Volunteer Explorer

I met Stacy Meadows when I went to volunteer at the old Coach House Theatre. It was early December 2017, and I had spent the previous year figuring out how to live alone after leaving my husband of 20 years. Community theater had been important to me in my youth — it was where I clung to childhood dreams of an acting career, of a romantic life lit by spotlights and infused with drama. Domesticity had dimmed those lights, so I thought returning to a theater could rekindle that spark within myself. I saw her vacuuming the curtains around the entrance to the auditorium and thought she was a boy at first. Baggy jeans and layered T-shirts concealed her mounded chest and hips. Then we made eye contact and I fell. Those jade-green eyes looked deep inside me, seemed to see me clearly without artifice or judgment for exactly what I was: a wounded soul with immense love to give. I felt an immediate connection to this not-a-boy. An easy rapport surfaced between us, and we moved around each

I read the local paper every day and can count on finding at least one incidence of gun violence in each issue. Usually there are multiple shootings in my city and the surrounding communities. I didn’t grow up with guns as part of my everyday experience. We weren’t hunters or target shooters. There were two antique rifles hanging on the wall in my parents’ bedroom, but they seemed more like décor than instruments of death. Guns lived in my imagination as things of power and terror. I saw them wielded by cops and criminals in movies and TV shows. I never saw them in real life, on the streets of the mostly white suburb I grew up in. School shootings were not the common occurrence then that they have become. Even when I lived alone in an unsavory neighborhood of Akron and went to gigs as a singing telegram character (read: stripper), I never felt the need of a gun for the euphemism of protection. I always thought of condoms as a much more immediate source of protection than a firear

It went south so quickly. One day it was a little bit of brackish discharge from my cat's right eye, then two days later it was a scene from a horror show. Less than 48 hours after the vet said I should shop around for a lower surgery fee, the animal ER performed an enucleation — surgical removal of the eye on which an ulcer had erupted. It seemed that in the blink of an eye, my robust, healthy cat had become an invalid. When Abraham’s remaining eye started to turn milky like the right one had, I stopped the steroid drops and called the vet. We switched to antibiotic drops 3 times a day, plus the oral antibiotics left over from the surgery. Three times every day, I searched out his hiding place, lifted him gently, wrapped him in a towel and squirted meds down his throat and into his remaining eye. He whined and cried pitifully. I cried after each episode while placating him with treats. Remarkably, I hardly drank any alcohol during this period. I felt I needed to stay sharp

 - Or - Seven reasons why dating myself is a personal choice that I make as a pathway to enlightened self-love and not as a reaction to being single during a global pandemic or getting stood up by some jerk I didn’t even want to get to know or share intimacy with anyway, and certainly not because it’s the only option available or a sneaky way of semantically rebranding the truth which is that I am single during both menopause and a pandemic, which fact has to be dressed up a little to keep it from completely crushing what’s left of my soul and sanity right now. 1. I am fastidious. My apartment is squeaky clean because nothing activates my inner Donna Reed like the prospect of company. Plus, I am free to watch whatever program or movie I like, pause to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes and talk back to the onscreen characters without commentary from a guest. 2. I’m an epicurean. The high-end takeout food and ice cream that was intended for sharing is aaaaaalllllll mine. Plu

 I wonder if I’ll smell like my mother when I get older. I’m cat-sitting for her while she’s at the beach with my brother and sister-in-law this week. One of the perks of taking on this responsibility is that I get to do my laundry in her nice machine instead of the aging and unreliable ones at my apartment building. Another perk is experiencing my mother’s personality through her belongings while she’s away. One can surmise a great deal about a person via their kitchen utensils, pantry contents and personal grooming implements. For example, my mom left out an old-fashioned rubber ice bag for me because she knew I was having some back pain before she left. Who uses anything other than frozen vegetable bags for icing sore joints these days? She also seems to be hoarding soap. There are stacks of wrapped bars on a shelf in the bathroom, still more in a closet. Old-fashioned brand names like Fels-Naptha are unfamiliar to me, but the aroma in my mother’s bathroom is as familiar as my

1. Try a few online dating sites. When you find one for people over 50, go ahead and subscribe, you know, just for fun. This is new for you because you were married when online dating first became popular. 2. Immediately get freaked out by the wretched weirdness of judging potential partners by three blurry photos and answers to stupid questions like “How patient do you consider yourself?” — realize they’re all judging you the same way and disable your profile. 3. Reach out to one of your exes because you figure he’s safe, living two states away, and you might enjoy a little socially distant sexting or Skype sex. 4. When Mr. Two States Away doesn’t respond, embrace the shame spiral of having ceded the upper hand you had at the breakup over a year ago and decide you’ll never date again. 5. Shake yourself out of that shame spiral by remembering what a jerk that guy was and how you were the one who ended things, so you certainly don’t want to go back down that road again