Type

What could the dating experiences of little old me - a 40-something, recently divorced mom - possibly have in common with those of a 23 year old gay man?

As it turns out, quite a bit.

In fact, as it turns out, gay men and straight men may have far more in common with one another than either group might like to admit.  A recent chat with my friend Kyle had us both in stitches over the “types” we’ve discovered in the course of our (mis)adventures in dating.

A sampling:

• The Pretty Boy.  I can’t go out with this guy because his hair always looks better than mine.  Ditto for Kyle (and really, this is a crime, because Kyle has fabulous hair).  Ladies and gents, if it walks like a Ken doll, talks like a Ken doll, and never met a mirror it wasn’t ready to make love to, it’s likely The Pretty Boy you’re dealing with.  Nice arm candy, but be warned: he’s only got enough love for himself.
• The Clooney.  This is a tough one.  Dashingly handsome, but with serious talent and substance to boot.  Has avoided commitment thus far, but causes everyone he comes into contact with to swoon in hopes of being ‘The One.’  But let’s get real, kids.  How many of us are truly in a class with Amal?  Keep your head on straight.  Your skivvies, too.
• The Pious One.  Maybe he’s an actual pillar of his particular religious community.  Maybe he’s just religious in his devotion to yoga, meditation, or his vegan diet.  But this is the man who gets you singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ in the shower and has you swearing you’ll convert.  You know - right up until the religious exclamations at romantic moments throw a wet blanket over your desire.  Put down the Kool Aid.  You know he’s gonna dump you for a blonde with family money anyway.
• The Trust Fund Brat.  Speaking of family money…  This is that delightfully soft, sweet guy - the one with wild stories, sparkling eyes, and a prep school past.  He’s the one you fall for immediately.  And it’s mutual.  The problem?  He comes with more strings attached than a marionette, and at the end of each is a family member so horrific only monarchies are creepier.  Give it a whirl - but keep scissors and running shoes handy.
• The Life of the Party.  This is the guy whose dating site profile lists him as “fun loving” and features an adult beverage in every photo.  It’s also sort of silly that he even has a dating site profile at all, since Tinder is more his style.  If you’re looking to wake up bruised, hung-over and naked on a yacht you don’t remember boarding, this is the guy for you.  Otherwise?  Not so much.
• The Strong & Silent.  Oh, this one’s a doozy.  He’s handsome.  Mysterious.  Says more with a glance than he ever does with those sultry lips of his.  And you know what?  It’s because he’s got nothin’.  There’s either not a whole lot going on between those lovely ears, or he has some terrible, soul-deep scars that prevent him from expressing himself.  You’d do better dating the Dos Equis guy.  At least he comes with a script.
• The Momma’s Boy.  This man-child starts out looking great (He’s so good to his mother!  So respectful!  So deferent!  What’s not to like?), but eventually he makes Norman Bates seem rational.  His mommy’s got him convinced that he’s Special…and no one is good enough for her boy.  Are you deluded enough to think you are?  She’ll spare no effort in slowly, painfully proving you wrong.  And your Prince Charming?  Don’t wait for him to come to your rescue.  There isn’t even a problem.  There couldn’t be.  His momma can do no wrong.  Advice?  Run.  Just run.  For fuck’s sake, run now. 

We identified a couple of notable others (God’s Gift, The Wandering Penis), but as these types seemed to overlap a bit with those detailed above, I’ll leave them to your imagination.

As for me and Kyle, we have no idea why we’re still single.

After all, we’re perfectly pleasant in every way…  ;)

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Dream

Passages are a funny thing to consider.

One soul leaves this world.

Another enters.

Certain lives may never intersect or overlap, yet one may still impact the other.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, five years before I was born.  He didn’t know my parents, and they - young white people getting their start in the world - surely felt their lives in New England were worlds removed from his death in Memphis.  They wanted a kind, gentle world for their family, so they appreciated Dr. King’s words.  They may have nodded, hoped, said a prayer, even shed a tear or two.  And then they moved on.

That is white privilege.

To agree, to hope, to pray and even to work for a better world - all in the absence of fear.

It’s an odd thing to try to understand.  As a white, middle-class female, it’s not something I asked for.  But there it is.

