by Marlene Hickey

Once upon a time . . . there lived a woman who believed she would never be single again. She’d married very young and could hardly remember a life when she wasn’t one half of a couple, but after 33 years of marriage and a few months notice, she found herself alone. I was that woman. The challenge for me during the first year of loneliness, despair and, finally, acceptance, was to somehow get through each day. I read books on widowhood, and many of the ideas mirrored what I was going through. One author wrote that the meaning of bereavement is that the love object is lost, and love without its object shrivels like a flower betrayed by an early frost. How can we live with-out love and its total commitment? In that author’s view, this loss explains the passionate grief of widowhood. Grief is a lament for the end of love. So it was perhaps inevitable that I should eventually begin to feel the need for male companionship again. I was in luck there, working as I did at a major amusement park where I was practically surrounded by men, many of them single.

His name was Mel. He worked as a security guard and would be described by teenagers now as a “hunk.” Whenever he was on duty, he stopped by my office to say hello and talk for awhile. I’d known him for a year when he asked me out for a drink, and I thought: Why not? As I put on my coat at the end of the day, I realized that after more than three decades, I was back in the dating game. I left my car at the park with the understanding that he would drop me off there in an hour or so. We drove to a nearby night club where we sat at an intimate little table in the smoke-filled, noisy room. He ordered a glass of wine for me and a mixed drink for himself from the friendly waitress. Since we had our place of employment in common, conversation flowed easily, albeit in louder than average voices because of the deafening music blasting our way from the small band.

He had a second drink, I switched to a Coke, and we talked some more. Finally I pled fatigue and cats to be fed so we stood up to leave, agreeing to go out to dinner the next time. That’s when he reached into his pocket for money to leave as a tip, and dropped into the server’s tray a small silver coin --- a tenth of a dollar --- one thin, lonely looking dime! I stared in shock at the single coin,
then raised my eyes to his to see if he was kidding around, but he merely said, “Shall we go?”

We had a few dates after that: a visit to a museum, a movie matinée at a neighborhood theatre that offered one dollar admission, and a picnic in the park on a quiet afternoon. Somehow, I wasn’t able to work up any real interest in him. That ten-cent tip had become an albatross in my mind.

A few weeks later, a fellow employee talked me into joining a walking club that hiked some nearby hills. While not actually a singles club, she assured me that lots of single men took part, and not a few hikers had found each other that way. It seemed silly to drive so far after work in order to walk, but I had nothing better going for me, so I gave it a try. On my second day, I found myself out of breath after a half-hour of climbing, and stopped to rest in a clearing. As I leaned against a low stone wall, one of my fellow walkers, John, stayed back to speak with me. After small talk about the weather and the difficulties of the preceding hill, he began to get more personal and started to talk about himself. Only himself. He didn’t ask anything about me or my life, and his conversation soon deteriorated into complaints about his ex-wife, what a witch she was, and how she had taken him for everything during the divorce. All I could think of was that he was proving what poor taste he had to marry her in the first place. I tried to decide on a polite way to leave this cozy little tête à tête, when he stopped talking and tipped his head back.
“Hey! Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” I asked.
“That kind of musky odor. It’s a wild smell.”
He sniffed the air again. “Yeah, definitely a wild smell. There must be a fox nearby, or a coyote. Maybe even a mountain lion.”

I straightened up and looked at him with renewed attention. He was speaking my language. But -- an animal lover? Him? Maybe I had misjudged the poor man. He might have hidden depths. A newly-formed bubble of interest took shape in my mind, but it burst with his next words.

“Man, I wish I had my shotgun with me right now. I’d hunt that sucker down. You should have seen this huge buck I brought down with just one shot two years ago when I . . .” But he had lost his audience. Mumbling something about finishing the climb, I was halfway up the steep hill before he finished his sentence.

For a few weeks I did see a lot of a guy named Mike. Did adults still use the term “going steady,” I wondered. I wasn’t sure, but I hated the word “boyfriend” at my age. Like most men I’d dated over the past year, he was younger than I, one of the occupational hazards of being a 52-year-old woman thrown back into the dating world. He’d been divorced two times and had moved back home with his mother. She helped him run the shop he owned and did his books for the business,so I
knew he depended on her for much of his livelihood. I just didn’t understand at first how dependent on her he really was. Mike often mentioned that his mother complained I was too old for him, and was upset that he never had dinner with her anymore. One evening right before our date, he said, “We can’t go out tonight. Mom said she’s fixing dinner for me and expects me home by seven o’clock. We’ll have to postpone until tomorrow. I’ll call you.”

Hmm, I thought. I’m all for honoring mothers, but a forty-year-old who can’t say no to his mom sounds like two episodes of a bad soap opera. I began to suspect there was ample reason for his previous marital breakups. When he called, I was busy and I stayed busy after that.

Sometimes when friends asked if I thought I would ever marry again, I always answered, “Only if I meet someone terribly rich or terribly intellectual.” Though I was joking, I actually had met a man in the latter category two years before, but he seemed as far out of reach as the red planet. To fill the long winter evenings after my husband’s death,, I had enrolled in some college classes, including a Philosophy course taught by an Irish professor. After I was no longer a student in his class, he and I still spoke occasionally. Knowing my son was studying to be a Lutheran pastor, he called now and then with questions such as “What did Martin Luther think of the Gospel of James?”

During that time, I continued the mad whirl of dating and waiting for the phone to ring. There came a July day, several months after I’d last spoken with him, when my professor phoned me again. This time he asked me to meet him for coffee at a nearby restaurant, at which time he suggested that maybe it was time for me to start calling him Denis instead of Dr. Hickey. The rest, as they say, is history (or herstory.)

The merry-go-round I was riding as a single was slowing down, the music becoming less frantic and more soothing. With Denis, I felt as if I had grasped the gold ring. Poetry flowed from this man’s lips like champagne from a silver goblet. Sounded like he had run through the Forest of Eloquence and bumped into every tree. He had all the characteristics that the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man of Oz had searched for: courage, a brain, and a heart. He, too, had been a searcher, longing to find the one person he could feel at one with, share laughter with, grow old with. My quest had been the same. Two years before we met, Denis had had his second book published, titled "Home from Exile." Twenty-four hundred years before that, Plato said, “When two people fall in love, each comes out of the loneliness of exile,” and this we had attained. We feel we have been together long enough now to safely predict that the end of the story will go something like this . . . And they lived happily ever after.