A Real Story

My daughter set up my OurTime profile in about ten minutes flat while I sat there protesting that I didn’t need a computerized boyfriend at my age. She picked a photo from my granddaughter’s graduation where I’m laughing at something off-camera, wrote a bio that made me sound far more interesting than I feel most days, and told me to just say yes to coffee if anyone decent messaged. Three days later a retired electrician named Gary asked if I wanted to meet at the Perkins off Route 9.

Gary spent forty straight minutes describing his ex-wife’s lasagna recipe and how nobody since had made it right. I drove home gripping the wheel and told my sister I was done, that I’d rather repaint the whole downstairs than sit through another date like that. She talked me into leaving the profile up for one more week, mostly so my daughter wouldn’t feel like she’d wasted her Saturday afternoon setting it up.

That week a man named Walter messaged asking, oddly specifically, whether I still grew tomatoes since my late husband’s garden photos were still up from an old profile picture my daughter had pulled from Facebook. Nobody had asked me about that garden in two years. We met at the same Perkins, and he brought a mason jar of his own heirloom seeds because he said a garden shouldn’t sit empty. I cried a little in the parking lot afterward, not from sadness, just from the strange relief of being seen.

Walter and I have been swapping seed catalogs and Sunday dinners for close to a year now. I still can’t crop a photo to save my life, but I’ve learned that on OurTime the good ones are worth wading through a few lasagna monologues to find.