How Old is Too Old to Fall in Love?

I wrote A Fairy Tale Dinner which is posted in The Gullet. I will post the link to that story at the end of this one. A friend asked for more About Julia and Woody; that is what this is. 

..............

I’d been retired so long I thought life’s big adventures were over for me. My future would be living in my snug little house, cleaning it when it needed it, decluttering when I was bored. I’d do my volunteer gigs, read, and watch detective shows. I’d keep on cooking healthy meals for myself and friends, then discreetly driving out for drive-through sundaes. This is the modus operandi for contented older people. Tell oneself nothing much is going to happen. Certainly the future no longer contains romance. If one wants to chase that they might as well move to Florida. 

So when Woody Calixto - my neighbor aka dinner party crasher - invited me to dinner I smiled and said sure. This wasn’t a date. It was simply an opportunity to become friends with a new person. After all, my husband Greg and I had loved each other body and soul all our adult lives. After he died it took years just to breathe again. I had no longing to find love again. Love is where you find grief.

Still, Woody’s invitation startled something in me. I realized this as I stood in front of my closet peering ‘further up and further in” like a Narnian woodchuck. Like any teenager dressing for a date, I riffled through my clothes with unusual attention. I found dark pants, a dark silky shirt, and the beautiful silver and turquoise necklace that Greg had given me on a trip out west. I looked pretty fine, if I do say so myself. Sort of like a distinguished older diplomat. 

The meal was delicious. I drank Merlot and ate all my lasagna. I know there are people who eat half and take the other half home but that’s not me when the food is that good. Then when Woody ordered cannoli for dessert, I ate half that, too. I told Woody it was too late to pursue slender. He replied that I am beautiful. We stared at each other because he had not expected to go there so fast and I had not expected it either. 

He gulped and bravely ploughed sidewards. “Speaking of cannoli, my dog Max loves to chase rabbits even though he’s on a leash. A couple years ago I was diagnosed with a heart condition that’s now under control, but I need to take care of myself. My cardiologist recommended I try intermittent three-minute bursts of exercise. So now I chase rabbits with Max.” We both broke into laughter; we were back in safe territory. The evening ended sitting on his front porch, still talking. The moon rose over houses across the street while stars came out and street lights winked on.

After that wonderful evening we did more things together. Painted his remodeled kitchen. Hiked in parks near us. He helped me change an overhead fan in my house. We volunteered together to cook dinners at a shelter. We made each other think and laugh and that’s a lot when one lives alone.

But then Woody mentioned to his son and daughter-in-law that he’d met me. Royal and Lissa apparently assumed I was their dad’s new partner so they came out from the city to meet me. I brought a cheesecake swirled with rhubarb from my garden after which there was a lot of enthusiasm about me. 

They admired Woody’s new kitchen. He explained that he’d started by calling the local Habitat for Humanity reStore. They came to his house to remove the old cabinets for no charge other than a donation and then they kept those cabinets to resell. 

Lissa, who was a pediatrician at a medical clinic in a city neighborhood, suddenly interrupted. “Oh! You guys! You could help us!”

 “What?”

“Our clinic just remodeled and now we have all these cabinets, cupboards, and some medical equipment that are still in serviceable condition. One of our techs is from a reservation in South Dakota so she made some calls. There’s a rural clinic close to where she grew up, twenty miles from Pine Ridge, way out in the hills. They’d love to have our furnishings. We were going to ship them but the cost is prohibitive. 

“Right now everything’s crammed in a storage area but you guys could drive it to South Dakota! Maybe even stay a day or two to help them install it? We’d pay fees and gas and you could have a cool adventure. I’ve thought about Royal and I doing it but we don’t have the time. Would you think about it?”

All we had done was enjoy a pleasant dinner and here we were, a month later, dispatched on a quest. 

……..

We arrived at the Milwaukee discount truck rental by 9AM on a weekday morning. The big white truck had already been packed tighter than a Rubik’s cube by volunteers from Lissa’s clinic. We would be moving cabinets, cupboards, desks, examining tables, swivel chairs, some EKG monitors, plus a huge, brown waiting room sofa. Woody and I jammed our suitcases in the very back and then pulled down the tailgate. Woody drove first because one of his college jobs, he told me, was driving a produce truck in Portland, Oregon. I joked about men who claim “fifty-year since…” skills, but I also was glad because I do not like complicated driving. If had been up to me, the truck might still be in Milwaukee. Which might not have been a mistake.

