The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
~John Buchan
“How about this guy?” I asked Lucy T. Cat, who was sacked out on my desk. The computer screen showed a dating profile that wasn’t half bad—okay, maybe it had more pictures of trophy fish than the fisherman, but one of the things on my wish list was “has a hobby of his own.” And the other pictures got my attention, as did his math degree and writing flair.
Lucy glanced up and yawned. I wasn’t sure if that meant, “He’s younger than you and lives on the wrong side of the Sound,” or “Pipe down, trying to sleep here.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It’s like three hours each way.” I clicked back to my inbox without sending him a message.
Dipping a toe in the dating pond after the implosion of a fifteen-year relationship, I was happy with myself but aware that, as in high school, most guys weren’t looking for a nerdy tomboy. But I figured that online dating widened the pond . . . and, besides, I was through with trying to change myself for someone else. So I had written a quirky, geeky dating profile and become WriterChick.
There was a new message, one of those, “I think ur hot. Want 2 hook up?” e-mails that spawned more eye rolls than excitement, along with the suspicion that “hot” meant “local and female.”
I shook my head. “Seriously, dude.” But I shot off a quick, “I’m flattered, but no thanks. Happy hunting.” Because, hey, to each his own.
They weren’t all like that, of course. In a few months as WriterChick, I had e-mailed with several nice guys, and had even progressed to long phone calls with a slogan writer on the other side of the state. Things had fizzled out, though, when “Let’s meet halfway for dinner” turned into “I’m beat. Why don’t you pick up some take-out and come to my place?”
Um, no thanks. First date equals public place. Plus, I’m worth the drive.
After that, I’d had a brief instant message fling with an amusing fellow who claimed to be a professor at a nearby college. But he was vague on the details, I couldn’t find his name on the college website, and he wanted to meet at a motel. Red flag, red flag, red flag!
I had gone on some actual dates, too, always with a friend waiting for me to check in. I went to a haunted house with a nice guy scientist and wished for sparks. I met a politician whose picture was ten years out of date, a neat fellow who was just looking for a good time, but was at least honest about it. I had planned dinner with a comedian whose e-mails made me smile, but the timing hadn’t meshed yet. So far, though, none of the matches had been quite right.
“Well, that’s it for today,” I said, logging out. “Ready for dinner?”
It was amazing how quickly ten pounds of tabby can go from sleep mode to a striped gray blur headed for the kitchen.
The next evening, Lucy and I went through the same routine, except that this time there was a real message waiting for me, one that had me giving a little, “Oh!”
It was from the fisherman.
I hesitated before clicking. “I hope he doesn’t think I was stalking him.” The dating site kept a running tally of profile views, so I could see who had been checking me out . . . but the same was true in reverse. And, yeah, maybe I had looked at his page more than once. “Oh, well. Only one way to find out if this is a ‘hey, baby’ or a ‘stop staring.’ ”
Opening the message, I found a short introduction in perfect online dating format: he mentioned something from my profile, added a detail about himself, and invited me to write him back. Even better, he had written it like he was a crusty old sea dog, turning things playful. If he had sent me a drink, it would’ve been a polite white wine wearing an umbrella.
I replied in a similar tone, then focused on my other e-mails, having learned that the more pressure I put on a conversation, the more I was headed for disappointment. It was far better to take things as they came and treat life—and late-thirties dating—as a wonderfully strange adventure.
The next night, I heard back from the fisherman—a witty missive that ended with: “I’d like to get to know you better. Want to write a story together?”
Well, hello. That got my attention. It also sounded like a neat way to skip the usual twenty questions. Plonked in front of the TV with my laptop on one side of me and the cat on the other, I wondered if I should wait so it didn’t look like I was haunting my inbox. Then I answered anyway, signing off with: “The story idea sounds cool. You want to start?”
His first chapter was waiting in my inbox the following morning, and I was pleased to find it a decently written setup with pirates and a lady captain. “I can totally work with this,” I told Lucy, who was sitting on her window perch, watching Bird TV.
She flicked an ear back, which I interpreted as, “You’ve got a book due in less than a month.”
I wrote the next chapter of the pirate story instead, crafting an utterly ridiculous sea battle, complete with a killer bunny and a red-skinned alien admiral who stood on the prow of his ship, shouting, “It’s a trap!”
Geeky? Definitely. But I figured that if he didn’t get my sense of humor, it wasn’t meant to be.
His reply? “Bravo! Round of applause!”
For the next few weeks we traded e-mails, bouncing the story from sea to swamp to land and back again, complete with a hero and a romance. We didn’t always get each other’s inside jokes, but there was plenty of common ground. And most of all, it was fun.
Between the ferry ride and my book deadline, it was more than a month of e-mails before I headed out to meet him at the dock, driving an ugly green truck affectionately known as the Fug-150 (we had debated who drove the worst heap, which was another point in his favor). I fought a solid case of nerves, telling myself it was just another first date.
Only it wasn’t.
The walk-ons were just coming off the ferry as I drove in, and I saw a guy take one look at the Fug and head in my direction. I got out of the truck, and as he drew near, I realized he was all of the six-three he had listed in his description. Bundled against the cold of December in New England and wearing a fur-lined bomber hat, he looked about eight feet tall, making me feel small and girly.
And I, a romance writer who had always thought that love at first sight only existed in books, took one look at the fisherman, this stranger I already knew so intimately, and I thought: “Mine.”
~Jesse Hayworth
http://www.chickensoup.com/
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