Helen of Dublin

My son Colby and I were having lunch the other day at the restaurant in Barney’s (It’s way overpriced but the food is good and it’s fun for celebrity spotting. We saw Bruce Springsteen there years ago and introduced ourselves. He was charming and friendly. But I digress.) The woman sitting next to us admired my bracelets, so we started chatting, as FOF women are wont to do. Her name is Helen and she was visiting from Dublin. We talked about unemployment in Ireland (it’s bad), whether people there care about the oil spill (they do) and about her favorite countries in Europe (Spain and Italy rank high on Helen’s list of faves.)

Helen is 61 and she recently retired from an insurance company after spending 38 years there. “I was offered a year’s pay so I decided to take it,” Helen told us. Now she’s reinventing herself as an artist. She was headed to Pearl Paints downtown to buy watercolors. We exchanged phone numbers and emails and I told her to join FOF and to send us some photos of her work. She said she would.

FOFs are the same the world over. Whether we live in Dublin or Detroit, we have the ability to take on new challenges with gusto. Not to mention we’re networkers par excellence.