What’s it like to be a mid-life, divorced dad looking for something new and good? David Raether is hopeful.
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It was a clear and blustery day in San Francisco, one of those beautiful early November days in the City when there is no fog and the air is cool and there is a swirling wind and everything seems like it is in a sharp focus.
It was the first Saturday afternoon of November 2009. My daughter, Claire, had taken Coco and Saskia out thrift store shopping, but here I was, slumped on an old couch in their apartment, watching a soccer match.
Not just any soccer match, though. This was the Superclasico, the twice-annual, superheated match from Buenos Aires between the two great rivals of that city: River Plate and Boca Juniors. It was on Fox Soccer Channel. The Superclasico is one of my favorite sporting events to watch, especially when it is played at the creaky La Bombonera, the home stadium of my favored team, Boca Juniors.
A few years ago, the London newspaper the Daily Telegraph put out a list of the ten sporting experiences you must have before you die. On the top of the list: attending the Superclasico at La Bombonera.
And, in fact, even before I read that list, one of my life dreams was to go to Buenos Aires someday just to see this match. A friend of mine did it once. He flew down from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires on a Thursday, walked around the city on Friday, and went to the match at La Bombonera on Saturday. On Sunday morning, flew back to LA, and said he never felt the same about life after that. Everything about life suddenly seemed too short and passing and not quite enough. He didn’t go to work for two days. Just stayed home with his wife.
Nine months later, he and his wife had another baby. It was a girl and they named her Sofia, which is the Greek word for wisdom. He isn’t Greek.
This was our third trip up to San Francisco that fall for Coco, Saskia and me. Marina and the little girls had been in Germany for ten months, and we had been separated for 15 months. The job situation was still muddled, and I seemed no closer to getting them back than I was when they had left the previous winter. While I had managed to rent a place for myself, employment with the company where I provided market research was punctuated by bouts of optimism and despair about the fate of the company.
This was going to work!
This was going to be a disaster!
Unfortunately, that roller coaster was not what Marina was willing to accept anymore.
The deal was simple: I had to have a long-term employment contract with a stable company providing health insurance and she would return. Nothing short of that. The problem was in 2009, that kind of job was not easy to come by.
Don’t worry, I kept telling myself, things will work out. That’s what I always told myself, even in the worst of it. It was a slender reed to hold on to, my mantra: things are gonna work out. I had no evidence this was ever going to be true. Still, it was sometimes the only thing I had going for myself. Things are gonna work out and we’ll all be back together. Just like in the old days.
What else could I tell myself? It was over?
I just couldn’t tell myself that.
As odd as it might sound, I didn’t have the courage to give up.
“The girls are getting used to it here,” Marina had told me a week earlier. “I’m making a life for myself here, you know, lessons, concerts; it’s not ideal, but I’m making a life here, David.”
A thought creeped in.
Maybe the move to Germany wasn’t just about our financial situation. Maybe Marina had actually left me. It wasn’t just unemployment and housing. It was deeper than that. She was done with me and the marriage.
I ran that thought through my head. It was the first time I remember actually thinking it. She was happy without me. Didn’t want me anymore. Sure, if I suddenly got a job and everything, she might come back. Or she might not. I wasn’t part of the equation of her life anymore. I mean, she hadn’t actually said ‘I love you’ to me since 1998. But she seemed to still enjoy me on some level. It was still a marriage and I was still in love with her. Right?
We talked all the time, but only because I called. She never called to check on me. I always ended every phone call with “I love you” and she would respond, ‘Okay’ or ‘Ja.’ And that would be it.
Wow, there’s a thought. It’s over. The big David and Marina adventure is done.
I turned away from the soccer match and looked out the window. It was sunny and sharp outside. Sunny in San Francisco! What was I doing inside?
Unlike Los Angeles, where the status quo is always sunny, always bright and chaotic and frantic, San Francisco is completely different. It is often gloomy, usually overcast, but in a funny way, it felt cozy.
It never, ever, feels cozy in Los Angeles. L.A. isn’t a cozy place. It is an exciting place, dangerous, dazzling, dirty, interesting, murderous and funny. But it is never cozy.
Maybe I’ll take a walk, I thought. I could watch a replay of this game later. I don’t mind watching soccer games even when I know the result. I can watch good games several times over, in fact. They are like chapters in a very long and complicated novel. Most are even worth rereading.
I put on a sweater — a sweater! — and a jacket, zipped it up and stepped outside. I would be walking around in a t-shirt in L.A. at this time of the year. But here I needed a sweater and a jacket on a sunny day.
Sasha and Claire lived in the Mission District, and I didn’t really care for it all that much. It was all right in its way, but I knew what I wanted. I would walk west up 24th Street to the Noe Valley neighborhood. A family neighborhood. Settled. Mothers with strollers. Pleasant bars and coffeehouses. A nice cozy neighborhood.
