Tom Pontac is a quiet man. Not in ideas, but in demeanor. He kind of glides as he walks, and softly enunciates when he speaks.
Tall and lean, he looks like the marathon runner that he is.
But first impressions are deceiving. His ideas and philosophies speak loudly, eloquently, and to many different points. He has an excitement and enthusiasm for life that is hard to find in people many decades younger than he.
At 79, he exudes a feeling that the best is yet to come, if only you are aware enough to recognize the signs.
Pontac started paying attention to the signs nearly three decades ago when he asked himself two important questions:
Are you happy with your life?
Would it be OK if the rest of your life was like it is now?
When he answered no—in his mind—to both queries, he knew something had to give.
What gave first was his long-term marriage, and all the security that came with it.
He let go of his safety net and waited for what would come. When certain things didn’t come, he set about looking for them. First was a partner to share his future with.
“I wrote a personal ad, and the title was ‘Poet/Runner.’ I was looking for someone to share my life with and I still believed in love—even at age 60.”
He received many replies, including four that he deemed serious. A date at a gym with one of the women sealed his fate. “We spoke on the phone and agreed to meet. I’m not much of a drinker so bars were out and I’d had enough coffee to drown myself, so I suggested we meet at her gym or my gym,” Pontac said.
Suffice it to say, Pontac has been with the “love of his life” for nearly 20 years now. And he has accomplished much since this late-in-life coupling.
He spent 17 years attending Long Beach State University, racking up degrees and course credits like crazy. He also got the courage to publish a book he started writing in 1996, “Movies in a Minute.”
Pontac took the Top 100 movies as selected by the American Film Institute and decided to write a short poem about the essence of each one. He didn’t have the “courage,” he said, to publish the book until 2014. “Fear of rejection,” he explained.
The poems are short, some just a short page, but describe the movie in verse. For example, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” begins:
Nicholson is
At his best
Feathering his
Cuckoo’s nest
He rejects a
Prison gig
And selects
The psycho brig … ” (it goes on)
The author, who lives with his wife in Leisure World, can recite many of the movie poems by heart. He is fond of asking, “what’s your favorite movie?” and then reciting that film’s poem. But he remains a man with many diverse interests and a conversation with him can bounce back and forth from the Bible as literature to “the seasons of a man’s soul.”
He ends the interview with an astute observation from his 79 years on the planet: “A person’s life is shaped by the things they value. As you get older, things narrow down.”
Maybe—but not, it seems, in Pontac’s world.
