Besides working, eating and sleeping, those things we need to do, though we might not always enjoy them, I spend a lot of time doing Wordle, the NYT crossword, and learning Spanish on Duolingo. I wouldn’t consider this wasted time though. I feel like I’m exercising my mind a bit. Also I walk quite a bit to try and keep fit. So where do I really waste time? Two areas: driving to and from work. I spend approximately 3 hours each workday. 5 days a week, 250 days a year for 40 years. Do the math. Just kidding… I did it for you. 30,000 hours, about 3 1/2 years of my life. I also waste an inordinate amount of time looking for something to watch on a myriad of streaming services. I spend more time swiping through HBO, Disney, Hulu, Prime and Netflix than I actually spend watching actual shows. So many choices and nothing to watch.
Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?
There are several foods I will never eat again in this lifetime, precisely because I was force fed them as a child. Undoubtedly, they would instantly transport me back to long suppressed nightmares of being made to remain at the table until every last morsel had been consumed. In the breakfast category, it was the store brand rice puffs. It was sold in 5 gallon plastic bags as I recall, not even cardboard boxes. No matter how much sugar was added, it never tasted as good as Cap’n Crunch, which was maybe a once a year luxury. Runny scrambled eggs remind me of my father ineptly making breakfast once. I think my mother was in the hospital and he decided to scramble some eggs up, but they were still runny. He made us eat them nevertheless. I cannot eat eggs to this day unless they’re fully cooked. Occasionally, my mother would make liver and onions because my father liked it. The rest wait in horrible trepidation waiting for the plate of sliced organ to be placed before us and ordered to eat it up. Tuna fish casserole never went down cleanly either. It went against my rule that canned tuna fish should only be served as a sandwich and NEVER with noodles. Which brings us to the last one: macaroni and cheese. My mother would add a can of crushed tomatoes to the gunk and I just could not eat it. To this day, you can’t make me.
I want to feel the hot Egyptian sun along the Nile and see the great pyramids and sphinx; walk upon the marble of the Acropolis; gaze upon the Sacred Valley from the heights of Machu Picchu; confront the terra-cotta army in Shaanxi, China; ponder the grandeur of the Taj Mahal in Agra; be made small beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel, and pay homage at the beaches of Normandy.
A lot of people looked their best in their 20’s. Or maybe they peaked in high school. Sadly, some folks were fantastic look toddlers and then their cuteness faded. I was one of these. I was a terrible looking child. An okay looking adult, but I’m sixty now and I’ve aged into my looks. This just may be my decade. I hope so.
I’ve put off traveling until I retire, so that’s what I’m looking forward to the most. And I want to buy a house close to a beach. I’m sooo close to it now. I taste the salt on my tongue.
See part one here: :Mel: the Pipes Are Calling Despite Mel not being quite what I favor physically, her profile drew me towards her. This is not to say she was ugly, she certainly was not. She was an attractive woman, just not my type. Her hair looked salon styled, her fingernails manicured, her surroundings elegant. And I thought I was mature enough to see beyond my own particular visual cues. Keep in mind, I’m under no misapprehension that I am a Greek god walking amongst mere mortals less gifted in physical beauty. I am not. I am well into my middle years, a few extra pounds, and balding, but generally have a pleasant look about myself that some women like and some don’t. As I said, the bagpipes were enough of a draw. She was several years younger than me, but not, let us say, creepily so. On Plenty of Fish, either person can send a message right away and so I did.
We chatted on Plenty of Fish for awhile and eventually musical tastes entered the list of topics and I mentioned I was a big fan of ska music, particularly second wave. Second wave ska mostly originated in Great Britain, rather than its birthplace, Jamaica. Ska was a precursor to reggae music. I know there’s a whole musical formula to it, but I can’t explain it. Like pornography, which is defined by knowing it when you see it,I know ska when I hear it,I don’t know how I came across it in 1979-1980 suburban New Jersey, but I did. Just me. I was alone in my devotion for ska.I remember going out to buy my first Specials album, bringing it home and putting it on the turntable so my friends could listen to it too. Unfortunately, I was so unaware, I had bought a 38 Specials album and “HoldOn Loosely” bounced off the walls. So did the album shortly after I realized my mistake. Honestly, my friends were more likely to prefer 38 Special than the Specials. They really thought Eric Clapton was God. Meanwhile, I had my doubts and I had the Clash and the Special spinning on my turntable. I was an outlier, for sure.
When I mention ska as one of my favorite musical genres, no one ever says, “Oh yeah? Me too.” No, usually I get a blank expression (there’s an Easter egg) in return. When I told Mel, she said she had been in a ska band in her college years. There were even recordings of her band on Spotify. Lord! Bagpipes and ska. Was this fate lending love a hand or just all the cylinders lining up coincidentally?
