Blind Date

The door opens. Whoa! She is blond and freckled, with kind blue eyes and a smile as bright as the red roses wrapped around her porch. 

“Jane?” 

“Erin?” I gulp. I’m forty years old, but I’ve never been on a blind date. A mutual friend thought we might like each other because we are both avid readers, single, and looking for love. 

“Come in.” Erin turns to someone standing behind her in the hallway. “Nam Kirn, this is my friend Jane. Jane, this is Nam Kirn, my daughter.”

Her daughter, sixteen, is also gorgeous and freckled, wearing a white turban and jeans. She quickly retreats to the TV room.

The fact that Erin has introduced me as her “friend” although we have never met makes me wonder if she’s “out” to her daughter. 

After dinner at a Chinese restaurant, we go a little art cinema nearby to see a film called Longtime Companion, an emotional drama about the AIDS epidemic. By the end of the movie, I am sobbing. I wonder what’s happening to me. I rarely cry and never in front of strangers.

We walk in the hills near her house, under the full moon. She is a homebirth midwife, refers to “catching” babies, not “delivering” them, and says she lived in an ashram for ten years with her ex-husband, who is still part of the spiritual community. Her daughters went to boarding school in India.

“Wow,” I say. “That’s a long way to go.” 

“My ex- and our teacher pressured me to send them there, and I went along,” she swallows. “What’s it like to write a novel?”

 “Hard,” I say. “I do massage to support myself.”

At the end of the evening, we stand on her doorstep. “I’m going East tomorrow to see my father,” I say. “Can I call when I get back?” 

“Where does he live?”

“Philadelphia,” I say. “But I’m flying to Maine to go sailing with him and his girlfriend and an ex.”

“An ex- of yours?” She looks at me hard.

“She’s my best friend.”

“Cool,” Erin says. “I hardly know my father. My parents split when I was little.” 

“I met someone,” I tell Catherine, my ex-, as the sloop sails past Dark Harbor, Maine. “We had a blind date.”

“Is she crazy? I can’t take another of your crazy girlfriends.” 

“Completely sane. Beautiful and smart. A nurse with two daughters.”

Catherine looks at me skeptically. “Is she a lesbian?”

“Sure seems like it,” I say, remembering her intense gaze as we said goodnight under the full moon.

Erin calls two days after I get home. ‘I’d like to book a massage with you.”

“Is that a good idea?” I can’t catch my breath.

She sounds startled. “You said you were a masseuse.”

“I am.” How to explain? “The thing is, I really like you, and I’m not sure I can maintain. . . my professional distance.”

She is crying. Crying? What have I said?

“Please,” she says. “Please.”

 We set a date. I give her a massage and maintain my professional distance.

We have been together thirty-five years. We bought land years later in the mountains of Mendocino County, where we built a cabin and a house. Erin morphed into a hospice nurse, and I kept writing. As COVID ended, the hills felt too isolated, and we moved south to Sonoma County, to an over-fifty-five “leisure” community with a boisterous, fun, and active lesbian support network.

We play ping pong with the “Rainbow Women,” leap around a swimming pool at water aerobics, and hike in the nearby hills. We dance to Sixties cover bands on Monday nights and fight our government’s lean toward fascism at local protests.

Our love was born under the full moon, with tears, Chinese food, and loving kindness. We are blessed.

My newest book Heat is out now. Order here!