A-Musings

  Ah, youth.     As I child I sort of hated September, the dreaded early-mornings back-to-school month.  I kind of loathed the fall, harbinger of the long season of dark and cold to come.  Not even the fun of Halloween could lift the doldrums for long; that  faded with the last trick-or-treated,  fun-sized   Milky Way bar.   In anticipation of my near-future loss of freedom and my obligation to study and socialize, work and perform, a low-level depression would begin setting in right after July 4 th .  And last the rest of the summer, tinging it with kind of melancholy better suited for someone considerably older with far greater demands on their psyche.    Youth is wasted on the young.   Not sure when the tides turned, when I began to appreciate the glorious gift of autumn.  When I began to welcome the clearer skies, the cooler temperatures, the shaking off of heady, heavy midsummer heat and humid...

Brave New Post-Pandemic World   After my disappointing, frustrating final forays on Bumble et al, after my decision to look at “silver-single” life as an opportunity rather than a depressing dead end, I began envisioning what I’d like my 3 rd  Act to look like.  Where I would live, what I would I do, who I would do it with … But first, I’d show them –   I’d give Bumble a piece of my mind.   I wrote to their Customer Service Department.  I wrote them of my myriad concerns, of my unpleasant experiences using their site, laying out the several close encounters of the criminal kind I’d experienced with the supposedly single men who were supposedly using the Bumble dating website for dating.  When, in fact, they were using the Bumble dating website to ensnare unsuspecting women and men, luring them with fake photos and profiles, wooing them with flattery and fiction, conning them through various schemes, and trying to shake the most gullible,...

Bumbling Across Bumble We first met on the Bow Bridge in Central Park on the first Sunday afternoon of June, 2021.     (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.     For now.)     It was rather warm, overcast.     I approached the bridge from the southern side.     And spotted a tall, barrel-chested man with a wild mane of silver hair leaning on one arm over the stone railing, rather macho-ly, looking north.     I thought, “Oh.     I can work with this.”     I took a breath, steeled myself behind a smiled, and continued my approach.       He looked up from the water, saw me.  He had that tousled, devil-may-care, easy elegance you only see in European men.  He didn’t smile, but his expression changed.  It softened, warmed.  Something around the eyebrows –   Summer, 2021.  The world still on edge, still masking and disinfecting and vaxxing and...