Breakfast at the Faded Men Cafe

This morning I am having breakfast at the Faded Men Cafe along with a room full of other men past their prime. Two decades ago these diners would have been at the office before sunrise or already on a red eye plane to engage in complicated affairs. Businesses they once helped build are now prospering without them. The noisy appreciation showered upon them at their respective farewell parties has subsided to faint memory.

For some success meant savings, investment, a ranch in South Texas, a lake house and expensive vacations. For others present circumstances mean that social security checks matter. For that group retirement required changes in lifestyle and brought worries about running out of money. Both types and those in between mix here at the Faded Men Cafe. It is not their financial statements that they have in common - it is the loss of power, purpose and collegiality that comes from meaningful work. These men were engineers, bankers, accountants, lawyers, teachers, coaches, business executives, government employees, office workers, preachers, doctors and contractors. They contributed to the greatest national economy ever to exist in a boomtown city. It was a rush. They created, treated, cured, built, invented, improved, devised, documented, lifted, and otherwise labored as the last of the Greatest Generation or the first of the Baby Boomers. They took serious risks, absorbed the lows and rode the highs for cumulative lifetimes of worthy living , but at high sacrifice. They got up early and came home late, missing a ball game here and a dance recital there. But they committed to their families as well as to their work.

But those days are mostly behind them. So they sleep late and dress too casually for their stature. Fishing shirts, baggy pants, sandals or thick soled walking shoes, a too shiny gimme hat. A t-shirt that is either enormous or way too tight over the gut. Yet, if I were to call these men to assemble around me I bet that we could form a new company of substance powered by hundreds of years of success in multiple fields. Talent that is now on the shelf but which still has a potential for good. Not in the hard charging manner of youth but with canny discretion, wisdom and the lost ethic of excellence.

Though well disguised my morning colleagues are the very bricks that made America strong and safe. We would do well to consider them as more than Faded Men.