Ten years ago

Ten years ago, this weekend, after I was done eating dinner with a friend, Sue Ott Rowlands, at Lemon Grass, I asked her if she thought I could succeed if I were to go to film school.  We were standing just about where this photo was taken, in the Cedar Lee parking lot.  She said something like, "Sure Jean, I think you have the eye, the artistic vision."  Then I said, "Truth be told, I really just--" (and at this point, my voice got louder and louder and my chin tilted back so that I was shouting to the sky) "--want a DATE!"

A few days later, I met Carrie online, and a week after that, on Friday, November 16th, we met for a movie at the Cedar Lee.  Steve Martin, Novacaine. 

I don't know if my life changed that night, when she walked up my front steps with the season's last yellow rose.  Or a week later when we kissed in her house after listening to Rachmaninoff.  Or when we went to Kenyon for New Year's Eve.  Maybe when she took care of me and my broken arm.  Or perhaps when she picked up the phone and I told her my mother had died. But maybe, just maybe, it happened on the night I shouted out my truest deepest need.  Maybe life changes when you ask it to change.

I was going to type desire in that last paragraph, but it was need.  I needed to go on a date.  I needed to feel the heat between me and a woman.  I needed to have sweet soft lips upon mine.  I needed, really needed, to know that I was lovable and could take a chance at loving. 

I was 40 and too terrified of loving to have loved.

I am now heading straight towards 50.  Carrie's gone now. (That was something that really changed my life, all for the painful better).  I find myself on this weekend with the very same need, only it has been soaked and marinated with a decade more of living.  I need to love.  I need the learning and growing that happens from and through love.  I need to try again, this time better.  I need to know a "we." I need to show my love in and to the world.

So I am wondering if I could recreate the whole thing.  Call Sue.  Pretend to ask about her job at Virginia Tech.  Her daughters.  The new grandson that will be arriving any day now. Hoping, of course, that at some point, Sue will ask about me, how I am, and I will have a chance to say those words that that I said ten years ago. 

I'd be more specific, of course.  It's not just a date I want.  I would turn my chin to the sky and I would say, "Let me love. Let me love someone wholly and warmly.  Let me be the person I can be only by having someone else to whom I am accountable.  Let me, please let me, hold someone's heart in my hands. Let me trust in another fully."

It's Saturday, November 5th. I am two months away from 50.  And maybe -- if my fingers type loudly enough -- just maybe, two weeks away from love.