You can believe this or not... I barely do.
I will sy that given the op, I'd do it again in a heart beat!
Parking Maneuver
Here I am in the lower back corner of the dog park with my Wire Haired Dauchsund, Kobi. I look up and see a young man coming thru the gate with his pup and am grateful because it is really cold and a bit of diversion is more than welcome.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” I holler.
As the dogs set to playing, the young man, Jeremy, and I set to chatting. He is a regular at the park and quietly sociable. It is always nice to see him and his little dog, Madeleine, and we usually exchange a few words before being drawn elsewhere. But it is the biting cold which keeps this conversation short.
Earlier I had picked up on a slight slur in his speech and he tells me it is a result of TBI –Traumatic Brain Injury- after a horrific car accident over ten years ago, which left him in a coma for three months. When he came out of it, he couldn’t read, or walk or talk.
Winter slowly turns into spring and gatherings at the park grow larger and more frequent. Having been divorced just a few years, I am still trying to get my social sea legs and this is as good a place as any to do that.
Summer is working her way in when a group of us are gathered around noon. As enjoyable as this is, I am expected at a neighborhood block party, so announce that I must leave because I need to try to look pretty enough to perhaps catch the eye of one of several gray haired gentlemen who regularly walk past my house—an effort that could take some time.
Jeremy offers to "escort" me to the gate and when he slips his arm around my waist and asks if a man with dark hair might do, I think he is kidding. We banter a bit about the possibility of my being a cougar and I assure him that at Seventy-three, I am a tad old for that role. Before I realize it, I am being lassoed into meeting the next day… and the next.
I really enjoy our conversations and spending time with him while Kobi and Maddie play. It makes me feel happy and when I tell him so, he says he feels the same.
As we are leaving one day, I ask him for a hug and he gives me one, but you cannot imagine my embarrassment when I spontaneously kiss his neck! Before long, hugs were followed by tiny kisses—the sweetest little kisses I have ever experienced. Who knows how these things evolve, but those little kisses began to take over. Soon, I felt nothing but pure joy at the sight of him and that adorable, slightly crooked, smile.
I can’t stop grinning when I see him and he grins right back at me. I feel alternately shy as a school girl and brazen as a slut. One minute I’m old and wrinkled and the next, maturely alluring. Harold and Maude, Tea and Sympathy.
Come on, he’s not that young! Kate Middleton is his age. Corporations are headed by people younger than he. At Thirty-two I was taking care of a home and family with six kids, for Pete’s sake! He knows what he’s doing.
Finally, I ask him what is going on and he shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head and states that we are getting to know one another. That doesn’t sound too reckless. I suggest that I could die soon. He says he could be hit by a car.
I’m wondering if he has a bet going with friends over how long it will take him to bed me, when he says he loves my vocabulary, doesn’t have the same conversations with friends that we have.
Right! This is intellectual. I’m fulfilling a need for stimulating conversation.
He was raised a Christian; my cathedral is in Nature. I’m volatile and dramatic; he’s quiet and thoughtful.
Our hands and feet are the same size. We both buy our hats in the Children’s Department. He used to live a few doors down from my new apartment. His step grandfather is a good friend of mine.
He is the most loving, gentle, kind man I have ever met and honest to a fault. He is sexy and handsome and funny and smart. He is precisely what I have been looking for in a man, but never expected to find again.
So, what does a not yet completely insane, great-grandmother to do when she begins to have real feelings for a man forty years younger?
When I hear him suggest that there are other places we could get together besides the dog park, my knees almost buckle out from under me and I think, Oh. Dear.