A rental truck is not luxurious. The motor was noisy. The barely padded bench seat bounced and jounced. Woody glanced at me as he negotiated our way out of the city. “Noisy, isn’t it?” 

“What?”

We laughed. He leaned over to find something on the radio but there was only static. I tried music from my phone but the noise of the truck drowned it out. We resorted to occasionally waving to each other. 

Past Madison he stopped at a rest area to switch drivers. Of course, as soon as I took over, orange barrels and looming construction equipment with swinging cranes appeared. Traffic slowed to one thin tight lane that I white-knuckled for twenty miles. 

Finally we came out of that mess. Cars sped up and spread around us into both lanes like gazelles trying to get around a large mule. 

Right then the truck’s growling slowed down. Something clunked. The truck shuddered. And then the noise stopped. We were in the right lane of 75-mph traffic in a large truck with no power. I swerved off the expressway to jounce hard, tip slightly, sink into the gravel, and roll to a stop half on the shoulder, half on rutted grass and weeds.

Woody leaned over to flip the emergency flasher, “Take your phone. Get out from my side so no one hits you. We’re getting out of here until we know what just happened.”

But we would never learn what happened. Condensation in the gas lines? Rusty connections? Gremlins? 

So many calls to make while standing in the blazing sun, on uneven ground, ten feet from major interstate traffic. Waiting for cops. Waiting for the rental company to call us several times to update us about what they could and would do. A tow truck. A new moving truck driven to us from a town an hour away. Waiting for movers the rental company somehow hired from that area. Whom we would need to pay. 

Momentary terror morphed into sweaty headaches under the July sun. We were next to an enormous cornfield. No trees anywhere. Time stretched and crawled.

Woody got our suitcases from the back of the truck. He opened his to pull the most bedraggled plaid bathrobe I’d ever seen. He shook it open on the ground at the edge of the field and then swept his arm as if inviting me to Cinderella’s ball. I sat down. He sat next to me. I looked at the frayed collar of the robe; the sleeves hung with unraveling threads. 

I understood. “Gerrie gave this to you, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. I could explain but I bet I don’t need to.”

I took a big breath. “I sleep in Greg’s T-shirts.”

He shrugged. There was nothing to say. 

He made another phone call and not too long later a car pulled up behind our line of tow truck, broken truck, good truck, and the squad car monitoring the fraught situation. A middle aged woman eased out of a car with a Door Dash sticker on it. She walked towards us with a bags of burgers, fries, and sodas. He’d even ordered enough for the movers and cops, which made everyone considerably more cheerful. 

“You’re good at this, Woody.”

“Good at what?”

“Fixing problems. When I met you, you turned my cat’s villainy into a humane society fundraiser and here you still are.”

He shrugged. “I can’t sing, play any instrument, hunt, fish, or throw a basketball through hoop. My skill is getting out of scrapes. I had a lot of practice as a kid and even more as an adult.” 

Without thinking, I reached to curve my hand around his face. “Well, I like you.”

He lifted his hand to cover mine. “Ditto.”

We rented two motel rooms that night because that’s what we’d decided when we planned this trip. We were each financially secure enough to avoid sharing a room when we were not sure we wanted to do that. So after that long fraught day, we walked to a restaurant close to the motel, ate quickly, then walked back to my room. We sat on my bed to watch TV and, of course, immediately fell asleep. Both of us. Woody woke a half hour later, chuckled loudly enough to wake me as he kissed the top of my head and went back to his room. 

The next day was long. There were hours to make up. It was windy so we had to stay under sixty miles an hour. We were so sore from that seat that we stopped every few hours to grab our backs and moan, then walk and stretch. It was already late afternoon when we finally turned off the expressway, drove around Badlands National Park, then found the smaller highway to take us west. Then a local gravel road going south. Then a driveway in the middle of nowhere leading, or so it seemed, nowhere. The directions said to turn by the mailbox that was a blue teepee with a red cross. We bounced slowly to drive around a rise, and there, finally, was a blue cement block building with a red cross on the front wall. 

When we rolled the windows down hot winds blew into the cab of the truck. The world was absolutely beautiful but it was also absolutely deserted. No cars anywhere. The clinic door was locked. Woody leaned against the truck to call people. There was no cell service. 

It was six in the evening and we’d been on the road since seven. Woody exhaled long and slow. I thought he was finally going to hit something or swear. I thought frustration, anger, and weariness would unravel us both.

