A Real Story

My wife Carol died in March, and by October my daughter had made me an OurTime profile without asking, mostly because she was tired of me sitting in the recliner every night watching the same three Westerns. I fought her on it for two weeks. Then I figured, what’s the harm, and started scrolling through women my age on my iPad with the text size cranked up to where I could actually read the bios. Most of them said things like “looking for my best friend” and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just started messaging women who liked gardening because Carol had liked gardening and it felt like familiar ground.

The first three dates were disasters in small, forgettable ways. One woman spent forty minutes telling me about her hip replacement. Another one canceled twice and then showed up an hour late to a coffee shop that had already closed. I almost deleted the whole thing after that, sat in my car in the parking lot and thought, I’m 68, what am I doing here. But then Linda messaged me about a photo of my tomato plants, and we ended up talking on the phone for two hours that night about nothing in particular, just her late husband’s woodworking shop and my grandkids and how neither of us liked cilantro.

We’ve been seeing each other for five months now. She still can’t work the volume on her own phone and calls me to fix it, which I secretly love because it means she calls. Last week she taught me to make her husband’s old chili recipe, and I taught her how to use the camera on her phone so she could send her sister pictures of her garden. Nobody warned me that starting over at this age would feel this much like starting over the first time did, nervous and a little dumb and worth every bit of it.

If I could tell anyone my age one thing, it’s that the awkward part doesn’t last as long as you think it will, and neither does the loneliness, if you actually let someone in.