Unscripted

Tin – Still it Shines.

“… Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.” ~ Seamus Heaney

I filled out the online dating profile the way I once filled out forms during breast cancer treatment – carefully, not quite believing I was describing myself at all.

Age. Location. Gender. The beginning of a version of myself I could scroll past.

Each field waited with bureaucratic calm, as if life had always been this sortable.

Widow.

I paused there longer than I expected to.

There was a dropdown menu for everything that could be reduced to a category. Smoking: yes, no, sometimes. Drinking: socially, never, often. Looking for: long-term relationship, casual dating, figuring it out.

Something like “figuring it out” felt like the only appropriate option.

There was no drop-down menu for the way language changes after loss, no box for how you learn to answer questions about yourself as if you are still in motion toward a clearer version of who you are becoming.

No space for that.

Just prompts asking me to reduce myself into something scrollable.

Favorite thing? The right word at the right time.

Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter.

I stared at the screen long enough to wonder when or how life had become so compartmentalized.

Committed to finishing the assignment, I kept going.

Height. Body type. Education. Political leaning.

Assumptions about how neatly a person could be packaged, as if identity arrived pre-edited.

I answered more or less honestly, although I’m not sure honesty was the point. In retrospect, the point had more to do with fit.

Filling out that profile, I began to understand what Joan Didion must have meant when she wrote that for years she saw herself through her husband’s eyes and therefore never really aged. Until he died. I got it. I thought I was still twenty-seven and that the rest of the world saw me as such.

The realization arrived quietly, which somehow made it worse.

The last time I’d been “out there” was in the ’80s – back when meeting someone meant running into a man at the pub on a Friday night, blissfully ignorant of his politics, deal-breakers, or the possible saga behind that tattoo on his forearm. Remember those days? He’d buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a couple of days later, and maybe you’d go see a movie together the following weekend. Slowly – almost imperceptibly -you became an “item,” and nobody felt the urge to announce it to the Internet.

Online, my girlfriends insisted, was made for me. It would be fun – a place where I could reintroduce myself as the single woman I had once been, back before smartphones and instant gratification. I could be equal parts brainy and breezy. I could hide behind photographs that only showed my good side, dodge questions with carefully curated ambiguity about where I lived or what I did for a living, and filter out men whose online selves disapproved of my politics, my hair, or my taste in music.

Better yet, I could seek out the ones who cared deeply about the Oxford comma and knew when to deploy “your” and “you’re.”

I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail, possibly evolved from her Sally, who had met Harry around the same time I arrived in America, both of us with questionable hair and impossible expectations.

My next chapter, they said, could be the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.

Or at the very least, a cautionary tale.

So it was with some awkwardness and reluctance that I built a dating profile. I answered the basics truthfully – age, politics, marital status. I took minor liberties with less legally binding categories like natural hair color and frequency of gym attendance. My best friend reminded me of what she considered my fluency in gray areas – knowing exactly how much to reveal and when to stop talking – and that I excel at the long game.

Emboldened, I milked it, offering deliberately unhelpful answers 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 online dating – or it abandoned me.

About a year later, after a stretch of offline dating that left me wondering whether my remaining years might be better spent alone or in a convent, I was convinced to take one more field trip online. I dutifully touched up my profile, uploaded a recent photograph in my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen, while also considering the relative peace of my golden years lived out in a nunnery.

Then a message popped up on my screen.

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

Ignoring the raised eyebrows and cautionary advice from online dating experts who considered his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. I broke all protocol. Without the usual protracted exchange of text messages, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon.

A quick study, I had already filed away the important bits: liberal, non-smoking, music-loving musician. I dismissed football – the American kind, for God’s sake – and golf (eye-roll), and hoped he meant it when he checked “no preference” on hair color. There was a conspicuously placed photograph of a Harley Davidson and a mention of integrity.

Box checked.

He said he worked out every day. No religion. No deal-breakers. He had my attention. I ignored the Dave Matthews Band reference. (I will tell you however that he was right about Dave Matthews. We would eventually go to see him play in Guadalajara years later).

Still, at the time disenchanted with dating – online and off – I expected Mr. Forward to be under five feet tall and ninety-five years old. Who knew if his photos were current, or whether he had built his profile on a foundation of invention? Maybe he didn’t even like Bob Dylan – a bona fide deal-breaker – or maybe he went to the gym three times a day.

If I sound cynical, let me just add that during this adventure I encountered more than a few men who claimed to live in the Arizona desert while also enjoying moonlit walks on the beach. I’m not joking.

Given all this, and what I had gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name. I fully anticipated that I would be number five or six in his rotation – a few too many bookmarked tabs still open on his browser.

It was a Monday. I sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at five-ish at a well-lit bar on 7th Street – Joe’s Midnight Run. The name was doing a lot of work for that time of day.

