Swim Lessons

Posted on by Giddyup,Linda!
I watch my friend Jo swim laps in our neighborhood pool and admire her steady stroke, cutting through the cerulean water with little effort.  As she glides to the pool's edge and somersaults under the water, I see her swim cap bob up again without missing a beat. She urges me to get in.  "Nah, I'll go down like a rock," I tell her. "Come on, I'll teach you how," she says. Not today, my friend.  When I was a kid, my mother told me that she had a bad... Read More

Man of Letters

Posted on by Giddyup,Linda!
Beware the pen pal. He reached out across the vast Tinder wasteland and said he liked my profile and could I meet him for breakfast? This was some years ago and he, in Palm Springs on vacation, had posted photos of himself looking as pure and smooth as a well-aged Canadian whiskey, a guy who could’ve had an Olympic pedigree with his tall, lanky physique, chiseled jaw and mop of silver hair that begged to be touched. I couldn’t make a date work with my full schedule, but he parted... Read More

Uncharted

Posted on by Giddyup,Linda!
I took a trip early in my singlehood to a place that will forever be on my list of beautiful vacation destinations: Sun Valley, an Idaho resort town where I’d never been before. But the difference about this getaway from the others I’d taken since my divorce? It was my first foray outside my comfort zone with a man–a straight, single man whom I met through mutual friends. We had emailed and talked on the phone for months, so I knew he was who he said he was, and that... Read More

Chemistry 101

Posted on by Giddyup,Linda!
I don’t expect every date to feel like the chemistry experiments my lab partner and I muddled through in high school, the ones where the desired outcome was an exciting, and sometimes explosive, reaction. That word desire, however, continues to confound me just like Chemistry class did. In a romance, it’s certainly more fun when there's a mutual desire that clicks. But finding it and keeping it feel a bit like digging through the earth's crust to China. I’d been in the dating pool for two years when I met... Read More

“I Like Sex”

Posted on by Giddyup,Linda!
When the trash truck rear-ended my car while I was stopped at an intersection, I should have suspended all dating plans for fear of what comes next. Not a real woo-woo girl in general, I still take note of full moons, that damn Mercury in retrograde and the resulting whiplash that happens when an 8,000-pound vehicle slams into my bumper. Days before, my dermatologist cut into my left cheek (the one on my face) and sliced away a basal cell carcinoma, leaving about an inch-long line of black stitches crawling... Read More