I remember being in elementary school and learning about the assassination of Dr. King.  I remember going home terrified that my own father - an intelligent, eloquent man who never hesitated to stand up for what he felt was right - would suffer a similar fate.  While clearly the intent of the lesson had been to illustrate our nation’s history of racial inequality and the impact of the civil rights movement, I’d somehow missed the crucial part.  My young brain couldn’t grasp the inane notion that skin color could have anything to do with hatred.  What I’d gleaned was that using one’s words to help others in this world could get a person killed.  What I’d felt was that such a world was surely insane, and terrifyingly unpredictable.

In time, I came to understand that my father, a white male, had the best armor possible.  This only amplified my belief that the world was an insane, terrifyingly unpredictable place.  As a child, I was certain my father was a great person - but I knew it had nothing to do with his gender or skin color.  It was because he was smart, kind, funny, and pretty much always carried candy for his children.  What sort of idiocy had been law in our country long enough that adults didn’t get what was so clear to a child?

My father told me about the Florida courthouse where he first practiced law.  Technically, Jim Crow laws were done for, but right there in the courthouse, next to the scales of justice, the words “WHITE” and “COLORED” remained inscribed in stone above the drinking fountains.

And people still used the fountains that matched their skin color.

How sad, how silly, I would like to say now.  I would like to look back and shake my head at the insanity of the past, gratefully beyond it.  Yet 2014 proved that the racial divide in this nation remains far from bridged.  There is quite a bit that is sad, yet nothing that is silly, about that.

I don’t believe this means we are doomed.  I sometimes think this nation’s past is so painful, we almost viscerally need to believe we’re done with it.  It hurts too damn much to consider the ways we might have benefited from an ugliness with which we disagree, or the times our behavior may have been guided by unfair instincts.  Still, we might do better to acknowledge it, to own up to the way prejudice can seep into the marrow and infect generations.  To look it in the face and say: I will not let you infect my children.

My daily experience with people is that they are generally good and kind.  I believe we are capable of bringing that goodness and kindness to our every interaction.  Call me Pollyanna, but I cannot read or hear the words of Dr. King without thinking he is still the key, and his dream is still possible.

I hope and pray 2015 is the year we each commit in our hearts to being done with drawing superficial lines.

That we work at treating each other gently.

That we take a moment before we speak, before we act.

That we remember that each of us is not the flesh and bone structure we see on the outside; it is the soul within.

With love and gratitude for the life, lessons, and memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dream.

- k.c.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Ripple

For most of my life, I have been lucky enough to live near the water. Salt ponds, rivers, bays, the ocean — I never cease to be amazed at the variety of landscapes possible in liquid form. There are days when the wind whips the surface into whitecaps, evenings so still the water is a mirror for the sunset. The change of seasons brings different birds and fish. Where I live now, the winter brings seals to my back yard.

One constant with any body of water is what happens when you touch it. Dip a toe, wade in, toss a stone — the water will ripple. That ripple will stir seaweed, send crabs scurrying. It’s one of the things I love most when I am on my paddleboard. I can see the impact of my movement on my surroundings: the swirl around my paddle, the gentle wake behind me. I can also so clearly feel the effect of my environment on me: the waves made by a passing boat, the wobble of my board as a fish passes underneath. I can feel my connection to everything in the world.

The ripple effect is something I tend to think of literally, given the way my life is so connected to water, but most probably think of it as a metaphor: each action we take has a ripple effect on others, often in ways we will never know.

I’ve been floundering a bit lately, having a tough time finding the meaning in some of what I’ve been through in the past year. It sometimes seems nothing in my life goes as I imagine it will. The reminders of plans gone awry are everywhere. I go for beach walks with Kimba and see The Ex and my former dog, Harry. No happily-ever-after there. I sit at my desk with the ashes of Tiny Tim, waiting for a warm spring day to release them at the dog beach. So much for my dreams of seeing him playing there with the other dogs, all-terrain wheels making up for the mobility he lost.

I’ll be honest: on bad days, I sit at my desk and look at Tiny Tim’s ashes as a symbol of all I’ve tried and failed. I wonder what the hell the point of any of it is.

And then last night I heard from Erica, one of the Guardians of Rescuewho’d helped save Tiny Tim. There was another dog the Guardians had been working to get safely from Oklahoma to Long Island, a blind Lab called Tiny. Of course, I noticed the name, and I followed his story. I was glad to learn he’d arrived safely in Long Island and was given a new name, Tulsa, in homage to the starting point of his journey.

What did Erica tell me that caught me off guard?