Instead he shook his head as he half chuckled “Well, if this were going smoothly, it wouldn’t be a quest, right? Then it would be an errand.”

That made me smile. “Woody, your brain is whirling so fast I can almost hear it. Are you going to solve this, too?”

He grinned back at me. “Gonna try. Let’s walk up that hill.”

“Okay. But do we have snake resisting equipment?”

“Good point.” He went to the back of the truck, rolled up the tailgate, pulled out our hiking poles. “They could probably sell more of these canes if they called them snake sticks. Sounds more macho, you know?”

The thing we were learning was that even though the wide prairie looked endlessly featureless, that was not even close to true. There were rises and ridges. There were washes that could become streams or rivers when it rained. Yet most of the time people and animals walked on or through the washes; they were natural sidewalks wending around the lowest places in the topography. 

So we walked away from the back of the clinic, following a faint path inside a wash that took us around that hill. And there, of course, a couple hundred feet away, was a modest, blue-painted cement block house. Sunflowers grew next to the wall. We knocked on its red painted door.

We’d been told that young doctors do two-year on-site residencies in this isolated clinic. We were not overly surprised when a black-haired, black-eyed woman in jeans and t-shirt answered our knock. “Oh, you’re here! I’m Dr. Gia, though we are not formal out here. Just call me Gia. I thought maybe something had happened so you weren’t coming until tomorrow. But hooray! You’re here! We’re eager to see what you brought us! Just a minute, let me call in the teeming hordes.”

She picked up her cellphone to call someone.

Woody’s forehead wrinkled. “We tried to call you from the clinic but there was no cell service.”

She grinned. “Yeah. No. There IS service out here but you have to know where to stand and that changes depending on cloud cover. Sorry.”

Within a half hour three teenagers, two boys and a girl, all with long, flying hair, arrived on two horses. I started to laugh because never in my long life had I encountered real horses being used as actual transportation. The kids realized Woody and I were way out of our comfort zone but that we didn’t care. So they laughed, too, as they introduced their horses; one named Taylor and the other Swift. The kids and Gia started unpacking the truck and we helped. There was a garage behind the clinic in which we stacked everything. 

When we were done, we were exhausted. Yet the western sky was lava-lamping into a gold and rose sunset. Gia found camping chairs and plus some dollar store snacks. We sat with this young physician, those three good-natured teenagers. We drank sugary drinks and munched generic Oreos with people descended from the people who’d lived here nearly forever. The Milky Way shone over us like a celestial rhinestone belt. 

While we relaxed we also made arrangements. We should come back the next evening for a potluck dinner with several families. Plans could be made then about installing everything over the weekend.

Gia hesitated. “The weather might be poor tomorrow evening so, um, my advice would be to bring extra underwear and a toothbrush.”

Woody nodded that that made sense, then stood up and then turned to offer me his hand to get out of my chair. “Julia and I feel as though we are on a rather magical quest and it doesn’t seem to be over yet.”

Gia smiled, “You two are good together. But you’re still deciding about that, aren’t you?”

I looked at her sideway. “You’re intuitive.”

The teenage girl giggled, “She’s also nosy.”

Gia laughed, “Part of my job.”

………..

We returned the truck the next morning where the rental guy also mentioned the incoming storm. On his advice we rented a 4WD SUV. It was much quieter than the truck. There were springs in the seats. There was Bluetooth so we could listen to music.

But it was still massive. Woody drove the loop road into the beautiful Tatooine moonscape of Badlands National Park. We pulled off at every overview to admire the amazing vistas and sometimes hike the trails. The park was filled with people, kids, dogs on leashes, and creaky old retirees in homely hats. It was vacation time in an American national park and it was hectic. 

But also, for us, it was private. People were everywhere but none of them were our people. We hiked two hours in the afternoon; towards the end we sank to the ground against a butte that loomed over us. Hot wind whooshed as we munched granola bars and drank water. 

I leaned against the warm side of that butte. Woody was quiet, then he took my hand, pulled it to his mouth, and kissed it. I tilted my head to watch him as he looked into the distance, my hand still in his.

“Woody?”

He looked at me. The shadow of his baseball cap shaded his eyes. “Yes.”

I was quiet a minute, “I was going to say something but I realize I don’t have anything to say.”

He smiled a little, “That’s exactly what I have to say, too. Just this.”

He leaned over, curled his hand around my face, and kissed my lips. 

