Chapter 1: The Mating Habits of the Mature

Jim’s Story

Suddenly, I’m single. I’ll probably never stop grieving the loss of Diane, but I’d committed to myself, my son and daughter, and my best friend Bruce to get my head out of my ass, as the latter called it, and to start to enjoy the world again.

I’m very left brain – analytical, logical. I was a systems engineer for NASA, and segued into middle and then upper management, but always with large, multi-million-dollar technical aerospace projects. I guess I was good at my job and we lived frugally, and made some wise investments, so Diane and I ended up able to retire when we were both fifty-five. We moved from Washington, where I ended my NASA career, to Sarasota, Florida, bought a nice house near the beach with a fabulous view of the city’s marina, and settled into a new lifestyle.

Diane had been a schoolteacher. She taught eighth-grade social studies in a suburban school. She was good at her job, too, and also took on some administrative duties that justified a pay raise. Four years ago, Diane found a lump in a breast, and that led to what turned out to be a never-ending series of visits to various doctors, hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centers, and eventually a hospice center, and then Diane was no more of this world.

We were married for thirty-six years, birthed two kids in that time, and raised and launched them – Josh and Carolyn. They’d both married, still lived in Virginia, and graced us with two grandchildren – one apiece, so far. The grandchildren had never met Diane.

Bruce asked me to write about ‘my situation’ as he called it – my story, and the first couple of tries I made read like a report on a replacement software system for a Mars’ mission. I’ve made an attempt in this version to be a little more humanistic instead of instructional, such as ‘put left thumb in right ear’.

I did not take to my early retirement as well as I thought I would. I was restless. I tried a whole string of hobbies and athletic endeavors: golf, tennis, bike riding, fishing, wind surfing, kayaking, painting, piano, and there are another dozen others that I could list. In parallel, there were a dozen charitable groups that I volunteered for: Habitat for Humanity, United Way, Red Cross, Head Start, SCORE, and Boys Club, to name a few. This attempt at being an author is also part of this story thanks to Bruce.

Why did I leap from hobby to hobby? At first, I was looking for my niche, and something that was satisfying and that contributed in some way to society. I took classes, went to many lectures and meetings, mentored others and got mentored, and slowly I realized I was trying to reestablish all my old office routines and schedules with new activities and under new banners. Bruce told me I was a ‘retirement failure’.

Diane’s illness pulled me out of my ‘retirement failure’, although I seemed to be productive and having fun at the other stuff, I devoted myself to her, and that wasn’t hard. I’d been doing that for almost forty years since our first date. I became almost more involved in her cancer and treatments than she was. I knew more, learned more, and talked to more people. I wanted to be sure we left no stone unturned. I don’t think we did, and the result was that we milked two extra years from the Grim Reaper after her first prognosis.

Diane tried to make her death ‘festive’. She insisted we all celebrate her life instead of mourn her death. We tried, but with tears in our eyes. When we shifted to palliative care, our kids came down, and a steady stream of friends and neighbors poured through our doorway to offer support and eventually condolences after Diane slipped away. My friend Bruce and his wife Mindy became my mainstay. I cried a lot, they held me, and then got me somewhat whole again, and back up and running on my own. We had a celebration of life party, and many of our friends and I waxed eloquent about the high points in our memories of Diane. I laughed and cried the day was so special. After that I felt so empty.

I cried myself to sleep for a month and then slowly got over the pain of loss. At first, I couldn’t even believe that she was gone. I’d go to the kitchen expecting to see her puttering around making breakfast or cleaning up some dishes from the night before, but she wasn’t there. After that, I got mad at her for leaving me, and then mad at the doctors who seemed impotent in what they could do for her. After that stage, resignation set in.

Mindy struck fear into my heart while I was having dinner with them with one simple sentence, “Jim, I think it’s time you started to date again. Diane made me promise to get you back on the circuit, and ... it’s time. Come on, three years have passed and you’ve done nothing but your charity work and mope around the house.”

I sputtered and spit around for a week thinking about that possibility. I tried to visualize ‘dating’ at sixty.