Kasia, the woman who drove from Brooklyn to Oklahoma and back as part of Tiny/Tulsa’s rescue team volunteered to do so in part because of a blog she followed. It was a Girl on a Wire post about a dog named Tiny Tim she’d seen on the Guardians of Rescue Facebook page. It moved her to tears, and ultimately, moved her to help another dog named Tiny.

Whaddaya know?

Miracles do happen.

The dog I tried to rescue may have passed, but he just rescued another dog. Tulsa will find his family, and his story will inspire others. Tiny Tim won so many hearts, and he is still changing lives.

We really are all connected. And while I still may not know what the hell the point of any of it is, I’ve been reminded: there is a point. We just have to trust.

As Kimba ran on the dog beach this morning, I tossed pebbles into the water. Some dropped with a plunk, others skipped across the surface. A cormorant emerged and looked at me, perturbed. A little farther away, a seal popped its nose out of the water.

I watched the ripples.

And I smiled.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

The sweetest hello

Resting safely

Tiny — now Tulsa — seems pretty happy to be making the journey to find his forever home.

Watershed

Up on the watershed

Staring at the fork in the road

You can stand there and agonize

'Til your agony’s your heaviest load

Yep.  Those are Indigo Girls lyrics.  I thought I was done with that angsty duo some twenty-plus years ago, around the same time I decided I really ought to have role models other than Sylvia Plath.

But just a year ago, Pandora landed on ‘Watershed.’  I had to pull the car over.  There on the side of a road in the middle of a sunny winter day, I totally lost my shit.  I was a crying, sobbing, snotty mess.  It was the kind of thing that happens when you realize you’ve been living too long in limbo.

In the months since our second wedding anniversary turned into the sort of colossal train wreck that illustrated all the ways our marriage was not ever going to be what I hoped (and no, he didn’t just forget to buy flowers), I’d known I had a choice to make.  For too long I’d clung to the little moments of bliss: our walks with the dogs on the beach, sunset cruises on the salt pond, the way it felt to wake curled in his arms.  If life were all beach walks and sunset cruises and lazy mornings, I suppose we’d have been okay.  But it isn’t - not in my experience, anyway - and whenever slightest of difficult times hit (a bill that was more than expected, a phone call announcing that his folks would be visiting yet again, the wrong weather on a day off from work), I found myself feeling more alone as a wife than I ever had as a single person.

And then came that damn Indigo Girls song.  I had to make a choice.  I knew that.  The agony was indeed my heaviest load.

I’ve blogged the hell out of what came next.  There was the brutality of separation, the finality of divorce.  2014 was, for me, a year of moving away.  Of treading water.  Of trying not to be dragged under.

As the year came to a close, I realized there is a burden even heavier than the agony of indecision.  It’s the agony of having no goal to move toward next.  If you know me, that may sound funny - I am rarely idle, and I always have about two dozen goals toward which I am feverishly working.  What did I lack?  A larger plan.  A vision of the life I want.

I’ve kept walking with The Ex at the dog beach, kept dogsitting my former dog and housesitting my former home when he’s traveling for work.  Daily, I see what I’ve lost.  Sometimes - when The Ex seems more like the fun guy I fell in love with than the moody man I found myself married to - it’s difficult to remember why I left.  Things always seem so much better from the outside looking in.

Then came Tiny Tim.  If you haven’t read the story of how his life intersected with mine, please do here.  As one who has been rescued by animals time and again, it should be no surprise to me that my focus - my vision of the life I want for myself - crystalized in the very short time I spent with a crippled, abandoned dog at the end of his own life.

I’ll share more in next week’s post, but for now, suffice it to say I feel 2015 is the year I stop moving away and start moving toward.  It’s the year I stop looking back.  (And if I forget this, I know I have at least one good friend who will help me extricate my head from my ass and get back on track.)

There are good things ahead.  I finally know just what they are.

And because life is nothing if not serendipitous, I just received this in an email from my friend Jude, and I pass it on to you:

WHATEVER YOU CAN DREAM, BEGIN IT

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy-

The chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)

There is one elementary truth the ignorance of

Which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

That the moment one definitely commits oneself, 

Then Providence moves, too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would 

Never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, 

Raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen

Incidents and meetings and material assistance,

Which no one could have dreamed would have come

One’s way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can.

Begin it.

Boldness has genius,

Power, and magic in it.

Begin it now.   

GOETHE

www.kcwilder50ways.com