“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”
It’s Father’s Day. It’s a big deal. In a recent survey, the National Retail Foundation found that 76 percent of Americans plan to celebrate today, Father’s Day. The celebration looks different for all of us. Scrolling through social media, my feed is already lit up with photos of fathers – including my own – all poignant reminders that my daughter has been without her dad for some of the biggest moments of her life, the moments that don’t happen on Father’s Day. It feels unfair. We can’t dodge it of course. On the one hand, we celebrate my dad, her grandfather – we’re grateful for the fatherly people in our lives. On the other, the day is a keen reminder – like every other day – that my daughter’s father is physically not here. The list of milestones continues to grow, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and Facebook memories. He has missed so much – her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America he had dreamed would be hers. He missed meeting her boyfriend, a gentle soul with hair as long as his used to be and a vinyl record collection and who studies archeology – the subject he once told me he would study in his next life. He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands – the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And, she missed him.
It was on our first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from home, had been teaching her to drive on what he considered the wrong side of the road. Watching from the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, he encouraged her to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s. Watching from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, I was transported from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me then and today of Seamus Heaney’s symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain
~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.
We are fit for it.
When I’m in Phoenix, she drives me to places I miss – to Target and the bookstore. One morning, as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park – the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite, ” the one where her father removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas – and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.
Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.
~ Nikki Giovanni
Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her note to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I am taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy – the color was irrelevant.
The pink bike had training wheels – “stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child. Stabilizers – my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold. Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson handily dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal.
Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” No wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.
But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage, a milestone. In our family’s story, it was A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and made a joke about how he had given her ma the Protestant discount. Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. We were not convinced and therefore had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .
Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only once and with only a few tears. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was riding a bike! Round and round the park, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and she, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum,” equipped for bicycle riding, for inevitable tumbles and the promise of a blue skies ahead. Just like her mother.
And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?
Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died the day before our 24th anniversary, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online. Online was made for me, my best friends said. It would be fun, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about where I lived, what I did for a living, or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could filter out men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was in a little black dress, but who cared a whole lot – thanks be to God – about the Oxford comma and when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re,’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.
Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with moxie and a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. This, I understand. I don’t remember when I last ordered a dish exactly as described on the menu. I make up for it by being a really good tipper.
“On the side is a very big thing for me.”
While most of us remember Sally most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.
When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. For several years – a decade – I carried in my wallet, a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s haircuts. I had hit the mother lode For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.
I remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20. It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans – and 70 was out of the question – definitely not the “new 50.”
And now I’m 60 . . . . but maybe it’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself. I’ll call them “alternative facts,” some of which are trivial. In no particular order: I don’t have sensible hair, and until five years ago, I spent a fortune coloring it, highlighting bits of it, and trying to tame it. I’m mildly preoccupied with signage. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t. If I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering. Comic Sans on letters home from school forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, but I still buy gas only after the “E” light comes on. I fell asleep during a performance of Les Mis and, I don’t like Coldplay. Seven years ago, I didn’t like the Dave Matthews Band either, but that changed this past weekend. More on that later.
Although it subjects me to lots of criticism and heated debate with some of my Facebook friends every Christmas, I love Love Actually. I do. I always will. I don’t like opera. A music major, I have pretended to like it and have sat in ‘the gods’ at the Opera House feigning interest in Don Giovanni and Madame Butterfly, but if cell phones had been invented I would have been on Facebook instead. I don’t really like ballet either. Yes, I took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” one Christmas but only because all the other mothers were doing it, and it was an excuse to dress up.
Having said all that negative stuff about opera, I still love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. I know you know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:
To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.
I’m not convinced I have accepted that I’m now over 60. I’m not sure I like it. I might even be a bit resentful of the aging process that sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a bottle of shampoo. Now, I can barely read the CNN ticker at the bottom of a big screen TV. I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I found in a restaurant, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t great, which I would rather blame on over forty years of concert-going than something as graceless as aging. Nora Ephron didn’t like it either.
I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyannaish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere—friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized …
My memory is unreliable too – thank you, breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not necessarily where I’m supposed to be later today. I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much more confident about going places today. If I have driven somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara – I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Siri and Waze and friends who consistently “bring me in” by phone to my destination – where they are often already waiting.
Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and gentler – with myself and others. Those who know me best – especially me – will attest that I’m not there yet. My husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty, making me cautious and anxious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. In the end, it’s about survival and control and choosing your words – and your friends – carefully. I suppose.
But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? Even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way her son characterized her in his documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except be cuter, avoiding clichés or divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.
So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was Resume Writing 101. My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I also excel at the long game. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.
About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not?
I took a chance.
I. Took. A. Chance.
#ITookAChance
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all protocol. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, non-smoking, music-loving musician. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll) and hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color. There was a picture of a Harley Davidson and a mention of integrity.
Box checked.
He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. No religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention. I ignored the part about the Dave Matthews Band.
Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be under five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. If this seems overly cynical, you should know that in the course of this adventure, I had discovered more than a few men in the land of online dating who claimed to live in the Arizona desert, but who also enjoyed moonlit walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would even remember my name, and anticipated instead the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’
It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 – around 5 – at a well-lit bar. Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closet from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights – a moonlit walk was maybe in the cards. Behind the highlights, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it for our first date, this was promising.
