A Real Story

My wife Carol died fourteen months ago after thirty-one years, and I spent most of that first year eating dinner standing up at the kitchen counter because sitting at the table alone felt like a punishment. My daughter kept nagging me to try one of those senior dating sites, and I kept telling her no, absolutely not, I’m not seventy-year-old bachelor material. Then one Sunday I fell asleep in the recliner and woke up to find she’d made me a SilverSingles profile using a photo from my retirement party, the one where I’m holding a cake shaped like a lathe because I spent forty years as a machinist.

The first date the site matched me with was a woman who spent the entire lunch at Cracker Barrel talking about her ex-husband’s boat, and I drove home thinking this whole experiment was a mistake. But the second match was Diane, sixty-six, a retired school nurse who mentioned in her profile that she’d rather fix her own gutters than pay someone forty dollars an hour to do it. We met at a diner and ended up staying almost three hours because she wanted to know exactly how a lathe works and I hadn’t talked shop with anyone since I retired.

What surprised me wasn’t the falling for her part, which happened slow and quiet over about four months of Sunday breakfasts. It was realizing I didn’t have to explain grief to her — she’d lost her husband to a heart attack six years back and she just got it, the way some mornings you still reach for the other side of the bed out of habit. We’re not rushing into anything, no wedding bells, but she comes over Thursdays and helps me stain the birdhouses I’ve started building, and that’s more than I thought I’d have again at sixty-eight.