The dearth of responses I received - one of every 50? - played into all the insecurities I’d worked so hard to overcome. Reduced to my meta data, however - 5-foot-5, 65 years old - I was nobody special. No Stephen King or David Remnick, maybe, but somebody who, after 45 years of working in the field, managed to make a mark, to help other writers, to earn a modicum of approval from those who knew. The work I did commanded money and respect. I wrote important stories, and some pretty weird ones, too. Never a good student, a bit on the chubby side, an “atrocious” speller, the smallest guy on the intercollegiate soccer team, neither worldly nor connected with the ivy-credentialed fraternity of literary endeavor I’d eventually choose, I’d hustled hard to find my path as a writer, to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, to excel. In no small way, my lack of success on these aps triggered some of my deepest lifelong issues. Not mention the bundles of good faith and hope I was spending: Maybe this will be the one to free me from this solitary sentence in purgatory. At today’s top rates of $2 a word, I figure I was sending each of these strangers at least $100 worth of free writing. After all, I’m a decorated professional writer. When someone appeared promising, I’d spend 15 or 20 minutes crafting a greeting/appeal I considered witty, sensitive, intelligent, and well written admittedly the descriptor “off the wall” could have also been applied at times (depending upon how deep into happy hour I’d gotten), but I was trying to put my best self forward. (Like most people, I tried several over time.) I’d spend a solitary happy hour sipping tequila on the rocks and shopping through the offerings on the platform I was patronizing. With no other choices on the horizon, I descended into the Dante-esque world of electronic dating.Īnd so it became my nightly ritual. Like a game of musical chairs, the music had stopped, and I had nowhere to sit down.Īs time passed, I reached the conclusion that nobody would magically appear unsolicited at my front door and ring the bell. When last we met on these pages, I was 65, two years into my COVID hermitage, facing down my 53rd Valentine’s Day as an active player in the ecstatic, brutal, game of love.Īfter a lifetime of relationships, I’d become found myself unexpectedly solo. Though it is only just turned February, it occurs to me that spring is already on the way. There are hummingbirds, doves, mockingbirds, and other small birds I can’t call by name, all of them in pairs - perching, cavorting, canoodling, flying wing to wing, playing chase. Like a pair of ice dancers, they mirror each other’s movements, swooping together and then drifting apart, an airborne pas de deux.Īll around me, a symphony of birdsong supplies a musical accompaniment. It settles into the same general air space as the first. (The mice and lizards and other small creatures in the canyon are likely not so enraptured by the beauty and miracle of flight they are about to become lunch.) Other times, it seems as if hawks are just flying around for the f*ck of it, joyriding, because it feels so good to be knifing through the air, spiraling higher and higher, pulling dives and loops and tricks like an old school bi-plane in a barnstorming air show.Īs I watch, a second hawk glides into view. Sometimes, I know, this type of activity indicates hunting behavior. In the majestic way hawks do, it traces lazy parabolas in the air, riding the currents of the ocean breeze. It is close enough I can see the dappled coloring on its belly and tail, the finger-like feathers on either end of its wings. In the middle distance, a hawk glides into view. It is the time of the day I like to leave my desk and sit for a few minutes outside my office, in the splintery embrace of a weathered old Adirondack chair, the tilt of which comforts my hinky neck and aims my eyes upward.Īfter two weeks of torrential rains, the big sky is again bright blue, with high wispy clouds stretching to the horizon. The wet sage and cayote brush in the canyon, the dark besotted ground, the delicate colorful florets of the lantana, the camphoraceous leaves of the mighty eucalyptus - from which issues most evenings the spooky hoot hoot hooting of an owl - all of it simmers in the strong, late-morning light, giving off a delicate potpourri of earthy scents. After the deluge, the sun returns to Southern California.
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