The term “widower” seems so loaded with tradition and history, it deserves a definition right here and now. I looked it up and this is what it says:

1. a man who has lost his spouse by death and has not remarried.
2. HUMOROUSa man whose spouse is often away participating in a specified sport or activity.”her new-found passion has turned me into a tennis widower”

If anything I was a garden widower before my late wife Linda passed away. But that was never true. My job was doing the digging into the ground for her on many occasions. I liked being part of that. The earth behind our Batavia home was deep and rich soil. Back in the late 50s when homes were placed the builders didn’t scrape off the topsoil. I dug postholes in that yard and that required poking through two solid feet of black prairie soil before hitting clay.

That’s where the water table ran. It was a constant battle at that home keeping the basement dry whenever the rains came. One night we wound up running around half naked in the backyard trying to empty the window wells. I didn’t mind. I always liked the look and feel of summer rain on skin.

There’s an amazing scene in the movie Midnight In Paris when the character played by Owen Wilson meets a French woman on the streets of Paris when it’s starting to rain. By that point in the movie, Wilson (who plays a writer) has decided to disembark from his marriage to a materially acquisitive wife who does not understand his obsession with the romance of Paris, both old and new. His high-paying writing work back in LA is not rewarding (he’s a screenwriter) but his experience in the netherworld of time travel convinces him to follow his instincts and write a novel.

He travels back in time through a midnight portal and eventually falls in love with a woman whose notions of the “Golden Age” are similar, yet they have different views of what constitutes the best time in history. For him, it is the period in which she is living. For her, it is decades before. She loves him in a romantic way, but eventually they go their separate ways. Back in the present, he finds a journal she wrote about him in a Paris book shop. It makes him realize that even beyond the bounds of time, love is real.

And finally, as if in a living dream, he encounters a woman he met in Paris while digging into jazz records at a local shop. She recalls his interest. That makes him realize that he’s actually “someone to somebody” in a new and different way. It also points out the possibility that we’re all capable of loving more than one person in our lives. There are indeed different kinds of love

I’ll admit that I’m a born romantic. There were times when I’d fawn over my late wife in some way that just made her wrinkle up her face. Sometimes I’d even fall in love with her all over again. That’s the way I’m wired. I feel things like love quite intensely. The first serious relationship I had was the product of “love at first sight” with a woman I met during my senior year in college. Our relationship was rife with conflicted motives, and after two years we broke up. But it made a deep impression on me, a living expression of Jackson Browne’s song That Girl Could Sing:

She was a friend to me when I needed one
Wasn’t for her, I don’t know what I’d done
She gave me back something that was missing in me
She coulda turned out to be almost anyone
Almost anyone
With the possible exception
Of who I wanted her to be

Given my deep susceptibility to romantic tomes, I used to lay on the couch late on a Saturday morning after morning bike rides of 60-80 miles watching some tear-jerking movie like Dances With Wolves, which I also loved for the western scenery. My daughter used to laugh upon catching me with tears in my eyes, but I liked the feeling of feeling something deeply. It relieved the stress of life to cry hard once in a while. I like crying hard just like I like running hard, cycling hard and these days, swimming hard. Life is hard. I like being hard back.

Hard choices

It was still a hard choice as to whether or when I should start dating after my late wife’s passing. But knowing that I loved company in life, I decided that going on some dates with women would be okay. I certainly saw no sense in moping around the house. The previous three to four years had provided plenty of that including many afternoon vigils in a silent house with a spouse sick or tired in bed. The stress of that adds up after a while. For many years we had to be cautious with physical attention as well. She could not afford picking up any kind of infection when her body was immunocompromised, as it could kill her. We knew that she was susceptible to internal infections from the time I met her.

As I considered dating at the age of fifty-five, I made decisions about the process that were sensible and real. For one thing, I placed a limit on how young to go with women that I’d date. I decided not to date any woman under the age of forty-five (as far as I could tell).

But here’s the thing. A few buddies egged me on to “go get laid a lot,” but I didn’t think I had the constitution for that. That is not a claim to pure intentions or an attempt to win favor in the eyes of readers. I frankly didn’t feel like I could handle sleeping with a bunch of different women.

Dating an Old Flame

But first, I did approach an “old flame” of mine from high school days. We went on a picnic date but she was a bit weirded out by the idea that I was ready to date so soon after my wife’s passing. She’d been divorced a number of years from a real jerk who cheated on her. For fifteen years, she’d been busy with her own life as a teacher, and had faced some personal tragedy as well. We enjoyed our picnic but I sensed her discomfort. A few months out, she did thank me for showing her that a man could be interested in her. She hadn’t thought of herself that way. These days, she’s in a relationship with a man that “gets her.” All power to her. If I helped in some way I thank God for that.

Once I opened the door to dating, I tried the dating app eHarmony. It was interesting trying to “read between the lines” on that app. Many women stated that they wanted to travel. I took that as a dog-whistle sign that they wanted to meet a man with money. Maybe that was just my take, but that’s how I read it. I steered clear. I wanted to meet a woman that wanted to do things together that might not always revolve around money.

