Chapter Fourteen: Meet Your New Life

My Name Is...........

People know me now as someone who talks to everyone.

If you’ve walked around Seaside or anywhere along 30A with me for more than about fifteen minutes, you’ve probably seen it. I stop people. I ask questions. I make jokes that sometimes land and sometimes do not. I say things that occasionally put my foot squarely in my mouth.

But there is always a reason.

It isn’t because I don’t care. In truth it is the opposite. I care more than I once did, and somewhere along the way I stopped worrying so much about whether a conversation was perfectly polished or socially correct. Life has a way of sanding those edges off you when you go through something that rearranges your understanding of time.

So I talk to people.

I always did, even before Brenda died. It was part of my nature. But after she was gone, something about that instinct changed. I began sensing something in people — something that is hard to describe but easy to recognize once you’ve seen it enough.

Pain.

Or the echo of it.

You start to notice that people’s lives orbit around invisible centers. Everyone is moving through their own private gravity well. Illness. Loss. Fear. Joy. Hope. Sometimes all of it at once. And when those orbits cross, even briefly, you can feel it.

Years later — 2025 to be exact — I would meet someone named Emily during one of those moments. I approached her the way I approach most people: a little direct, a little playful, probably a bit too forward if you didn’t know me yet.

“Who are you?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you around here before.”

She wasn’t having it.

She fired right back at me, matching the tone and then some. To her it probably sounded abrupt, maybe even rude. To the people who already knew me it was just Richard being Richard.

But later, when we had a quieter moment and I apologized for my approach, something else surfaced. We realized we shared a thread of life that neither of us had known about when we first crossed paths.

That’s how people come together.

Not through polished introductions or carefully constructed networking conversations. Through shared gravity. Through the recognition that somewhere along the way both of you had been through something that rearranged your understanding of the world.

Sometimes that happens because Richard is simply being Richard. Occasionally that means a foot in the mouth before the introduction is finished. But intention tends to reveal itself eventually.

But I didn’t know any of that yet in 2014.

In late October of that year I returned to Memphis one final time.

The apartment lease ran until October 31, 2014. I had left it behind in the fog of Brenda’s death, but eventually there comes a moment when unfinished chapters have to be closed. So I rented a U-Haul, packed what remained of that life, and began the drive back to Florida.

Witches and Goblins and me on the road.

That drive was surreal.

When you drive long distances alone, music has a way of becoming a narrator. Songs from other parts of your life surface unexpectedly, and suddenly lyrics you’ve heard a thousand times carry entirely different meaning.

“Two Tickets to Paradise.”

“Color My World.”

The soundtrack of earlier years played through the speakers while the miles passed beneath the Highlander. And for the first time since Brenda died I felt something unfamiliar creeping into the edges of my mind.

Not happiness.

Not relief.

Something quieter.

Possibility.

I was not going back and forth anymore. Memphis was behind me. The triangle that had defined our life — Memphis, Nashville, Florida — had collapsed into a single point.

Florida.

My new life.

You can only see the pattern looking backward, of course. At the time it just felt like a long drive and an ending that needed to be completed.

But I remember at least one day that followed as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

Only looking back.

November 14, 2014.

It was a Friday afternoon. Probably around three or four o’clock. I walked into Seaside from the house in Sugarwood for what I assumed would be another ordinary afternoon. At the time the old Amavida location still stood where a jewelry shop sits now beside Pickles.

I walked inside and took my place in line.

This was my habit even then. I would joke with whoever happened to be nearby. A man in a Tennessee Volunteers cap might hear something like:

“So how about that football dynasty Arkansas gave us on that fumble?”

Translation: a little harmless jab, an invitation for the other person to play along.

Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t.

But that afternoon there was someone standing in front of me in line.

A woman.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

She had clearly been watching my antics with the other people in line and was not particularly impressed.

“I live here,” she said. “In Panama City Beach.”

A few barbs went back and forth between us. Before long we found ourselves sitting outside at one of the tables with coffee, me continuing my usual routine and her giving me what can only be described as a sustained stink eye while somehow tolerating my presence.

Eventually the conversation settled.

We introduced ourselves properly.

And in that moment I told a complete stranger something that would have seemed impossible for me to say just weeks earlier. Many would say, “Ok… bye now.”

“My wife died last month,” I said. “After four and a half years of illness. I’m just trying to stay in life and be out there.”

That was the truth.

Only a few weeks earlier I had been close to disappearing entirely inside that house in Sugarwood. The week of moss and opioids had brought me within reach of becoming Brooks.

But the voice had pulled me back. Now I was Red, riding the bus into a life I did not yet understand.

The woman across the table listened carefully. She was a nurse practitioner, and she responded with the kind of quiet empathy that only someone in that profession seems able to offer without making it feel like pity.

Her name was Cynthia Gayle Adams.

I did not know it that afternoon, but four years later she would become my wife.At the time, however, none of that existed. We finished our coffee.

“Well,” she said, “maybe I’ll call you sometime. We can get you over to Rosemary to play some tennis or something with the guys.” It sounded simple enough. Just a stranger offering another stranger a small bridge back into the world.

And that is exactly what it was.

A few days later she called again.

My birthday was approaching, and some friends had been encouraging me to host a small dinner at the house. I had decided to cook Lebanese food, which is not a casual undertaking. Anyone who has ever rolled grape leaves or made kibbeh from scratch knows it can take the better part of a day.

When she heard about that plan she offered to stop by and help.

Whether she thought I needed assistance or simply wanted to see if I was serious about the cooking, I never asked.

She came by that day.

In truth she mostly watched. Lebanese cooking is something of a production, and there was not much room for helpers once the process started. We talked while I worked — rolling grape leaves, shaping kibbeh, preparing the dishes that would soon fill the table.

I do not remember anything of the banter. There was no grand moment. No sudden realization. Just conversation between two people who had met a few days earlier over coffee in Seaside.

When she left I shook her hand and thanked her for coming by.

The dinner party happened the following evening.

A couple of days later she called again.

“Your birthday is coming up,” she said. “Let me take you to dinner.”

I don’t believe either of us thought of it as a date at the time. But looking back, of course it was. She came by the house and we drove to The Vue restaurant.

It was Tuesday, November 25, 2014.

The day I turned fifty-two.

The universe had told me earlier that year in a dream that I would be alone at fifty-one. And it was right. It never told me I would meet my next chapter by fifty-two.

Brenda had died before I turned fifty-two. But on the evening of that birthday dinner something else had quietly arrived.

Hope in all its glory.

I just didn’t know it yet. I was getting there on my own. I was open to life a bit.

Looking back now I can see something that was invisible at the time.

I thought I was just beginning to rebuild my life.

What I didn’t realize was this:

The bus had already arrived in Zihuatanejo.