Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

So tonight, I’m walking down First Avenue in the East Village on my way to dinner, and I pass Lanza’s restaurant. “Oh,” I say to myself. “Lanza’s. That’s where I had my first date after I moved to New York.” My date was Bill, whom I met through the Village Voice personals, back when the ads were in print and you either wrote a physical letter* or called a voice mailbox (which I think is what I did). I dated Bill for a while after that, though he turned out to be a Nice Guy™ and put me on a pedestal. He also gaslighted me, which was a lot of fun.

And then I start thinking about Bill, and about how long ago that first date was, and it suddenly hits me: Bill is 53 now.  I dated a man who’s now 53.

Which makes the fact that I’ve rejected several guys from OKCupid out of hand for being over 50 somewhat ironic.  Well, if by “ironic,” I mean, “indicative of not quite coming to terms with my own age.”

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* In my first job out of college, I worked at a newspaper in Connecticut.  One guy there had previously worked for the Springfield Advocate, which is not associated with the gay paper, but is part of a chain of alt-weeklies in Southern New England.  He said that one of the traditional things to do at someone’s goodbye lunch was to take the box of unclaimed mail from the personals and make the person read the letters out loud.  I’m kind of glad that technological advances have made this particular ritual obsolete.

And to make myself feel even older, I remembered that the daughter of another one of my coworkers, whom I used to babysit for extra cash, is now old enough to be starting college this year.