Loring, a Writing Life

10: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

The solo wine tasting parties of the last post straddle much of what I’ve written so far and much of what will follow. The subject of this post straddles my story in the same way. It’s all ridiculous and slightly embarrassing, but I don’t want to paint a false picture: You know, valiant writer struggles while doing good deeds and seeking enlightenment on the side. Maybe there’s somebody like that somewhere, but he never showed up in my Loring Park apartment. I wish he had.   

And as I said, loneliness attracts loneliness. The acting out attract the acting out. Please appreciate the comedy of what follows.

I met Charlotte (not her real name) folk dancing. I’d put up a small Christmas tree, my Bodhi Tree, and invited her over to help decorate it with Buddhist trinkets next to the lights and bulbs—stupas, little deer, vajras, a gingerbread Buddha. My invitation was all about seduction. Naturally, it included a bottle of wine. We both knew what was what and played our roles well. The evening ended as I’d planned. We started seeing each other.

Her situation was not that different from mine. She was an artist, living alone far from her home and estranged from her roots in South Carolina. She’d been, like me, through multiple failed relationships and, unlike me, dozens of one-night stands. Against common sense and ample evidence to the contrary, I hoped we might have something. She played the fiddle and I (sort of) play the guitar. We planned to work something up together.   

Before we got around to that, though, we went out to breakfast one morning. The place was empty except for two young women who had brought along their little boys. While they talked at a nearby table, they let the boys, both about five years old, wander around the room playing. Loudly. Gloriously. Charlotte couldn’t keep her eyes off them. “Ah just luv children,” she kept saying in a dreamy, preoccupied drawl. “Ah just luv ‘em to death.”

That expression always gives me the creeps, and when she said it her eyebrows met and she leaned forward as if looking into some hidden force floating out in space.

The kids were pushing chairs across the stone floor, making a holy racket. I found it kind of funny. Their mothers completely ignored them and I found that kind of funny, too. When my own son was that age, I would not have allowed him to do that sort of thing in a public place, but what the hell? These weren’t my kids and they were having a wonderful time.

“Ah just luv children,” Charlotte kept saying, “Ah just luv ‘em to death,” and each time she said it I knew deeper and deeper that she hated—HATED—children. Her face contorted more and more as she repeated it. Suddenly, she couldn’t contain herself another instant and, just as one of the boys came into reach, she leapt out of her chair and grabbed him by the arm and started shaking him. The mothers and I were on our feet lightening quick, peeling her finger off the terrified kid.

Wow!

So, that one didn’t work out. I check the headlines now and then to see if she’s in custody.

Then I met a woman named (well, this is another made-up name) Greta. Bright, well-read, passionate, and quirky. We met swing dancing and hit it off pretty quickly. That she was an animal rights activist seemed kind of cool. I grew up with dogs and cats and cows and horses around, even raised beef cattle as a 4-H kid in high school. I remember how badly I felt the first time I hit an animal with my car. It was on one of those two-lane, no-guardrails roads in the Rockies. I was driving my very young family on a camping trip and a rabbit jumped out in front of us. Swerving would have sent us off the mountain and into the river far below. We all felt badly.

Driving through the narrow streets of Loring Park one afternoon with Greta, a squirrel dashed out in front of the car. I saw it and knew we wouldn’t hit it. Greta, however, let out a bloodcurdling scream that nearly sent me steering straight into the neighborhood grocery store. I thought her reaction rather extreme. As were some of her other views, like on the death penalty. She rejected it for people who murdered people, but not for people who harmed animals. That’s right. Harmed animals. Need I say there were issues? Fortunately, though I didn’t feel fortunate at the time, she eventually dumped me. I should have dumped her, you are probably thinking, and you are right. Remember her, though, because she figures in a later post. Like I said, this stuff straddles.

My next misadventure in this vein came with a beautiful Southern Minnesota farm girl. We also met dancing. She is a truly kind soul, but life had been given her more than she could manage and she’d been taken advantage of by all the men she’d been with. Her insecurity and mistrust were pathological. If I were flipping through cannels on the television and stopped too long on one with an attractive woman on the screen, the evening was ruined. Add to this her fundamentalist Christian belief system and the cult-like megachurch she attended. As nice as she was, it couldn’t work and I should have known that from the start. I ended it with her as best I could.

The common denominator holding these romances together, for however long they lasted, was, of course, the obvious. We all need the obvious.  

Still, maybe there was hope for me. He who loves children and animals might eventually find his way.

The India book was written to my satisfaction and I was looking for an agent.