In one daydream I hang out at the local ‘meat market’ where I’ve seen attractive younger women. Several of them dance with me, and eventually I invite one of them to come back to the house. She does, and we start a torrid romance. The romance turns to a sudden pregnancy, and, oh my god, I face another twenty years of diapers and child-raising. I’d be eighty with a kid in college. I am not a ‘hang-out-in-bars’ kind of guy.

In yet another daydream, I decided to start to attend church again. This dream turned on me. Instead of hot, young women, I am suddenly surrounded by dozens of gray-haired women – all from the quilting circle. They vie for my attention, but elderly thinking, plump or even obese in form, and vapid in intellect, I find myself in a little shop of horrors. I also am not a ‘churchy’ kind of guy.

I kept waiting for a rational daydream to arrive, but none ever appeared to me. My ‘visions’ were really nightmares materialized in the daylight hours. I didn’t allow any of them to haunt me.

Edie’s Story

Two years before our planned retirement Harry, my husband, had a massive heart attack in his sleep. One minute he was there, and the next gone to a funeral home on a gurney as I stood in a bathrobe and watched two men from the funeral home take him away forever. I missed him, but in a way felt glad I didn’t have to suffer his long retirement. Harry had been a perfectionist, and I knew that as soon as he started to spend a lot of time around the house instead of with his consulting clients, I’d become the focus of his assessments, and time and motion studies. He’d have an unlimited number of recommendations for me about improving the laundry, cooking, arranging my closet, consolidating my shopping trips to save energy, and more and more. That was what Harry did. Somehow, I’d managed to keep him out of the business division that I ran for a modeling agency.

Thus, I found myself at age fifty-five single, yet with many friends – many of them divorced females. Since I wasn’t divorced, I didn’t have the bitter, anti-men, love ‘em and leave ‘em mentality most of them had. I’d had a reasonably happy almost thirty-year marriage, and figured I’d used up my allotment of happy times with a member of the opposite sex.

Harry had been not only a good provider, but also had often referred to himself as ‘over insured’. Thus, as a widow I was suddenly the beneficiary of a small fortune. I would never have to worry about money again, and neither would our son and daughter. Penny worked in publishing in Chicago. Mark was career military and was stationed in Germany, and was in and out of the Middle East frequently. He liked it over there, and even had a German girlfriend.

I stopped working only a few months before I’d planned to stop anyway. I’d been in charge of running a branch of an international modeling agency. The older I got, the younger the girls we represented appeared. I was always amazed when one of them told me she had trouble parking her car; I couldn’t believe she was old enough to drive.

Once I’d been in their shoes, enjoying the travel and being the center of attention as I modeled various lines of clothing or just my own skin. I’d started in my teens, and then even competed in a few beauty queen contests, ending up winning a few major contests in the region. Those efforts were a natural segue into a modeling career. The industry changed so much over the years. For a while I did some modeling when I wasn’t running part of an office, but then I eventually opted to work on the business development and placement side of the business instead of being a model. I started that transition in my late-twenties, and despite that I often did some ‘gig’ to keep my hand in the ‘front-end’ of the business. I think I was really an exhibitionist.

Despite having ‘retired’, I saw men friends – most always the husbands of some of my married friends and neighbors when I got invited to a dinner party, but I had no inner voice telling me I was an incomplete person without a man permanently in my life. I was still able to hold my own in mixed company, and enjoyed the diversity in my circle. In fact, I found it odd that the women that felt needy for a man appeared to be all my divorced friends, who opined hourly about their lack of male companionship. They often wondered why I didn’t feel the same way. Of course, two minutes later they’d be bashing their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends and then generalizing to all men. If I’d been a male in their presence, I would have run the other way at top speed.

My friend Rita Styles and I had coffee at Starbucks late one morning. She was married to a really nice man, Hank, and happened to be the smartest woman I knew. He was pretty hunky, too. I guessed her IQ had to be well into the genius range. Rita could have been a model, except she started a computer programming business and made some real dough in her career, particularly when she sold the business she’d formed.

Rita said, “Edie, you are a gorgeous woman, and I know you’ve become fiercely independent since Harry died; however, I think you should think about going out on some dates ... and I don’t mean with your divorced friends hanging around either.”

