Is There Sex After 60? (Navigating Single Life After 60)

 So far this year, as we were moving onto summer I have bought three different bags of cherries. Cherries are my very favorite fruit, along with tomatoes (yes, tomatoes are in the fruit family) and lemons and blood oranges. I love cherries so much that I even eat cherries that aren’t very flavorful. This year all three bags haven’t had much taste. Doesn’t matter too much to me because, if I like something, I like it, no matter what. My taste hasn’t changed that much though the years. I have a few foods that have been my go- to meals when I am sad or not feeling too well or when I need to support my mental state with a special, “Happy Meal” My own “happy meal”, usually revolves around small shell noodles with Hunts Tomato Sauce and a nice chunk of butter, salt and pepper and Parmesan on the top, shaken from a can. Everyone who has known me from the age of three or four, through high school and college and beyond … knows this about me. Even in college I would make this simple pasta dish for my friends in my dorm room with just a hotpot to use for me to boil the noodles. I believe I made a whole group of my friends addicted to this feel-good snack. In college I became so famous for this dish that I could imitate the sound of stirring the pasta with the tomato sauce. My friends would say, “Make your sound of noodles being stirred” and I would make the curdling sound with my mouth and tongue. Oh yes, I had many natural talents or highly skilled attributes, which so far, have not made me rich. Ah well, back to my story. I also make homemade chicken soup with dumplings. This always helps if I am feeling blue. I cook it for a few hours while the smell permeates through the air. Then I make the dumplings and drop them in the boiling soup, a spoonful at a time, until they are cooked through. I make hard dumplings. They are the most satisfying. I like the soup to be salty. I only like to make chicken soup if I am able to make a half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a plate next to my bowl of chicken soup. One more thing, I have to have with this meal is, an ice-cold glass of milk. The milk can be skim, 2% or whole milk… it doesn’t matter to me… it just has to be ice cold. I have a few other things that can make me smile or feel better no matter what is going on in my life. I will list them not in any particular order. Ice Cold Champagne, Margaritas on the rocks with salt, Dirty Martinis with lots of olives, almost any ice cold white wine, Perrier, also ice cold, lemon cake, my mother’s Angel Food Cake with her cherry glaze frosting (my mother is no longer with us … now she is the angel so I don’t eat this cake anymore), potato chips and onion dip, Cherry or Apple pie … must be hot with vanilla ice cream and ice cold milk to drink, Pretzels, buttermilk, sour dill pickles wrapped in a piece of summer sausage, herring, only vinegar and onion herring, eaten out of the jar. I know sort of unusual however, my mother liked herring and I picked up the habit.

These are all my favorite foods that I have loved since I have been eating solid foods well with the exception of the alcohol. When I like something, I like it, forever. This goes for lots of my likes and dislikes. Movies, TV shows, books and yes, even people. If I like you and take the time to know you then by golly, I like you for life. I hate pudding, I have always hated pudding and I still hate pudding. There isn’t a pudding on earth that I would like. If I were starving … would I eat pudding? Yes, only if I were starving. I’m not crazy.

You might be wondering when I will be getting to my point of this blog.

If I have taken the time to talk to you, to write you and to talk to you in person, or on the phone, and if I have made myself vulnerable by getting to know you and letting you get to know me then, like it or not, I like you and I will probably like you, forever. That is just who I am and I can’t help it. Now, I have really, good friends that have drifted out of my life. I am not sure if it was on purpose or if it just happened as we moved on with our lives, however, am telling you right now, that if we used to be close friends, as far as I am concerned, we are still friends. If I run into you after many years apart, I am still going to be thrilled to see you. I still want to catch up on your life and everything I have missed since we last spoke. Need help or a shoulder to cry on… I am still here and I want to help, if I can help, in anyway. I’m loyal, and yes, I would say, I am loyal to a fault. I have been in like in my life and I have been in deep like and I have been in love, and I have been deeply, madly, and truly, in love. When these friendships or likes or love or deep loves have moved on did I stop caring, or liking or loving? No, I did not. A few times in my life (thankfully in the past) I have been devastated with severe and overwhelming grief, due to the loss of a friend or loved one or the loss of what I had considered to be a real romantic love.

Thank heavens, I have aged and grown stronger and tougher as the years have rolled on. I don’t feel devastated by rejection, disappointed? Sure, upset? Okay, for a bit, but now to quote my very favorite actress of all time who has recently passed away, “Que, Sera, Sera. If I liked you I’m sorry but my own feelings haven’t changed. I like you and I probably always will. If I loved you then that probably hasn’t changed either. Maybe it isn’t truly and madly or deeply, anymore, but I probably still love some part of you. Consider the way I have never been able to walk away from a really good bowl of cherries, even bad cherries. I can’t help it, my likes, stay the same. You can walk away and some people have walked away. That’s okay too. Judy Garland sang about life in a fabulous song, “Life is just a bowl of Cherries.” Look up the words to that song. Try to live that life.

Until Next Week…

Songs mentioned in the post: Que Sera, Sera   singer,Doris Day Published, 1951 Written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans

“Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (Love, Judy Garland’s rendition) Written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown Published, 1931.