Fully Unsupervised

I’ve written previously about the isolation and loneliness that can accompany the life of a single old guy. But one of the more attractive aspects of being entirely unattached is the freedom to make decisions that may appear non-logical, impulsive, or perhaps just plain crazy. I’m accountable to no one. I can go a little nuts whenever I want, and there is no one around to intervene.

A recent example comes to mind.

So there I was, innocently watching television, when a Subaru commercial appeared featuring the redesigned 2026 Crosstrek. Now, I have owned three Subarus over the years: a 1999 Forester, a 2007 Forester, and my current 2020 Crosstrek. Naturally, I paid attention.

Wow, lookin’ good, I thought.

On a whim, I picked up my iPad, visited the website for our local Subaru dealership, and began browsing inventory. Before long, I found myself looking at a blue 2026 Crosstrek and noticing a button inviting me to receive an online trade-in quote for my current vehicle. Foolishly, I took the bait. I answered a few questions, anticipating that they might respond with either an attractively optimistic number, or at least a reasonable range.

Instead, what followed was a parade of generic emails from the dealership’s “internet sales” department, none of which really answered my question. I replied more than once, attempting to redirect the conversation back toward the trade-in value. Eventually, an actual human being emailed me with a range.

The low end was mildly discouraging. The high end, however, got my attention.

More emails followed. Eventually, they persuaded me to stop by so they could evaluate the car in person. While my Crosstrek was out being test-driven, the salesman asked whether he could also put together numbers on a new vehicle.

I shrugged and said “sure.”

What came back was disappointing. They valued my trade-in (low mileage! very clean!) at the absolute bottom of the quoted range while simultaneously presenting a rather ambitious price for the new Crosstrek that most interested me. So I walked.

To be fair, I had warned them from the beginning that I was mostly window shopping and not particularly serious about buying a car right now. The sales manager followed up afterward, and I reiterated that point. I also informed him, diplomatically enough, that the salesman he had assigned me was not someone from whom I would ever purchase a vehicle.

More emails followed.

Would I consider a used vehicle? A different trim level? Another salesperson? (“I have just the guy.”)

And honestly, the sales manager seemed sincere. (Or am I just naïve?) He appeared genuinely interested in finding a way to make a deal happen. So I kept casually browsing inventory online and eventually noticed another Crosstrek that checked most of the boxes, especially the safety-related features I cared about. I agreed to come back in, meet Joseph, the alternate salesman, and take a test drive.

2026 Subaru Crosstrek Premium

Well, of course, that was doom.

The new interior was even more cockpit-like than my current car. It drove beautifully. It looked terrific. The entire thing felt smooth, quiet, and just futuristic enough to flatter me into imagining myself as the sort of person who should own one.

I agreed to let them run the numbers again.

I still balked. The trade-in figure remained lower than I wanted, and I had become increasingly fixated on including an extended warranty in any final deal. One of my thoughts at that stage was this: if I could get a new car with a seven-year warranty, I would probably be set, vehicle-wise, until age 86. (Honestly, who knows if I will even be alive that long, much less still driving?! But this did feel like a legitimate plan.)

So naturally, we went back and forth on the numbers for a bit. Eventually, they came close enough to the bottom-line figure I had in mind and, after a very long afternoon, I drove off the lot in a new 2026 Crosstrek.

There was no one around to question my choices. Or stop me. Freedom and loneliness, it turns out, often arrive as part of the same package.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Baby, you can drive my car
Yes, I’m gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my car
And maybe I’ll love you

Beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah

(“Drive My Car” — The Beatles)

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Karma

In my last post, I offered a condensed, Reader’s Digest version of my last relationship. As with any such account, it is only one version of the story. Gwen, of course, surely has her own.

As it turns out, at one point, she told it. In 2022, she gave me a copy of Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less, and inside she wrote a 90-word account of our first three years together. Given how often we broke up and then found our way back, I cannot say exactly where we stood at the time, or even what prompted the gift.

She entitled this “Karma.”

We met on my 65th birthday, two self-contained people looking for a spark, maybe love. And we found it, with a depth of recognition and connection that felt like tendrils reaching centuries back. Potent love was never in doubt. But however strong, that love didn’t pave over centuries-old rutted roads and ensure a gentle ride this time around. Alexander Pope says Hope Springs Eternal. That was our mantra for three years. And yet. He tried. I tried. Maybe the ride will be smoother in another century. Hope still springs eternal.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

This love of mine
Had no beginning
It has no end
I was an oak,
Now I’m a willow
Now I can bend
And tho’ I’ll never
In my life see you again
I still stay
Until it’s time for you to go

(“Until It’s Time For You To Go” — Buffy Sainte-Marie)

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The Shape of What Didn’t Hold

Not long ago, I wrote about Lauren Kessler’s Everything Changes Everything, a memoir that revolves around love, loss, and what it means to keep on living. It is, in many ways, a simple proposition. We form attachments. We lose them. And then, ready or not, we find a way to move on.