So many fish in the sea

Remember when we were kids, and a relationship broke off and hurt? Our parents would often say, “Well, there’s a lot of fish in the sea…” which was another way of saying, “Get over it.” Well, it’s a bit different when you’ve been married for twenty-five years and figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. Perhaps part of that process is trying things, and going fishing.

A woman from a nearby city reached out to me through eHarmony and we met at a restaurant for drinks. I quickly met her daughters when picking her up, and they seemed really sweet. Originally, she’d asked me if I wanted to try going to a fly-fishing seminar. I thought that was really interesting. She was also apparently a competitive tennis player, a fact I noticed in photos showing her fine-looking legs. Cause hey, there’s nothing’s wrong with having good legs.

After our second date, we’d had a really nice conversation and were walking back to her cart through the city where she lived when it started to rain. She carried an umbrella and popped it open as the spring rain started to fall. After crossing the street, I bent under the umbrella, said “thanks for a nice date…” and gave her a kiss on the lips. The light reflecting off the wet streets made her eyes shine, and while walking away, I glanced back and gave her a wave. “Well,” I thought to myself in the moment. “I guess I can do this.”

Is something fishy?

Now, dating so soon after my wife’s passing wasn’t met with favor by everyone in my life. Some immediate family wondered whether it was all too sudden. But I’d decided to move forward and took that woman to a friend’s backyard party where the host, a longtime friend of mine, was the lead singer in their band.

It was a fine day, and she looked pretty in her summer dress. We had light drinks and talked with my friends old and new. After that, we drove back to my house after the party. I was not expecting her to stop and stay, but she was careful to make that clear. Then she said, “I think it’s kind of weird that you still have best friends from high school.”

I looked at her carefully because I could not tell if she was joking or not. “Well,” I replied. “Those guys and I share a ton of history. We ran cross country and track together. I went to college with the lead singer in that band today. He and I lived together in Chicago. He was the best man in my wedding…” then I stopped talking. I paused: Was mentioning that going to be a sore subject with her?

“Well, it was a nice time,” she told me, heading back to her car.

A few days went by, so I reached out to see if our dating was through. “Well,” she told me. “I still have feelings for my Mr. Big…” That was a reference to the show Sex In the City. She lived in a town where there were plenty of men with money. As a divorced teacher, she had her eyes on the future…”He’s taking me sailing,” she told me.

Okay, I thought to myself. I can’t compete with that. But a week later, she called back. “Things didn’t go so well with Mr. Big,” she admitted. “Do you still want to date?”

“Um, no thank you,” I told her.

After that, I wasn’t sure how any of the dating scene would turn out. I had date with a woman a bit older than me that went much quicker. We’d scheduled a wine date at a restaurant in my town. When she arrived, it all got real: “Listen,” she told me. “I need a man who’s willing to move south to Arizona with me. I have a son down there that I really like, and I’m not so wild about my son up here in Illinois. He’s a male nurse, and so…I’m thinking of moving…”

She had called ahead to let me know she’d be late. I’d ordered her a glass of Pinot before she arrived. Following her opening pitch, I pushed the wine across the table while saying, “Thanks, but no thanks…I’ll pay for the drink…Nice to meet you.” Then I left the table, and her, far behind.

Was she Mrs. Big?

Perhaps I met a Mrs. Big during a date in Chicago’s south side in Hyde Park. She was a confident, attractive woman who made it clear from the start that she had plenty of dough and wanted a man in her life to share it. We went for a walk in the park. I noticed her checking me out from behind, and I kind of chuckled at the thought that perhaps I was a bit of Man Meat in her eyes. Apparently I passed the test, because from there the convo turned to how often I could make it downtown. Clearly she was feeling a bit lonely in her fine estate. After a dinner date with plenty of wine, we ended the evening with a kiss. I was a bit conflicted about the idea of being some woman’s Kept Man. We’d held hands during our walk in the park and that was nice, but it all felt a bit disparate to me. Still, she had a really pretty face and smile. I didn’t know where to leave that one…

All of this took place over the period of several months. Then one day an email arrived in my inbox from a website called FitnessSingles.com. The site description was clear: “Whatever an active lifestyle means to you, Fitness Singles is the world’s largest online dating community for sports and fitness enthusiasts. Whether you’re looking for a “fitness date,” exercise friends or a workout partner, Fitness Singles is a fun, private and secure environment to meet fit, athletic singles!”

There was a significant cost for signing up, and I balked at first. But the prospect of meeting an active woman really sounded intriguing. I didn’t know where that pursuit would lead, but I filled out the profile with all my running, cycling and birding activities, and hit “Join Now.” I didn’t know that my world would change within a few days.

And just for insight, here’s another scene from Midnight In Paris. The movie contains more than one plot twist and character insights.