Noe Valley seemed like a place where you could land and spend fifty years happily until you died in your sleep and all the neighbors would come to your funeral and tell stories about your life and laugh and then go home and have some soup, watch the news and go to bed in their warm cozy bedrooms, which seemed in abundance in Noe Valley, as far as I could tell. Probably it isn’t that way, but this was how I imagined Noe Valley to be were I to live there.
I settled at a table in a coffeehouse and sipped a coffee. At the table next to me was a couple, both of whom appeared to be about my age, gray-haired and dressed in sweaters and slacks. The man was saying something and the woman was laughing and then agreeing and then the man would say something else and she would laugh a bit more and slap him gently on the arm and bend her head forward as she laughed.
It was conspiratorial talk, the kind that couples have.
I watched them for a while and then the woman slowly slid her hand across the small table and put her hand on the back of his hand. They looked at each other and he leaned into her and kissed her lightly on the lips and then looked at her and she smiled. And then he said something and she laughed again.
That was it.
That was what I was missing so much.
The presence of a woman.
A woman my age.
Man, I was lonely, but not just general loneliness or the alienation all of us feel even in a crowded room.
This was a very specific loneliness. I was lonely for a woman. Somebody to walk around the streets with. Someone to sit in a coffeehouse with and run stuff by. Someone to sit at a table with and read a section of the paper while she reads a book. Not sex. Just company. The company of a woman, and a woman my age.
What I had plenty of was male conversation. I could go to Kaldi, a coffeehouse in South Pasadena I frequented, and find a bunch of guys to talk to. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a woman to talk to because women talk about things in different ways.
What I missed was sitting with a woman and gossiping and talking about clothes and people we liked or were disgusted with, as I imagined that couple in the coffeehouse was doing. A good conspiratorial conversation that couples have because sometimes when you are a couple, it is the two of you versus the world and the happiness of being a couple sometimes is in defeating the world by simply being happy together.
I walked back down the hill to the apartment and watched the end of the game. It was your typical madly passionate Argentine game, and after it was over I was excited by it and was thinking it would be great to explain what excited me about it to a woman. A smart one who didn’t necessarily care about sports but would listen anyway and smile and laugh about it when you talked, the way I would smile and laugh when she talked about what she was interested in that I didn’t care about.
Nah, forget it.
Just forget about it, David, I told myself.
Things’ll work out.
Marina will be back soon enough and then you can talk to her again. I made a coffee and sat at the table by myself and drank it.
But what if Marina is gone for a really long time?
What if she never comes back?
She had a self-possessed and distant tone in her voice now when we talked. She was making plans for her life there. The kind of plans you make when you’re settling into a place for a long time.
Nah, she’ll come back.
I thought about the game, and then I thought about that couple in the coffee shop again, and then about my friends and their daughter Sofia.
You know, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to get to know a woman up here, someone just to hang out with when I came up with the kids.
Coco, Saskia, and I returned to L.A. on Sunday night on a Rideshare. I don’t remember the ride, but Coco reminded me that the driver was the dullest guy we met on the Rideshares we did together. He said that guy talked a lot about insurance or finance or something like that and I completely drew a blank. Didn’t remember him in the least. He said that he and Saskia sat in the back seat and rolled their eyes for five hours, and couldn’t believe I was able to talk to a person that dull for that long. I don’t remember a word of it.
On Monday I was working on yet another research project when I decided I would do what I’d seen dozens of men do on library computers—and had been so disdainful of — I would post something in the personals ads — men seeking women — on Craigslist.
We were going up to San Francisco in three weeks for the long Thanksgiving weekend. I would run an ad, looking for a woman. I typed a headline.
“Visiting from Los Angeles, looking for a woman to hang out with.”
Then the ad.
“I’m a former television writer up from LA and will be in San Francisco for the Thanksgiving weekend. I’m looking for a woman my age (early fifties) to hang out with — coffee or a museum. That sort of thing.”
And really, no kidding, that was all I wanted.
At least that’s what I told myself.
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This is an excerpt from David Raether’s phenomenal book, Tell Me Something, She Said, which is available at Amazon.com.
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Photo: Flickr/ williamshannon
I just wrote a short rant today about how I basically hand intelligent, cute, funny, adventurous women to men on a silver platter via my offerings, but yet cannot for the life of me find enough men to keep up with all the fabulous ladies who sign up for Mac & Cheese (the average age is 35-45). This issue is now going in Year Nine.
So David, if you ever find yourself in Chicago… http://www.macncheeseproductions.com/. PLEASE.
Lexy, we’re out here, looking….
Ha, I wish men in this age group thought this way in Los Angeles, or anywhere.