The very next day, email popped up twenty-four matches for me. I swore I heard a “Ka-ching!” I’d hit the mother lode! Twenty-four? I thought. Good grief—that’s two dozen! It’s positively raining men—hallelujah! Is the man I’m destined to meet going to be there? Is he tall? Handsome? Twinkling eyes? How can I possibly be able to pick one from so many at once? And this is only Day One. I tried to think of a gift to send to my daughter as a finder’s fee.
In a second, the images appeared, and a millisecond later the mother lode yielded fool’s gold. Yes, there were two dozen images, but of what? None of these looked like my teen idol David Cassidy—then or now. Where were the handsome models from the television ads? Had I made a mistake and put a “1” in front of the age parameters? These guys looked positively ancient!
Time and memory can sometimes be like oil and water—they don’t mix. The last time I’d been on the dating scene was in the late 1960s. Potential dates then had heads of shaggy or wavy hair, full muttonchops (or scraggly facsimiles thereof), shining eyes, youthful sexiness in their smiles and grins, and complexions that showed both the young children they had been such a short time ago and the hint of the young men they were about to become.
The profile pictures I saw in that first batch sported heads in various stages of baldness and/or gray hair. Jowls replaced youth’s muscular clean lines; some were covered in various wispy beards. Their eyes were shiny, but I think that was from the glare on their glasses. I was looking at a bunch of men, my fellow Baby Boomers, my peers in the aging process, and it took me quite a few minutes to get my bearings and rearrange my expectations of what I could find online in the way of dates. Nope, we definitely were not sixteen anymore.
There were a variety of pictures. The photos ranged from deer-in-the-headlights looks to suave and sophisticated. A few had submitted good quality, professional-looking pictures. Some were fuzzy and grainy. Some were snapshots taken with a grandchild blocking part of the man’s features. (I was not alone!)
It’s a strange phenomenon that once we get to a certain age, and/or have children and grandchildren, we don’t have too many pictures of ourselves alone. It might be because we can’t figure out how to take selfies. But chances are it’s just that the younger generation is so cute and precious, we can’t take enough pictures of them.
It shouldn’t have come as any surprise that quite a few of these people only had pictures of themselves that were obviously cropped because they had been taken on special occasions that included a group. There was the guy in a tuxedo, a big grin on his face, holding a bottle of beer aloft and bent over toward a sliver of someone in a silvery gown, who presumably was also happy—at least at that time, if it was a former wife.
There was another man who looked, at first glance, like he had a lot of hair. A second glance revealed that his mane was really the locks of some long-haired brunette, whose face and torso had been clipped out of his photo—and probably out of his life.
One of the cropped photos made me grab my magnifying glass. Yes. That was definitely a tongue coming from the side of oblivion and licking this guy’s cheek. It must have been a dog, because it was certainly the longest and skinniest tongue I’d ever seen. Just in case it wasn’t, though, I made a mental note to skip this man. I wasn’t sure I was ready to be someone’s new “pet.”
Finally, there were those without any picture at all. Either they had no concept of how to download a photo, or they were hiding something. These guys needed to get with the computer technology available today and do what I had to do to download my pictures: call a child to help out.