Hit

A young woman hit on me yesterday.

At first I thought I might be misinterpreting her actions, after all I’m pushing 70 and she could not have been a day over 30.

But then, of course, I am a well-preserved 70; she may have thought… Well, who knows what she may have thought? Maybe she felt so desperate for a man that even I looked overwhelmingly attractive to her.

After all, I do resemble James Bond, a very mature James Bond.

And I clean up nice.

I’d spent the morning at yard work and a young man from another country came by to talk with me about his prospects of becoming a successful writer in America. I encouraged him as best I could. But when he left, I shaved and showered and combed my hair and dressed up before Ginny came home from work. So I was not shabby when we went out to the library..

Ginny and I returned our books to the library and she went off into the stacks looking for a life of Teddy Roosevelt; while she was gone, I browsed along the video shelves.

As I read the blurb on the back of Annie, unaware of the world around me, a young woman’s hand brushed mine. She began speaking about the sort of videos she’d like to take back home to her apartment to watch.

I looked around.

Not many people frequent the library early Tuesday evening. There was not a single other person anywhere near the video section. Yet this young woman stood close to me. Very close.

A very nice looking young woman, smartly dressed, tasteful, wearing snug blue pants with a long-sleeved silk blouse with a floral print and a bow at the collar.. I thought she might be a receptionist just getting off work from some professional office; or maybe she’d come to the library from a job interview, or straight from some sort of important appointment.

I have an aversion to being touched so when her hand brushed mine, I took a step backward from the shelves; she moved a step closer still talking about films she likes.

I put Annie in my bag and went to see if any new Donald Westlake novels were on the shelves; the young woman walked over into the nonfiction section. Curious, I thought. But a few minutes later, she appeared in the Ws standing so close to me that our shoulders touched.

No other person was in that aisle.

What’s going on here, I wondered.

Again I moved away. Hey, these days even a dirty old man needs to be cautious.

I sat at an empty library table—there were a number of empty tables around the room—and the young lady came and sat directly across from me. She placed three books she’d brought over from nonfiction on the table and began to leaf through one.

Pretending to scan my own choices, I peeked at her from the corner of my eye.

What was she after?

Ginny came out of the stacks and sat beside me sorting her own book choices. We talked about where to drive for dinner and decided on Country Kitchen. Ginny carried our books to the checkout desk; the young woman left the table and wandered off into the stacks leaving her three books.

As Ginny and I left the library, I noticed the titles of the three books the young woman had left on the library table—

Every one of them bore a title like Coping With Your Cancer.