling insecure anymore, and sometimes it works. I was at a board meeting recently where I argued we needed to remove an ineffective leader. I didn’t have anything against the person, but he was holding the organization back. I laid out my case. I even closed my laptop for emphasis.

There was silence for a moment, and I worried I wasn’t convincing anyone. Then I remembered something else I could say. “Oh, and another thing,” I almost said. It felt like a sneeze I couldn’t stop.

But I waited.

Have you ever seen a child hold their breath? Their cheeks fill up with air, and they look like they’re going to explode. That’s how I felt. Blood hammered in my skull, but I stayed quiet.

“I agree,” said one of the other members.

And so did everyone else.

Or maybe they were already there, and this time I didn’t talk them out of it.

The conversation moved on quickly. Someone was already talking about next steps. I had a brief, stupid urge to say, just so we’re clear, that was my idea.

I didn’t.

I exhaled.

I know myself well enough to know that next time, there will be another thing I want to add. There’s always another thing.

The urge to go on and on or to say, that was my idea—I don’t think that’s about vanity, exactly. It’s more like fear. Fear that if you don’t say it, it didn’t count. You didn’t matter.

That man at the party would just stop mid-sentence and disappear for a minute, patient and unhurried.

I’m trying to learn how to do that while I’m still awake.

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If you’ve got your own “and another thing,” I’m all ears.

When I graduated college and decided to spend a year wandering around Europe, my father drove me to the airport. At a stoplight, he handed me a box of fifty condoms.

“Be safe,” he said.

I looked at the box. It had been ripped open and was missing a few. I pointed to the torn opening at the top of the box.

“Dad…”

“Ach,” he said. “They’re expensive.”

My father was a pragmatist. He showed love by preparing me for a world that wouldn’t.

One morning when I was around ten years old, he looked up from the book he was reading and, apropos of nothing, said, “If you’re ever stuck behind enemy lines, find a brothel. They’ll hide you.” Then he went back to his book. I had no idea what a brothel was, so I looked it up and wondered what he knew about my future.

My friends’ fathers taught them how to throw a fastball. Mine offered a different curriculum. He told me not to inhale cigars, and never to put more than one ice cube in a Scotch. He also said you were too drunk to drive if you couldn’t recite the quadratic formula from memory, which I couldn’t do sober. Also, I was twelve.

He also told me I shouldn’t expect his help once I turned eighteen. “I don’t own you,” he said. “I’m renting.”

He was kidding. He meant it in the most loving way possible. He was saying: Be prepared. Soon enough you’ll need to stand on your own.

My dad didn’t quite know what to do with children, having never really been a child himself. I have a photo of him from Germany when he was six, holding a Schultüte, the giant paper cone filled with treats children receive on their first day of school. My father looked annoyed, like the whole thing was beneath him.

A few years after that photo was taken, his father was arrested and forced to sell his dry goods store for pennies on the dollar. They barely made it out of Germany after that. Most of their relatives who stayed behind were killed in one camp or another. Like so many immigrants, they arrived broke and broken.

So, with no childhood to draw from, my father didn’t know how to be a fun dad. He believed in hard truths. He took me to see a Harlem Globetrotters game for my birthday once. When I worried the Washington Generals were catching up, he scowled, “Don’t be an idiot. It’s fixed.”

As I shook his hand goodbye at the airport, he said, “Your mother’s worried you’ll be reckless over there.”

“Are you?” I asked.

“Nah, she just wanted me to tell you that. But don’t be an idiot.”

My mom wrote me loads of letters while I was abroad, often leaving a little space for my dad to add something. On one, commenting on my upcoming boat trip to Greece, he wrote: “Watch for shoals and the rapids as you sail along the Mediterranean basin.” He was quoting the Odyssey, which he somehow assumed I had read.

He wrote on another that he was jealous of my adventure. I read that line over and over. It felt like pride.

When I had children of my own, he didn’t become one of those swooning grandparents. He once saw me carrying my nine-month-old son Adam in a chest sling and said, “Put him down already. He’s not a baby.”

I raised my kids differently. Tickle fights on the living room floor. Football and baseball games. Dad jokes at the dinner table.

But kids don’t always want what their parents want. I was wrestling with Adam on the floor of a shopping mall once when he was seven or eight, rolling around outside Macy’s while my wife shopped. I had him pinned and was tickling him while he tried to twist free. I thought he was having fun, but he looked up at me and said, “I don’t think I’ll be as playful as you when I’m a dad.”

I froze, crouched on the mall floor. Kids have a way of telling you who you are and who they aren’t when you’re not expecting it.

Years later, weeks before he died, my father talked only about whatever was right in front of him. My bright shirt. His painful dentures. How cold he was. He was always cold now.

He told my older brother Steve he knew he would die soon. Steve asked how he’d like to be remembered.

“Just forget about me as soon as possible,” he said.

The night my father died, I followed some of his advice: I poured a Scotch with one ice cube and smoked a cigar without inhaling.

But I also disobeyed him and started this essay.

Don’t be an idiot, I guess.

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This feels like the right song to end on.