Whatever it was, it was enough for me. I liked her look, I liked her musical tastes, I liked her banter. And after all, banter is all you have at first, besides looks. And looks are dependent on filters. She was smart. I could tell that right from our first exchanges. Like I said, she was several years younger than me, but she had managed to advance herself into an upper mid level position with a major tech giant. Her department handled company news and since the company was composed of tens of thousands employees worldwide, it was a pretty prestigious job, especially considering she was a musical theory major at university. She was whip smart. The world was her oyster and I was just a cracker.
I don’t have a super power, but I do have an above average power. I have one thing I do better than most people. I’m not one of the best; I’m not elite; I’m just this side of better than most, slightly better than let’s say 75% of the male population. I banter pretty well, especially in the written form. And quite a few women write well too, so we tend to get along famously. So with Mel, we messaged back and forth joyfully. We were like two odd shapes that had found our slots. I still had this blog linked to my dating app and she loved it. She read it and gave me pointers on how to make it better. If I made grammatical mistakes, she offered corrections. She said she liked my writing and encouraged me to write more. Wasn’t this basis enough for me to fall in love?
Not long into our conversation, I went away for several prearranged days at the New Jersey shore, made famous in the songs of Bruce Springsteen. We had not been on a date yet. We had not even talked with one another on the phone. I stay at my sister’s House on Long Beach island, a barrier strip betweenthe Atlantic Ocean and New Jersey proper. I went down with my son, but towards the end of the week he decided to go home, so I was looking at a weekend alone in a house at the beach. I told Mel all about it. “ I have thoughts about that,” she said. So do I, I told her.”What are your thoughts?” she asked. I was thinking you should come down and alleviate my loneliness. She said those were her thoughts too. She decided to come down. We had all the appropriate discussions: too early, I don’t know you well enough, I may not like you in person, etc. I said, Listen, come down. Have a glass of wine. Kiss me. There are empty rooms here with doors that lock. You’re welcome to your own decisions the whole night and I’ll respect them. You can say no at any point.
And she said, “And so can you.”
I liked that. I thought I was being a true gentleman, but she was saying, “No, you’re just being human.”
She came down. I met her in person for the first time I opened a bottle of wine and we drank it on a couch by open windows conveying the roar of the waves on the beach a couple of hundred yards away, She was everything her profile and messages promised: a good looking woman of intellect, humor and refinement. We spent the night together. It was lovely. We spent the next day on the beach…in sunshine.
“O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen and down the mountainside The summer’s gone and all the roses falling ‘Tis you, ’tis you must go and I must bide
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow Or all the valley’s hushed and white with snow ‘Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow O Danny boy, O Danny boy, I love you so”
Let me go back to my very early days of online dating, when I was still on Plenty of Fish. Actually, it was so early I had a link to my blog on my dating profile, so you could read my posts which were reflective of my recent (but not current) dating activities. I had built myself up a decent little audience at the time, but it was pointed out to me, people I knew in real life could find the blog and then pass it onto my children or siblings or parents. I had seen women who I knew during my swiping sessions. There was the divorced mother of one of my son’s friends, another went to the town pool. My son or daughter reading about my dating exploits was not a scenario I would’ve liked to have seen fulfilled. Before I ended the link, however, I connected with a woman named Mel.
Those first weeks and months of online dating were a heady, adventure for me. I had never had so much and, frankly, such easy access to women. For a while there, I was going on a few dates a week. I think I may even have arranged two dates on a single Saturday. Behind the curtain though, hidden from everyone’s view, was a woman named Pía. She entered the picture even earlier than Mel. She is a several post series by herself and remains in my life from those days to this, mostly peripherally now. The importance of Pía is that I was dreadfully in lust with her and just the slightest bit of encouragement from loving her. (This poem is about Pía The Rightest Wrong One) The thing about Pía was she was an expert at handling men in general and me in particular. For a brief moment, she considered falling in love with me, but quite quickly decided no. It took a considerable amount of time for me to get that memorandum. What i did do correctly, despite my all-consuming lust for her, was not just twiddle my thumbs waiting on Pía. I was out there dating hard. It was during those Wild West dating days, I found Mel.
Some of the details are fuzzy, this is over three years ago now, but I must have seen her profile on Plenty of Fish. The one thing I remember from that profile was that it included a picture of her playing a bagpipe in a marching band. I’m not going to say I love the bagpipes. That might be overselling the point a bit, but I’ve been known to stop everything to listen to the skirl of “Amazing Grace”. She was a handsome woman, with a broad brow and a square jaw. She didn’t look overweight, but still had an appearance of substance, if you will. She looked to be large breasted, but that’s not my thing, so held no great attraction for me that it might have for other red blooded American men. Her upper teeth had never seen the inside of an orthodontia office, which is apparently a British trait that she shared with her countrymen, as she was in fact British. I thought she was probably not my type, but the pipes, the pipes were calling.
So I sent her a message saying hello. And began a whirlwind romance, wherein our hero (me) is really the villain.
The Last First Kiss 