I laughed, “Why would I want to do that? I gave up dating when I fell in love with Harry. I let him get into my panties back then, and from what I hear from the girls that’s what the guys still want to do despite being thirty years older. You know Harry and I were trying to reverse having a stale sex life.”

Rita smiled. “The men still want sex, and if they’re good, you know it’s worth the effort. Whether you have sex or not is beside the point – well, sort of. You, my dear friend, are becoming very insulated in your thinking and in your social life. You may have regained your mental virginity, but I think it’s time for you to lose it again.”

“I’ll think about it.” That was my standard passive-aggressive response to things I didn’t want to do. I had no desire to think about finding a mate of any nature, but the response would hopefully satisfy Rita.

It didn’t.

Rita said, “Oh, good. I’ll think about it too, and maybe we can come up with a plan.”

Bruce didn’t ask, he informed me over a beer in his backyard that I had a command performance for dinner at their home on Saturday evening. He said, “Look Jim, Mindy has this friend Rita, and she has this widow friend named Edie who apparently is a knock-out, and they’ve cooked up this dinner so you and Edie can meet. Rita and Hank are coming too, but you and Edie are the main attraction. If I don’t deliver you to the table, Mindy told me I was cut off for two years; come on, man, you’ve gotta help me out by coming.”

I feigned, “I feel a heavy dose of the Asian flu coming on.” I felt my forehead.

“You have to. This is what we were talking to you about weeks ago. You’ve got to start dating.”

“I don’t even know this Edie person. What will I say to her? What if she ... I don’t know ... expects something to happen? Does she even have a brain in her head?”

“Jim, buddy, just roll with the evening. There’s no preconceived notion about how things will end.”

“What do you know about this Edie person?”

Bruce smiled. “I’ve not met her, but Mindy had Rita on the speaker phone when she was being described, so I listened in. I am ready to ditch Mindy for Edie if you don’t take the bait.”

I gestured for him to be forthcoming with lots of information.

Bruce said, “She’s apparently a walking dream – even for someone in your age bracket. She’s late fifties, blonde, won the Miss Iowa beauty contest way back, was a fashion and bathing suit model, but then retired when her husband died two years ago. She hasn’t been serious with anyone since – long-term marriage, two kids, etcetera, etcetera. Rita said she was still gorgeous. I gathered she’s financially independent too, so she’s not looking for a sugar daddy.”

I stepped back, “Oh, my god, you’re setting me up with a model – a fucking model. Miss Iowa? I’m just a plain Joe. I’m not worthy of a model or beauty queen. Is she a ditz? Was she a trophy wife?”

“No, she’s apparently a skilled business woman and now, like you, spends part of her time working with local charities. She ran a multi-million-dollar region for the Windsor Agency – they’re known worldwide as having some of the top models in the world. That’s also who she modeled for. She has a good head on her shoulders. As for you, you certainly are a worthy person. In your own way you’re handsome. Not my cup of tea, but I can understand why Mindy likes you and Edie might find you appealing. Mindy described you to Rita as ‘previously hunky’.”

I laughed, “I’m previously everything. I’m out of touch, out of shape, out of gas, retired, dull, reclusive, and I won’t know what to say to her. I do try to stay in shape.” I thought a moment and asked, “Is she on the Internet ... maybe some of the porn sites?” I said, pretending some enthusiasm at finding a porn queen.

Bruce ignored my leer and said, “Let’s look.” He got his iPad and started to punch at the screen. He muttered to himself as he typed, “Name ... Edie Emerson ... oh, wait, that was her married name. I heard on that call it was Reed before that.” A minute went by.

Finally, Bruce said, “Yes! Here we go.” He paused and stared at the screen. “Hoooooly shit! Wow! I definitely might ditch Mindy for this gal. Look.” He thrust his iPad into my hands.

I gawked at the screen. Some of the photos were obviously dated, perhaps two or three decades old, but ... Edie Emerson in her twenties was an absolute knockout. I think I started to drool.

I groaned. “I can’t possibly meet someone this good looking, even if they’ve turned into a crone since these pictures were taken. Look, there’s a picture of her getting crowned as the state beauty queen.” I pointed at one picture in Google Images. “There’s one of her at a charity ball here in town; she’s still gorgeous. My God.”

Bruce said, “Scroll down the page. See if there are more recent shots.”