It was a while before we both leaned back, looked at each other, shook our heads to remember who we were. He then looked up. A dark band of blue rimmed the western horizon. 

“That’s probably the storm.”

By the time we got to the clinic the sky was dark and it was raining. Other folks arrived in trucks bringing casseroles and frybread. Someone brought venison stew made with wild rice. Woody and I had stopped at a gas station store to buy name brand sodas, fancy juices, kombuchas, and cold teas and they were all popular. 

We watched from clinic windows as lightning zigzagged across distant buttes. Thunder drummed the earth. Rain lashed the roof and walls. Gia told us to crack open the back door; we heard the astounding roar of rushing water in the wash.

 “You won’t be able to get back to town tonight. I have a futon in my living room that you’re welcome to sleep on.”

Gia slept in her room. Woody and I loosened our clothes to gingerly settle into the futon with its thin mattress. Woody muttered ruefully. “I thought I might still be able to walk without pain once we turned in the truck but here we are again.”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing too loudly in the tiny house. “What does one call a quest that ends in emergency physical therapy?”

He turned on his side, pushed my hair out of my eyes, “If I were in my twenties right now, I’m pretty sure I would be in you. Or at least I’d be trying to get there.”

I closed my eyes, smiling. “If we were in our twenties, I’d be interested. But I do not want to end up in traction.” I opened my eyes to look into his eyes in the dim room, “I’m not sure what I want. I really don’t have words for what’s happening between us. I just know I never want to hurt again as much as I hurt after Greg died. It’s on my mind when I’m with you, how unbearable that was.”

He kissed my forehead. “I keep trying to forget it, too, but it’s always there, isn’t it. When you’re young, you want a life. When you are old, you know the risk.”

…

The next day flew. Two of the volunteers who showed up to install the cabinets actually had jobs on construction crews. Woody helped them. I helped the teenagers paint the waiting room sky blue. When I thought we were done the kids pulled out cans of leftover paint they’d brought from their homes. They then carefully but freehand painted a Badlands horizon on the longest wall in the waiting room. When it was dry enough, we pushed the new sofa almost to the wall and then stepped back to admire our work and their artistry.  

What a long day. We hugged our new friends and promised to return as soon as we could. We left a big donation to help the clinic continue to buy what it needed.

And that is when we finally drove back to town, turned in the SUV to, finally, rent a small hybrid. We shook our heads at its quietness. “Will we have enough to say now that we will need to speak with each other?”

Woody joked, “I’m guessing you and I won’t run out of topics.”

“Probably not. So how proud are we of how far we drove and how hard we worked to help all that happen?”

“See? A question like that ought to get us to the Corn Palace. At least.”

Chapter 3. Changed  

It was different going home. We were different. We were driving away from a strong and beautiful place that both of us had visited before in our lives. But now we shared particular memories. There was Badlands National Park. There was also the long macadam and gravel roads through a wide, wild landscape, to a hidden, healing place where we were welcomed. Frybread and beans. Dollar store sodas and Lil Debbie snack cakes. That sky. That storm. The sound of a wash filled with it’s own river. Horses with pop culture names and a futon that didn’t cripple us, though it tried. 

We left the expressway to drive a smaller highway that followed the hills of western Iowa. We found a local diner at lunch time that served us peach pie baked that morning. We stopped in another town with a riverside park. We took off our beat-up shoes and pulled off our socks to gingerly step into the river to cool our feet. It felt wonderful so we kept wading. As we walked, Woody said he’d read somewhere about the dangers inherent in unexpected baptisms. 

We both laughed but not as loudly as one would expect. We knew this trip had been more than a trip. A few hours later we pulled into the driveway of a small motel. I was in the driver’s seat, my hands on the wheel as I parked the car. Woody looked straight ahead. “Two rooms? Or one?”

I drummed my fingers on the wheel. “Funny how we have been talking all day and yet here we are and we don’t know this one thing.”

He glanced sideways at me. His smile, his lively eyes, and his fast thinking had become so familiar to me. I felt alive next to him. I felt wanted, invited, seen. 

“I think we should get two beds because we don’t know how we actually sleep. But, Woody?”

He was smiling now, looking right at me. “Yeah.”

“I think one room would be interesting.”

As if he was reading my mind he leaned over to kiss me. “I don’t want to walk away from the happiest I’ve been since Gerrie died. I didn’t expect this, but what is the point if we are afraid to love?” 

This is the link to A Fairy Tale Dinner. 

https://substack.com/home/post/p-211994997