My last significant relationship, with Gwen (not her real name), comes to mind when I think about all that.

We met on her sixty-fifth birthday, in March 2019, when I was in my early seventies. I remember attaching a certain significance to that date, as if the timing itself carried meaning. At our age, it felt possible, even sensible, to imagine that what began then might be the last relationship for each of us. There was comfort in that idea. An appeal. A sense of arrival. Or at least of being done with new beginnings.

What followed, instead, was the start of a pattern that led to considerable pain for both of us.

We broke up and then reconciled many more times than I can count. Our endings never quite held. Sometimes they were quiet, other times louder and more-obviously decisive, but during the five years we tried, I became conditioned to believe that none of them were truly final.

She had many ways of reappearing in my life: a text; a voicemail; a call; more than once, a knock on my door. At one point, a sighting on the bike path resulted in a conversation that turned into something else. Then, despite whatever resolve I had constructed in her absence, I would find myself drawn back in.

In March 2020, I started back into therapy. It was there that I was introduced to Attachment Theory, which provided a framework for understanding what felt, at the time, both confusing and inevitable. In simple terms, some individuals move toward closeness when a bond feels uncertain, while others move away when the closeness feels threatening. The anxiously-attached partner leans in, trying to secure the connection. The avoidantly-attached one withdraws, trying to protect a sense of independence. Neither position feels optional from the inside; people are, in many ways, hard-wired from early in life.

Gwen and I fit this pattern with an uneasy and predictable precision. The more distance I felt, the more I tried to close it. The more I tried to close it, the more she needed to back away. While there was an intensity to our reunions that suggested a renewed closeness, it rarely held for long.

Over time, I came to understand a bit more about her beginnings. As the oldest child, early in life she was left with her grandmother for a time while her mother went on to build a life that did not include her. I do not pretend to draw straight lines from that fact, but it is not difficult to imagine how early abandonment might echo later in life, shaping how closeness is approached and how distance is managed.

Of course, it is only fair to acknowledge that I brought my own baggage into this relationship. My mother was physically present throughout my childhood, but I rarely experienced her as emotionally available or supportive. Looking back, it is not hard to see how that absence, of a different kind, may have left its own imprint, shaping my need for reassurance and a hyper-sensitivity to distance.

We even tried, toward the end, to step out of our destructive pattern and call it “friendship.” That, too, proved to be fraught with difficulty. Too much had been said, and unsaid. Too many endings had left us wounded and scarred. Whatever ease friendship requires, we had long since worn it down.

In the end, the final separation came not with a shared understanding, but with a story that could hold. She came to see me as the one who had wronged her, and while I did not share that view, I came to understand how it made a clean ending possible where none had existed before. She stopped knocking on my door.

Now, as I approach my seventy-ninth birthday, I see quite clearly how much of this decade of life was spent inside a relationship that just did not have enough positive emotional adhesive to endure. We’re now over two years down the road from our last contact and I still think of all the painful times shaped by that push-and-pull dynamic. As Kessler reminds us, life continues, making its way around and through both the love and the loss.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

I was on my way to you and I was worried
I was all torn up and nervous cause I knew that you’d be gone
I knocked and crossed my fingers while I waited
And I couldn’t hold the teardrops when I walked away alone

It’s all over, it’s all over, my heart echoed
Every minute that you cry for her is wasted don’t you know
It’s all over, it’s all over, so forget her
Stop your cryin’ turn around and let her go, let her go, boy
Let her go

(“It’s All Over” — Johnny Cash)

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Horizontal Compatibility

Online dating, at my age, raises questions one does not always anticipate. Some of them, it turns out, are… positional.

Not long ago, a woman on OurTime (a dating site for seniors) recently “liked” my profile. I liked her back and sent a message suggesting that we meet. Then: nothing. Four weeks passed. I ultimately filed the whole thing away under “oh, well.” I admit, I forgot all about her.

But eventually she wrote back.

So then I found myself, somewhat to my own surprise, heading out for my first first date since March 2019. This fact alone felt like an event worth noting.

The meeting itself, at a local Starbucks, went well. More than well, actually. We talked for more than an hour and a half without effort. The conversation had range, some depth, even a bit of spark. At the end, there was a hug that she initiated. Not the standard-issue, socially-prescribed hug, but a long, sustained, quietly-mutual embrace. The kind of physical contact that lingers just enough to suggest possibility.