I wore the green shirt from my profile photo partly to prove the image hadn’t been taken in another century. There was no way he could know there are still clothes in my closet from the 1980s. I also wore flip-flops perhaps to stay approximately my own height. It was a really good hair day, Topher having redeemed himself with beachy highlights that made a moonlit walk suddenly seem at least theoretically possible. (Topher, all these years later, is still in Arizona and remains my long-distance hairdresser, which is its own ongoing arrangement. I send him random pictures of Meg Ryan’s haircuts, which he will no doubt recognize as the digital evolution of the magazine photos I used to bring into salons. Torn out of magazines. Crumpled at the bottom of my handbag for years..)

Behind the highlights, I was a mess, embroiled in a spectacular legal battle I was probably not supposed to discuss with anyone other than my attorney, although I think I told him all about it within the first five minutes.

The Harley from the dating site photograph was parked outside, silver steel catching the light like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it for the occasion, this felt promising.

Onward.

He was already at the bar when I arrived, and I watched him pretend not to watch me as I crossed the room.

Butterflies.

Even though I knew better than to expect anything, I had prepared myself for disappointment or deception. Instead, my instinct told me he wasn’t going to lie to me – and I wouldn’t lie to him.

Over beers and banter, we sized each other up and over-shared in those early you go first moments – the kind where things slip out that you might otherwise have kept back. He didn’t flinch at any of it. We both had histories we didn’t have to translate for each other, and we didn’t try.

He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. The important boxes checked and then quickly forgotten.

When the bar closed, we went to another – a proper dive where the light is low enough to forgive most things.

He put his quarter up and challenged the pool table.

Trick shots, easy confidence, chalk dust on his hands as if he’d always known his way around a room like this. The crack of the break, balls scattering across green felt, neon caught in the corners of the room.

Bob Seger again … after midnight on Main Street. The sense of standing just outside something that might become something else.

Because I had read the FAQ section of the dating site a few too many times, I knew this was probably already a problem. Second locations on first dates are considered a red flag. Too much, too soon. A premature sense of intimacy.

The experts would have had a field day.

But I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night. And the next. And, most nights after that, long after Joe’s Midnight Run had run its two-year course.

If it sounds like a match made in heaven, it’s not. In spite of algorithms and compatibility scores designed to reduce people to percentages, we built this match ourselves, in the messy collision of two complicated lives arriving at exactly the best and worst possible moment.

Life, as it turns out, has a way of not waiting for narrative approval.

By the time anyone might have called it otherwise, we were already elsewhere entirely. We moved to Mexico just as the world began to close.

No one had that on their 2020 bingo card.

During those strange, cloistered COVID years, when restaurants reopened cautiously and people sat six feet apart with hand sanitizer on every table, we resumed our musical life. At first it was practical – no full band, no crowded bars. Just the two of us, an acoustic guitar, and songs built more on story than spectacle.

Lyrics first. Always.

We sang the kind of songs that leave room for scars: Jackson Browne, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch. Songs where the words carry the feelings we all know rather than dress them up and call them something else.

Every so often, I would notice – and still do – when someone in the audience is singing along, eyes closed, somewhere private and far away. It’s a powerful moment, realizing you have wandered into someone else’s song.

In our duo days, there was the song that always sneaked into our set – Steve Earle’s “Goodbye.” Not flashy, not showy, but somehow ours.

It was mine before it was ours. Steve Earle’s 12th step in the key of C. It has that verse about November that still catches somewhere in my throat.

The first time Scott picked up a harmonica to play with me, it was on that song.

He knew exactly where to enter and where to leave room. I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing on my verse.

We still perform it – after disagreements, storms in teacups, or simply on days when we feel like letting the song carry us. The harmonies arrive as if they’ve always known the way back.

And maybe that is what these ten years have really been about.

Not perfection. Not compatibility scores on a dating site. Not a match made in heaven.

Just two people, a little battle-worn and slightly off-script, learning when to speak, when to stay quiet, and when to trust the music – and all the rest of it – to carry them through.

I once asked him why he had been so forward in that first message.

He said he thought the woman in the photograph was looking right at him.

I told him there was probably a song in that.

There was. There is.

We always find our way back into it.

Before I sat down to write this, I looked up what a tenth anniversary is supposed to be. It’s tin. Or aluminum. Depending on which list you consult.

Practical and pliable, tin is an ordinary metal, easy to overlook. Then one day, there it is quietly holding the shape of things. Over time, you notice it has picked up a quiet luster, a gleam – not from polish, but from use.

Not something that belongs in a Tiffany box, and yet …

Pressed, bent, dented in places, it still catches the light.

Which feels about right.

Ten years on. Still shining.