Shoot Me, I’m Dating Online (8)
Dates have come and gone bye-bye. Let me see. One friend didn’t appreciate my letting him pay for our first several dates, whereas I thought I was allowing him to exercise his male prerogative; then there was the guy who phoned to give me his ground rules regarding what I had to do if we had […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (7)
Help! Profile pictures confuse me. Many men are wearing sunglasses, often standing in front of a car next to a large dog. Let’s think about this for a moment. Here is the first picture a potential dating friend sees. But what opens on the computer is disappointing–a blurry photo of a man wearing dark glasses. I can only guess that a […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (6)
“Didn’t I tell you that I had a thing for serial killers?” I wrote to a fellow traveler after he suggested that we meet to make sure that neither of us were serial killers. It sounded like a unique opening line. We decided on an appointed time for coffee, a rendezvous at Peet’s on Fourth Street. It […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (5)
A broken heart is an open heart, at least that’s what I hear. So here’s to all us online daters because after being disappointed and defeated, it takes courage to return to the playing field, and to announce to everyone who wishes to listen, Here I am. Take it or leave it. Or for some […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (4)
Skate boarding through the chatrooms of lonely algorithms, I meet a contractor who wants to know my idea of a life-partner I text him caring, intelligent, sexy, etc. and he says wow that’s just what he’s looking for and do I think he fits that description? I text him how the fuck should I know […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (3)
One day at a time. Right? As I waited in line to cross the San Francisco Bay Bridge from Oakland, the agent waved me past the tollbooth. “Keep going. She’s already paid for you,” and pointed to an older BMW that was waiting its turn ahead of me at the metering lights. I couldn’t wrap […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating! (1)
The going wisdom in the world of online dating is “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince (or princess).” But I had to overcome my aversion to green, rubbery lips before I could immerse myself in online dating. Well, let me back up. I’m a woman in her mid-fifties, […]
Different Species
Outside the deck two birds wade in birdseed, one small, a dark-eyed junco, the other, twice her size, a brown- headed cowbird a step away from my geranium, quaking its feathers, parrying its beak into a hissing V and insists feed me in a language available to imposter hungry birds. The junco keeps picking up seed faster […]
Cataract
thistle stalks with silvery thorns not yet turned iron in the summer heat the explosion of a buckeye’s start poppies close up after hours helicopters go on a spree a robin squats in a squirrel’s nest weekenders no longer melt in the distance leaving her drenched in her own mist getting steady with a walking stick as though there were no distance […]
Ode to Aunt Elsie
I look at the walls of your town house where you lived for more than forty years and died after your hundredth birthday just as you predicted you would. I’m looking at your walls, family photographs of children and grandchildren, obligatory framed pictures of you and your husband from a marriage you endured; paintings of […]