The Dating Game at 75 and Other Asides
Since divorced almost a year now, I have dated a bevy of at least 15 to 20 women, some divorced, some recently widowed, all reasonably attractive and appealing, in one way or another and some relatively normal. One immediately stands out because she was a hoarder. It took me two days to come to my senses and to flee, lest she mount me to the wall as a new collectible. I will not divulge too much of our sexual encounter except to say it also involved her dog, my mistakenly assuming his nubby hair for her mons pubis in the apocalyptic darkness.The horror! the horror! Ironically she was a nurse who worked professionally in the sterile climate of a hospital, yet at home wallowed in her sty. Another Nevadan native, with breasts the size of walnuts, proclaimed over dinner, like a demented Annie Hall, that she was especially feeling free because she had no bra on. If I had leaned over and took a feel, I imagine it would be much like grabbing a car radio button — volume, perhaps.
One woman, it was revealed, was a fanatic Republican, Trump no doubt, who told me that in a few months hence she would be absent and that I could not contact her because she became totally consumed politicking. Ah, conditions. Another woman, a diva of a kind, so grabbed my attention — and heart, for an intense month in which I felt I had met the One only to call me after a weekend of love-making in a late night call that she had “issues” (never shared); that I was a “gem” but it was over and dispensed with me, threw me under the bus. It took a few weeks to reanimate myself. Parenthetically, she was a therapist.
Concerned about the “loss” of so many women, Jewish and non-Jewish, I asked my woman therapist if I was sending out something untoward or lacking in something. She saw no pattern, but in essence I was in the land of Ditzy-ville riding the anomie flue in Orlando.
One lovely woman, D. wanted a friendship. I wanted a relationship at this time in my life. We parted tenderly as friends. And I think of her, from time to time, fondly. My age and the difference between our ages was in a way, for her, somewhat insurmountable. I always felt there was something else and she was holding back, a pending question I did not ask. I shared the anecdote of Bacall, Bogie and Lorrie. Asking Lorrie to help her to decide about marrying, she was nineteen, I believe, and Bogie so many years older, Lorre used his Jewish European sensibility and advised Bacall to put away her misgivings. Be with Bogie and you may have five good years and you would be lucky — in other words, we are all “near death experiences.” In short, RISK!
Yet some women have concerns. Will I be widowed once again? Is he not a tad too old at 75 to be invested in living? How will he be in bed, Viagra heaven? Is his mind arthritic in terms of life? Of course, woman, you could drop dead at dawn.
I will reverse this. What does woman want? It is too generic, but it has a measure of truth to it. So I will tell you what I want.
–I want my t-shirt to read: “I require solace and repose.”
–I want my t-shirt to declare: “I make mistakes — all the time. . .Shoot me!”
–“Attention must be paid” is on my underwear waistband.
–My underwear declaims: “I am more than my genitalia.”
And the Eleventh Commandment reads: “Look at my face and you will discern who I really am. Voice and word deceive.”
I associate to the garbage trucks that relentlessly go to the dumps after a day of collection. In my truck there is no trash. It contains all the goodness I am capable of giving to another human being. It is the collection of a lifetime. The sadness is that my truck, unlike the others, can make no delivery –as yet — so like Sisyphus I just truck up the hill each and every day.
Sisyphus knew well that to arrive was nowhere as important as getting up each and every morning and slogging up the hill.
P.S. If you are a woman reading this, the address is mthsfreese@hotmail.com
