I started this week celebrating a birthday. Mine. Not like me to announce it in public or at all, but with so many social media websites updating people automatically, what's the point of hiding?
Then at the end of the week, I joined a "celebration" of the life of the man who owned the apartment I have rented for the last six years. He originally built it for his own father. The father died two years ago. Roman Fritsche died two weeks ago suddenly. A heart attack. He was 60.
In the photo above some of his employees gather outside a cafe near the church before the service. One of these women told me she had worked twenty seven years for Fritsche Reisen. Mr. Fritsche founded his travel agency 31 years ago. A small, successful company with a few dozen employees. The priest characterized Mr. Fritsche as a man with energy, humor, a love of life and travel, and a gourmet cook. He'd made 100s of trips in his life. I can attest to that as even my first inquiry call was returned from Spain. Later email replies from Asia, Egypt, the States.
My sunny apartment feels a little more forlorn for the loss, but I am stronger for the reminder that I'm writing my own story, also an entrepreneurial one. I hope in 30 years, someone might say with some happiness they started working with me in my business two decades ago. I would be way past normal retirement age for that to happen.
Then again, when you do something you enjoy and bring others into it, I call that living a happy, fulfilling life. Give me three decades, please...
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