COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
“For some people it’s a second career,”
she observes, explaining how reinvention
occurs. “For some people, it’s just a matter of
‘What can I do that would make the world a
better place?’ For others, it’s ‘What can I do
to express my creativity?’ ... You don’t need to
climb the ladder of success. Your goal may
not be paycheck-related or status-related—it
may be satisfaction-related and content-ment-related and about meaning and finding fulfillment. ”
F;o; Dalla; ;; Tuscan;
Bill and Patty Sutherland with Pauley in Tuscany f
ONE OF THE stories on Your Life
Calling featured Costco members Bill
and Patty Sutherland. High school sweet-
hearts Bill and Patty’s paths diverged; they
married other people and raised families.
After divorces, they found each other again.
Bill proposed on the first date.
“I’m the realist; he’s the romantic,” Patty
says. They’ve been married for 25 years.
“I had a really good business here in
Texas,” Bill explains. “I just was bored with it.
It was time to move on and go do something
else. As a college student, I spent a summer
DAVID YODER
in Europe, and I’ve always wanted to live there.” The couple traveled around,
fell in love with a storybook village in Tuscany and bought a house there for
use as a vacation home.
“One day we were coming back from Tuscany and had a couple of glasses of
wine too many, and couldn’t figure out why we were coming back to Dallas,” Bill
says. “So we just stayed over there.” They were in their early 50s.
“After we got there, in talking with each other, we started thinking we could
retire but just barely get by, and not have very much extra money,” recalls Bill,
“and [we] thought there was something we could do to make a little money.”
They created Tuscan Women Cook ( www.tuscanwomencook.com),
which offers weeklong explorations of indigenous cooking and cul-
ture in beautiful Tuscany.
“We talked to a shrink,” Bill recalls, “and he said, ‘What are
you running away from?’ And we said, ‘We’re not running away
from anything—we’re running toward something new.’ ”
Even Patty, the realist, has advice for anyone
with a dream, no matter what their age: “Go for
it! I’d rather regret what I did than regret
what I didn’t do.”—SF
The concept of reinventing oneself is not
a late discovery for Pauley.
“One of my revelations about reinvention
is how often what seems like a brand-new
idea goes way back,” she states. “I first used
the term ‘reinvention’ when I was 38 years old
and I was talking to 100-and-some young
women about to graduate from Radcliffe
College, and my message [was] already about
reinvention.”
That is Jane Pauley’s mission today: help-
ing people to find their path in life after the
age of 50.
“We can finish that 30-year standard
career trajectory and still be young and
healthy enough to start a whole new one,”
she points out.
When the revolving door that is broadcasting left her on the outside looking in,
