“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and that he likes Bob Dylan and that he will open doors for me? Why not?

Between the time I met my late husband and the time he died twenty-four years later, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online.  Online was made for me, my best friends said. It would be fun, they said, a place where I could easily reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been once upon a time in that time before smart phones and texts and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I  could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind pictures that only showed my good side, dodge questions with cryptic clues about what I did for a living or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, I could easily filter out those men whose online versions of themselves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who couldn’t care less if I was as comfortable in blue jeans as I was a little black dress but who cared a whole lot – thanks be to God – about the Oxford comma and when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’  I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having possibly evolved from her famous Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I arrived in the United States. My next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.

Fictional Sally, I subsequently learned, was an extension of the real Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. This, I understand.  I know there are committed to the memories of more than a handful of waiters, “yvonne specials,” dishes not on menus across Arizona and here in Mexico – avocado toast without the toast  kind of thing. “On the side is a very big thing for me.”

While most of us remember Sally most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, for me she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who still shows up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she tells me, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right.

When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday,” Sally is barely thirty, sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride, dear reader, to confess here that I carried in my wallet, for several years – by several years, I mean a decade – a page ripped from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s haircuts. I had hit the mother lode  For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Turin shroud and coaxed them into giving me one – any one – of those Meg Ryan hairdos. Not until I turned 50-ish, did any one of them ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless of course the late Nora Ephron is writing it.

I remember when 40 was an impossible eternity away from 20. It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.”

I’m gonna be 60 . . . one day. Soon. How soon? 57 days from today. I’m not counting. Not really. But maybe it’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself. I’ll call them “alternative facts.” Some are minor. In no particular order: I don’t have sensible hair, and until four years ago, spent a fortune coloring it, highlighting bits of it, and trying to tame it; I’m mildly preoccupied with fonts and signage. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t – if I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I think twice before entering it. Comic Sans on letters home from school forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I didn’t find out until after forty years of driving that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the “E” light comes on.  I don’t like Les Miserables – I don’t. I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version;  and, I don’t like Coldplay.  Although it subjects me to lots of criticism from some of my Facebook friends every Christmas time,  love Love Actually. I actually do. A music major, I have no interest in the opera. I don’t really like ballet either, although I once took my daughter to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas because all the other mothers were doing it. Mind you, I love that one scene from Shawshank Redemption. I know you know the one. Andy Dufresne walks into the Warden’s office and plays a recording of Duettino “Sull’aria” across the main speakers to the entire prison, and Morgan Freeman’s Red says:

To this day, I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are left best unsaid. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free.

I resent the aging process and the way it sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once upon a time, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a bottle of shampoo. Now, I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I found in a restaurant, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t great, which I would rather blame on over forty years of concert-going than something as graceless as aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you breast cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much more confident about going places today.  To be fair, if I have been somewhere at least eight times – like the mall in Guadalajara –  I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I still lean on Google maps, Siri, somebody reading directions from the phone that is smarter than all of us, and friends who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they are often already waiting.

Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and more patient – with myself and others. Those who know me best will attest that I have yet to reach a level of proficiency in either area. You see, the circumstances around my husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty and made me cautious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. At the end of the day, it’s about survival and control and choosing your words – and your friends – carefully.

But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? I’m sure even Nora Ephron wouldn’t have described herself the way she was characterized in her son’s documentary – “with a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your resume – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés or divulging your home address. You also have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.

So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status, while taking some liberties with other details like natural hair color and frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was Resume Writing 101. My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. I also excel at the long game. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.

About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone or in a nunnery, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.

“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”

Why not?

I took a chance.

I. Took. A. Chance.

#ITookAChance

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who deemed his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all the protocols. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.

Box checked.

He said he worked out every day. Of course he did. Doesn’t everyone?  And, no religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention.

Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be under five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – and maybe he went to the gym three times a day.  Cynical? Moi? Let me tell you that in the course of this adventure, I had discovered more than a few men in the land of online dating, claiming to live in the Arizona desert – but who also enjoyed moonlit walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would even remember my name, and anticipated instead the possibility of being number five or six in what I had learned was ‘the dating rotation.’

It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 – around 5 – at a well-lit bar.  Lighting is everything. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closet from the 1980s.  It was also a good hair day, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beach-y highlights (just in case a moonlit walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I know I was probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley from the photograph was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was promising.

Onward.

He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies.  Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.

Over beers and banter, we sized each other up, and we over-shared, validating the boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – he was a musician after all, although to be fair, not a drummer – I was also smitten.

That bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you a nice tip.

Having read and memorized the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew the second bar was yet another red flag. First dates that are too long or that turn into second dates on the same night are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and hundreds of nights since.

A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match  or subsequently updating our relationship as  ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.  Although, deciding to start a new life together in Mexico at the same time as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency was not on our 2020 Bingo card.

As for the rest of the story?  Well, the rest of the story is for me. And for him, as Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:

‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.

P.S. I once asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He said he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I told him there’s a song in there. And even though we don’t always hit the right notes, we’re still singing it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.