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Jan 9, 2004 It usually turned out that anyone I found interesting online would not find me interesting, while the people that were proactive in contacting me were not my type. So finding a likely dating candidate took time and effort. The dating site produced a few possibilities but Echo was the first one I actually met. Echo was, it turned out, not just a screenname for someone, but her actual first name. She was born in Hawaii of a native mother and an Italian father and had come to the continental US to attend college. Echo was a nurse and lived alone save for her mother, who had come to live with her as a near invalid and was now housebound. She was a Christian lady who spent most of her time working, taking care of her mom and spending lots of time online. She had not had a boyfriend in quite some time and had been married once, years before. She now thought she wanted to have a relationship that might lead to marriage and therefore was trying a dating website for the first time. The picture on her dating profile page was great and after we traded emails for awhile and then graduated to instant messages and phone calls, she sent two more pictures. I was ready, I thought, to actually meet her. We agreed to meet at a Greek restaurant which was within 15 minutes of my home. We would meet at seven o’clock for dinner, each driving our own car. I would wear the same shirt I wore in the last picture I sent to her, and she would be wearing, she said, a yellow dress. I arrived ten minutes early and ordered a coffee. After twenty minutes I began to worry. I know that it is not unusual for a woman to be late (okay, ladies, you don’t all have to email me and tell me I am sexist, it is just an observation based on my life experience!) and so I did not really begin to think I had been stood up until she was a half-hour late. At that point I began to decide when it would be appropriate for me to just leave. At 7:30 a very small woman with very long black hair walked in to the room. She was gorgeous! Her hair streamed down her back to past her waist and her large eyes were scanning the room. She saw me and smiled. I stood, she walked up and hugged me and then we sat. “I’m so sorry I was late! I just couldn’t decide on which dress to wear. I wanted to look really good for you” I realized her dress was not yellow at all, but perhaps tan with a subdued print. “Well, you succeeded. You really are very pretty.” “Thank you, and you are more handsome than your picture.” She tilted her head a bit, like she was looking at me from another angle. I was thinking how glad I was that I had not left the restaurant and how glad I was she thought I was handsome. At various times I had been told that I resembled Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers and Bob Seger depending on whether I was wearing a beard. No one had ever said I looked like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty so I was going to take handsome anytime I could get it! We talked through dinner and I noticed little things about her. She had a vague dusting of barely discernible freckles on and around her nose. Her hands were small and yet they were longish and slender. When our eyes met there was a little thrill of mutual attraction mirrored there. Echo invited me to see her home, which was close by. One of the first things she did was take me to her bedroom, open up her closet and show me a dress she wanted to wear “The first time she went to church with me”. I was given the grand tour of the house, sans the bedroom in which her mother stayed for she was already asleep. She made coffee and we sat on a couch in the front room. Echo put a Kenny Loggins album on the stereo and we sipped coffee and talked. I had, since the time I had become officially engaged to my first wife, not kissed another woman. This now encompassed a passage of about 23 years of time since last I kissed a woman. I had not kissed any woman I had spent time with since becoming single again. Sitting there with Echo I felt a real sense of loss, the loss of romance, and I began to think about kissing her. Echo was waving her hands and playing with her long hair as she talked about being an emergency room nurse. I was wondering if I would be rejected if I sought a kiss. I turned myself to look more directly at her and found my arm going around her shoulders. I was going to tell her that I would like a kiss, but her head moved towards mine and mine moved to hers. My first dating kiss since Jimmy Carter was President! “I like you” she said, when we came up for air, “And I liked that kiss!” “I was kind of enjoying it myself…” “I’d like more…….next time.” She decided as she got up from the couch. It seemed to me that it was an invitation to leave. “But I am flying to Hawaii tomorrow morning and I will be gone for a week. Think you’ll still want to see me when I get back?” “Uhm-hum” I mumbled and pulled her in for another kiss before leaving. It was even better this time. I could feel my heart shifting into third gear. I was armed with a phone number in Hawaii I could call if I wanted to reach her while she was gone and a whiff of her perfume that managed to attach itself to my shirt. I was about to leave when she reached out to me, pulled me very close and whispered in my ear. She told me a secret. In the next segment, I will have to share it with you. ------------ About the author: Kimbal Ross Binder is a husband of one wife and parent of six child units of various sizes. He is a tennis bum, karaoke singer, punster and a reformed liberal who now admires Rush Limbaugh and hates to miss Fox News in the evening. You can pass along plaudits and invectives to: radarbinder@comcast.net Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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