Eileen Blossoms

Lesson #2 from my flying friend, Eileen.  (She told me her age, but privately, so all I’ll say is this: she was visiting her daughter who was retired.)

Ok.  So, along with courage, which was lesson number one, there was a lesson that a writer of a blog, titled, “Single for a Reason”, a blog for choosy people, could not ignore.  The lesson is this: You are never too old to be choosy.

Her current male friend is wonderful but she doesn’t think she wants to marry anyone again.  She thinks, in fact, the reason that this relationship works so well is because they each have their separate domiciles.  But, it’s even more than that.

She’s long noted a double standard for men and women.  When she was just a young girl growing up in a small town in the South, she realized one day that the girl who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock was totally shunned in the community but the “father” paid few, if any, social consequences.

In modern parlance, I can just hear little teenage Eileen saying: “What’s up with that, people?”

But, she said she never could talk about her misgivings.  Nor, could she ever bring up such subjects with her late husband either.  He’d just get agitated.  So, she kept them to herself throughout a full life.

But, today, she confides that the man in her life is just about perfect, although a bit overprotective.  He calls her multiple times a day and if she is late coming home from a doctor’s appointment, for example, he panics.

But, then, she questions the surface of this overprotectiveness, just as she once questioned social and moral inequities when she was a teenager.  Maybe it really wasn’t a need to protect her that was driving him, she went on to say, as much as a reflection of needs all his own.   Maybe a need to control her in a way, she said softly.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve said that out loud before,” she said to me with astonishment.

Speak on, bloom on, sweet Eileen.  I am going to look on the bright side this morning and think about your gentleman caller in this way: he simply feels like I do about you–a precious voice, long silent, is a beautiful sound to hear.