I think it can still be done at 75

I found my book-of-the-month for May — “29” by Adena Halpern (2010, Simon & Schuster, 267 pages) — last weekend in Lubbock on a $4.95 discount table at the South Plains Mall.

Ellie, a 75-year-old widow in Philadelphia, still feels young-at-heart and identifies more with her 25-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, than her 55-year-old daughter, Barbara.

Ellie married her high-powered-lawyer husband, Howard, when he was 29 and she was 19. Although he was a good provider and she never had to work, getting married for security rather than love was what women of her generation did.

When Ellie was 73, Howard — who had cheated on her several times — passed away from a heart attack (falling face-first into coleslaw during dinner at a restaurant).

As a joke, during Ellie’s 75th birthday party only 29 candles are placed on her cake. She makes a secret wish to be 29 again for one day.

When she awakes the next morning, her wish has come true.

Lucy comes over, and Ellie finally convinces her she’s her grandmother in a 29-year-old body. They have always been close, and now look strikingly similar.

Pretending to be cousins, they go out for the day and night, with Ellie planning on doing all the things she missed out on in her 20s.

Meanwhile, Barbara and Frida, Ellie’s 75-year-old best friend, are frantic about Ellie’s whereabouts — reporting her disappearance to the police, and searching everywhere for her.

During the day, Ellie meets Zachary, a friend of Lucy’s boyfriend. Zachary is worth $50 million from creating a personalized fashion website.

During their short time together, Ellie and Zachary discover the kind of true love Ellie never had with Howard.

But when Ellie wakes the next morning as a 75-year-old woman again, she sneaks home before Zachary sees her. Zachary is brokenhearted, but the older Ellie eventually explains to him that the young woman he fell in love with had to leave town to return to her former life.

On her 76th birthday, Ellie contemplates what she learned from her magical day.

She realizes her marriage with Howard was not perfect, but it worked and brought her daughter and granddaughter into her life.

She decides she would not go back to being 29 if it meant missing out on her life with Barbara, Frida and Lucy — all whom learned to live life more fully through Ellie’s experience.

“The truth is this: in my life, I did the best I could,” Ellie narrates. “Are there regrets? Sure, there’re always regrets, but there’re a lot of truly wonderful things that outweigh the regrets.

“If you look back at that one day I got to have … I did everything I always wanted to do … I got to learn new things, to see the world in a (new) way.

“If there’s anything I learned, it’s that I can still do all of those things — even at 76.”

Contact Wendel Sloan at:

[email protected]