I drove home thinking, well, that was nice.

The next day, I wrote to say I’d enjoyed meeting her and would be glad to get together again.

Her reply was, and I quote:

“id like to meet again if we spend most of that time hugging. Hmm where would that be possible”

Now, as suggestions go, this was not one I was inclined to reject. I even confessed, in a moment of candor, that I might qualify as a very touch-deprived individual. And so it seemed that we had entered into a mildly flirtatious exchange, one with a surprisingly clear agenda.

But then came the practical question: where does one go to engage in sustained, low-ambiguity hugging?

She thought maybe a park. A blanket. Perhaps a picnic.

And now it is here is where the narrative takes a decisive turn toward the absurd.

I explained, as plainly as I could, that lying on the ground — grass, sand, or any other surface that requires one to interface directly with the planet — is not something my back, hip, and leg nerves are inclined to negotiate well. This was not about getting up afterward. This was about being down there in the first place. So, yep, I had reservations about this idea.

And let’s be clear: we are talking about two 78-year-olds here. The image of both of us gracefully arranging ourselves on a blanket, then remaining there in some extended state of horizontal embrace, begins to feel less like romance and more like a logistical exercise requiring advance planning and possibly the temporary services of a personal aide.

Her response was brief and decisive. Again, I quote:

“Regretfully, if you’re not capable of laying down on a blanket with me, I guess we’re not a match”

And just like that, a door closed.

There is something almost admirable in the specificity, simplicity and clarity of the rejection. Not about conversation. Not about compatibility. Not about chemistry. Entirely about: blanket viability.

One imagines her revising her profile to include: “Must enjoy meaningful conversation and prolonged horizontal hugging in outdoor settings.”

Rejection, however it arrives, still has a way of landing, though. And land it did. Not dramatically, but just enough to be noticed, a small shift in the internal weather. And then, as these things tend to do, the storm passed, leaving behind the memory of that unexpectedly good hug.

Thank you, universe, for that.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

And when the night falls, and when the sky falls,
I long for your embrace.
Another daybreak, another heartache,
I long for your embrace.

(“Embrace” — Bee Gees)

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Shrinking

“Shrinking.” noun: a popular series on Apple TV.

“Shrinking.” adjective: becoming smaller in size or amount.

Lately, the word brings the TV show to mind first. Harrison Ford, Jason Segel, and Jessica Williams play therapists sharing a small private practice. I’m quite fond of it. It manages to be funny while taking on friendship, parenting, grief, and the frequent ethical angle. I really look forward to each episode.

But there is also a more personal meaning these days: becoming smaller in size. It turns out that is not just a definition; it is my life.

The older I get, the smaller my world becomes.

Last fall I traveled to my high school reunion, only the second trip I’ve taken since the pandemic. Both trips have been to small-town northern Wisconsin. Travel has become such a physical ordeal that I now approach it with the strategic planning of a minor military operation. Fortunately, I had enough frequent flier miles to upgrade to first class each time. I am not sure I would have survived the cattle-car-in-the-back alternative. Or at least with not much dignity; my claustrophobic tendencies would likely have taken up too much attention.

Closer to home, my world has settled into a familiar circuit. The UPS store for my Amazon packages. Three grocery stores in regular rotation. And then the medical offices. So many medical offices! I seem to have assembled quite an impressive team of specialists, each responsible for a different body part that is no longer performing as originally advertised. Most of these businesses and offices are in North Eugene where I live. My ophthalmologist, pain doc, and therapist are in South Eugene.

Yes, I have a therapist. At this age. I still have issues.

There is also my daily walk, which remains essential for body, mind and spirit. Not that long ago I was walking three miles a day, more than a thousand miles a year. These days I manage about one mile, often pausing halfway to stretch and negotiate with my back. Spinal stenosis and its accompanying nerve pain have reset expectations. They have also reduced how often I attend protests or head out with a camera, both once reliable parts of my routine.

And then there is my height. I used to measure 5 foot 7 at my annual physical. Last month, even standing as tall as I could, I came in just under 5 foot 5. Apparently, I am not only aging, I am compressing. Yes, I have osteoporosis. I do not like this. In high school I was among the shortest in my class, often the last chosen for teams. I remember the feelings of inadequacy that resulted. While I am no longer being chosen for teams, the world is still a different place for a short man. It always has been.

What I am left with, it seems, is a smaller map. Fewer miles traveled, fewer places to go, fewer things I can easily do. Even a shorter reach upward.

Despite everything, though, I seem to be getting a better look at what’s right in front of me.

And if necessary, I suppose, I can always stand on tiptoe.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Well, I don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
‘Round here

Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
To love

(“Short People” — Randy Newman)

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