Onward.
He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.
Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all, although to be fair, not a drummer (apologies to all my drummer friends) – I was also smitten.
That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip.
Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed “more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy.” Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time. Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.
As for the rest of the story? Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:
‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.
P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it. We have built our wall.
P.P.S. This past Saturday night, we went to a concert at the beautiful Teatro Diana in Guadalajara. He never understood why I didn’t like the Dave Matthews Band. I don’t either.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?
Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died twenty-four years later, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online. Online was made for me, my best friends said. It would be fun, they said, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about what I did for a living or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could easily filter out those men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was a little black dress but who cared a whole lot – thanks be to God – about the Oxford comma and when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.
Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. This, I understand. I know there are committed to the memories of more than a handful of waiters, “yvonne specials,” dishes not on menus across Arizona and here in Mexico – avocado toast without the toast kind of thing. “On the side is a very big thing for me.”
While most of us remember Sally most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, for me she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.
When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride, dear reader, to confess here that I carried in my wallet, for several years – by several years, I mean a decade – a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s haircuts. I had hit the mother lode For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Turin shroud and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.
I remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20. It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.”
I’m gonna be 60 . . . one day. Soon. How soon? 57 days from today. I’m not counting. Not really. But maybe it’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself. I’ll call them “alternative facts.” Some are minor. In no particular order: I don’t have sensible hair, and until four years ago, spent a fortune coloring it, highlighting bits of it, and trying to tame it; I’m mildly preoccupied with fonts and signage. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t – if I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering it. Comic Sans on letters home from school forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the “E” light comes on. I don’t like Les Miserables – I don’t. I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version; and, I don’t like Coldplay. Although it subjects me to lots of criticism from some of my Facebook friends every Christmas time, love Love Actually. I actually do. A music major, I have no interest in the opera. I don’t really like ballet either, although I once took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas because all the other mothers were doing it. Mind you, I love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. I know you know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:
To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.
I resent the aging process and the way it sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once upon a time, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a bottle of shampoo. Now, I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I found in a restaurant, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t great, which I would rather blame on over forty years of concert-going than something as graceless as aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much more confident about going places today. To be fair, if I have been somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara – I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Google maps, Siri, somebody reading directions from the phone that is smarter than all of us, and friends who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they are often already waiting.
Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and more patient – with myself and others. Those who know me best will attest that I have yet to reach a level of proficiency in either area. You see, the circumstances around my husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty and made me cautious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. At the end of the day, it’s about survival and control and choosing your words – and your friends – carefully.
But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? I’m sure even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way she was characterized in her son’s documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés or divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.
So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was Resume Writing 101. My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I also excel at the long game. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.
About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not?
I took a chance.
I. Took. A. Chance.
#ITookAChance
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all the protocols. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.
Box checked.
He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. Doesn’t everyone? And, no religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention.
Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be under five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. Cynical? Moi? Let me tell you that in the course of this adventure, I had discovered more than a few men in the land of online dating, claiming to live in the Arizona desert – but who also enjoyed moonlit walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would even remember my name, and anticipated instead the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’
It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 – around 5 – at a well-lit bar. Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closet from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights (just in case a moonlit walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was promising.
Onward.
He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.
Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all, although to be fair, not a drummer – I was also smitten.
That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip.
Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time. Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.
As for the rest of the story? Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:
‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.
P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it.
Dangerous pavements… But this year I face the ice with my father’s stick ~ Seamus Heaney
On New Year’s Eve, two years ago, health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Since then – as we all now know – the virus spread to nearly every country, killing over 6.6 million people and decimating the world’s economies. Amid fireworks and countdowns on this last day of 2022, China is again battling a surge of infections nationwide, after it recently – and abruptly – rolled back the stringent zero-COVID policy it had in place for almost three years. There are widespread reports of overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes, of crematorium furnaces working around the clock with a cremation backlog. The COVID death toll released by China’s National Health Commission fails to show the severity of the current outbreak, stating that a country of 1.4 billion people has suffered only 5,237 COVID-related deaths during the pandemic. The country’s definition of a COVID death, counts only deaths resulting from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its reports. This explains the low numbers, and if we didn’t know better, it might also explain that the ruling Communist Party is on top of things. But we know better.
After ten months, war rages on in Ukraine. This New Year’s Eve, there is no end in sight. Russia, previously targeting Ukraine’s energy sector leaving millions without electricity in a bitterly cold winter, has intensified its attacks. On this last day of the year, it has launched 20 cruise missiles. bombing residential areas and civilians in the capital Kyiv, where many Ukrainians – despite the danger – have returned to be with their loved ones to ring in the new year. Defiant and determined that Russia will not rob them of this moment of hope, some of them haven’t seen each other since the invasion started in February.
Hope.
Hope is good for us.
Hope can change our lives.
Dr. Shane Lopez, senior scientist at Gallup, defines hope as
the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.
At midnight in New York city, wishes for 2023 from people all over the world will be added to the thousands of bits of confetti that flutter down in the heart of Times Square – a magical sight to behold. It is also a reminder that wishes don’t work. Hope works. And hope is hard work. It takes practice.
Wherever you are today, you might find yourself in an essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser, a timely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”
I’m ready to step into the club car, heading for a place called hope. There’s plenty of room.
Over beers and banter, we 
