The Chrome Phase

My phone rang at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. Rather than being alarmed, I pulled myself out of sleep and reached for it. I didn't even look at the number; I already knew who it was. “Hey,” I answered in my raspy, middle-of-the-night, just-woke-up-from-a-dream-about-you voice. My inflection was deliberate. Perry and I, we’d done this a million times. “Hi, honey,” I heard on the other end. I felt prickles through my arms and legs. Not at all the voice I was expecting. “Oh, hey Rob,” I replied as casually as possible despite the fact that my heart was exploding with every beat. If Rob knew I was expecting a call from another man at this time of night, especially Perry, he would flip. Rob knew that Perry and I had a past, so he assumed that Perry and I also had a present. The truth was that the present was nothing more than witching-hour phone calls that often wandered towards sunrise. Perry and I had a close bond. Nothing wrong in my book, but Rob’s book was much diff...

“Can I give you a hand with that?” said the man in the liquor store parking lot. I wish I had known that that would be the last time I heard those words all night. I was standing there in the cold rain, wearing a dress, heels, and wool overcoat. I was a half-mile from my house, stopping for a bottle of wine because I knew I was going to need it. I didn’t want to deal with my evening’s project in my work clothes, so I planned to go home and change into a raincoat and grubby jeans first.  “No, thank you sir,” said I to the kind man. “I live down the street, so I’m just going to take it home.” I drove home, slowly and carefully, on a very flat tire. My mind and body had kicked into what I call “survival mode”. I recognized it immediately, because it wasn’t so long ago the last time it happened (the Derecho /epic power outage/absurd heat wave/car crash of June 2012). I was starving, and I’m pretty sure I had to pee, but I forgot to deal with either basic function because I was foc...

Good advice for all of us spinsters. My little paperback dictionary defines “Spinster” simply as “an unmarried woman”. That’s an overly-simplified definition for a word that carries such stigma, so I prefer the more descriptive offerings that Word provides for synonyms: “Unattached”, “Bachelor”, and my personal favorite “Free”. Spinsters today seem to gravitate towards the term “Cougar” when narrowing their entire essence into one word, but that also carries a lot of negative connotations. Based on my own observations, when I think of a cougar (in the non-feline sense of the word), I envision a woman at least a decade older than me dressed up like a woman at least a decade younger than me going out to a bar that I haven’t been to in at least a decade and wholeheartedly trying to bring home a man (boy) at least two decades younger than herself. Not one stitch of me fits that description. Now that I’ve arrived at an age where people seem genuinely concerned about me simply becau...