The Day She Met Marty

By this age, if we’re lucky, we’ve had the chance to fall in love with both a partner, and life itself. It sounds like baby boomer Jane Mohler Pigott has, in this paean to the day She Met Marty.

When I met Marty I was nearly convinced that life after fifty would be better alone than with partner who could not see me, could not recognize something familiar in my eyes, and had no lexicon for the artifacts that clutter my kitchen windowsill.

In the corner of the windowsill, there’s a very deep oyster shell yanked from a narrow gut on the eastern shore of Virginia. Two plastic gibbons with their arms raised commemorate the day at the Philadelphia Zoo when the gibbons were most in touch with their carnal side and friend Babs and I laughed to tears with admiration. An owl made of shell and bark is a reminder of days spent in graduate school far from the beach or the forest but on the hardscape of Temple University’s North Philly campus. A tiny clay bear sits solemnly assured of his importance as a Mother’s Day gift. There are corks, just a few when there could be an acre, one from The Great Wall Chardonnay, another from the serene and frumpy valley that bears my middle name Edna.

Next to the corks, the black and yellow Jitterbug— a jointed cigar-shaped fishing lure with a wide metal “wobbleplate” at its mouth to make it stagger and bubble on the water’s surface. I found the Jitterbug while drifting in my kayak. Tangled on some rocks, it had been left by the first owner who didn’t have boots or the eyesight to retrieve it. The Jitterbug is just one of the countless objects from moments spent before I met Marty.

When I met Marty he was concerned that whatever filament of attraction he had managed to attach to me would break if we did not share our thoughts every few hours, at least by email if not by phone. He was concerned that, with silence, I would be repelled by his nearly bald head, freckled crow’s feet and perhaps the belly that filled in between us when we kissed.

Yet when distracted from his inner voice, he appears comfortable in his stocky male body. A bit taller than me, he is thick and grounded like his Russian heritage; he looks like a man who should enjoy his beets several ways. He dressed in a black t-shirt that has a dark grey Fender guitar logo fading into the front, jeans, and slip-on black canvas sneakers with tiny white skulls decorating them, as if some Talbot’s designer had visited the catacombs. I looked at the shoes a lot on that date. I know the contentment from quietly wearing shoes designed for your children; we walk happier than our peers wearing acceptable loafers. We didn’t have to convince Mother to buy them either.

But as I looked at the shoes more and more I wanted to see Marty’s feet. I imagined that there would be hair on the top of both feet and on each blunt and full-sausage toe. I wanted to see them looking unabashedly male, built like heavy machinery for sturdiness and utility. I wanted to see them as if I had been his wife of thirty years and awoke like Snow White, to marvel, to be familiar, to know them, to suddenly realize those feet had carried him through a full and different shelf of artifacts to this night, to be warm on the cool summer park bench, next to me.

Jane Mohler Pigott lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.