A Real Story

My husband Dave died in March, and by that October my daughter had set up an OurTime profile for me because, in her words, “Mom, you cannot spend another winter reorganizing the pantry.” I picked a photo from a work conference, wrote three sentences about liking crossword puzzles and hating small talk, and forgot about it for two weeks until a man named Roger messaged me asking if I’d ever been bass fishing on Lake Monroe.

I hadn’t. I’d never held a fishing rod in my life. But Roger was 61, recently retired from thirty years teaching high school shop class, and something about the way he described the smell of the lake at 6 a.m. made me say yes before I’d thought it through. He picked me up in a truck that still had a booster seat in the back from his grandkids, and our first stop, before the lake, was a bait shop that smelled like fish guts and stale coffee, where he taught me to scoop minnows into a bucket without shrieking.

I did shriek, twice, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on an overturned crate. We never actually caught anything worth keeping that morning, but we talked for four hours straight about his late wife, my late husband, his shop students, my thirty years as a hospital scheduler, and why neither of us had any interest in pretending to be someone we weren’t at this point in our lives. That was eleven months ago. Roger still can’t get me to bait my own hook, but I’ve learned to love a 6 a.m. lake, and neither of us has looked at another dating app since.