SAY YES! Flying Solo After Sixty

By Pamela Hull

What happens when, long-partnered and no longer youthful, we are suddenly left alone and uncoupled?

Here is a book that embraces the will, the spirit of such a challenge.

Here are stories of how an older man or woman may avoid a barren middle age. Of how to imbue our later years with heft, meaning and delight, self-renewal thick with surprise and discovery.

Here are concerns that grievously affect our burgeoning aging community as most of us over 70 now live alone, matters that resonate as well for retired couples.

Say Yes! is neither guide nor manual. Rather, it is the narrator's intimate recountings of loss and aloneness. But also possibilities for a thrilling, reconfigured reality, an abundance of bountiful awakenings for wishful readers who may become heartened and emboldened.

Do we latch on?

Or do we accept a conventional stasis, a sedate conformity. A digging in from fear of the untried.

The author is 60 when her husband of 36 years dies of pancreatic cancer. Bereft, an opportunity arises. She takes an impulsive trip to Florence, Italy. From this, her life catapults beyond the mundane as she travels by herself to other European cities, writes a book, moves to New York. Enriched by strangers, she finds celebration in being alone, enters into passions old and new with verve and grit. Standing firm is her staunch refusal to accept a life of marking time devoid of vigorous well-being.

Why move beyond what comfortably suits?

To vanquish doubt, dread, despair.

To savor the largesse of our world in adventurous new ways.

How does one begin?

Say Yes!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781683489733

Book preview

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Copyright © 2016 Pamela Hull

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2016

ISBN 978-1-68348-972-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68348-973-3 (Digital)

[e-mail]

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Dedication

In Appreciation

Death and Return

Stricken

Passages

Who Needs Therapy?

Walking into Firenze

Digressions, Discoveries

You Never Know

Powerless or Not

To Life!

What Moxie Gets You

Looking Back

The Cup

A Few New Men

London Made Me Do It

Encounters

Layers and Notions

Only So Many

Courting

Two Women

And Now?

Endings, Beginnings

Other books by Pamela Hull

Where’s My Bride?

Dandelions Endure (pending)

Dedication

To the aging among us. May your spirit be zealous, your pluck, unvanquished.

For Paul, always Paul.

For our children, Geri and Bob, and their dear spouses, Neal and Jennifer.

For our grandchildren most precious, Josephine Lola, Peter Geordie, and Evan Fredrick.

And for Burt, a rather elegant man.

In Appreciation

My enduring gratitude to Joelle Sander – teacher, editor, painter, writer. With her insight and guidance, Say Yes! now lives.

Our lives unfold as a succession of doors whose openings require constant tending and thoughtful deliberation, if the fates defer to mortal governance.

Trouble is, many of us make choices the way we insert the key – looking long, struggling to fit. Cajoling, fumbling, jamming the threads, skewing the works.

Even unlatched, torpor and fear may yet guard the way. Caution may ensure chances forsworn.

No.

Pursue mindfulness. Look both ways. Then, hands up, push.

Let instinct walk you in.

P. J. Lasher

Death and Return

Ciao, bella signora. Bella, bella! hailed the diminutive Florentine of rosy cheek and jaunty step. Was that a wink? Unruly gray hair, ample tummy sustained, no doubt, by abundant helpings of focaccia and pesto.

Overwhelmed, I stood at the door to Mario’s Laundromat holding a basket of needy laundry. His arms reached for my burden, his smile relieved, as if he had been waiting for me all morning. Why so amiable? Maybe it’s my blonde hair, I thought. Something different. Obviously American, unlike the saucy Italian women with glossy dark hair, flashing dark eyes.

"Io vi aiuterò. I will help," he offered, fervently pressing my black bra to his chest. Stirred up, I looked away as he slipped the remaining garments into the barrel of the battered machine.

"No, no. Caldo, hot, hot," I pleaded, imagining the threads shrinking and shredding.

Tapping two fingers on my cheek, he murmured, "Non ti preoccupare."

Not to worry when all I had done for the past four years was worry day and night? Not to worry when here, in Mario’s Laundromat, I was suddenly assaulted with reminders of my dead husband’s shirts gone through a thousand cycles in my own washer at home? When now the recall of Paul’s death those few years ago, and he only sixty-six, thundered back with its tender sorrows, creating havoc with this mundane errand?

"Signora, Mario asked. Are you long here in Italia?"

Distracted, I fidgeted like a nun smoothing her skirt.

Mario, what? I kept asking as he jabbered in Italian and spatters of English. Somehow, I divined that Mario was seventy-two and the grandpapa of four, three girls and a boy named Carlos. A manly swipe across his groin – I presumed a reference to his sons – rather startled me. Then again in front of my breasts. A sign of my womanhood? Another reference, perhaps this to his wife? Or to his daughter-in-law, born in Malaga but easily forgiven her non-Italian origins when she made him a grandfather.

Muddled by the intimacy of this stranger’s movements, suddenly I recalled Paul’s frisky eyes, his sweet playfulness. Enjoy it, Pammie, I knew he would say.

My clothes whirled about, the washing machine belching and groaning.

"Vieni qui. Come here," Mario beckoned as he extended his hand, gnarled and bruised. My yielding palm mindlessly accepted as he led me to a stool on the stoop outside. With surprising grace, he arranged himself artfully at my feet. I sat, incredulous, as in a robust baritone, he began the love aria from Tosca, E lucevan le stele:

e olezzava la terre…

Entrava ella, fragrante,

mi cadea fra le braccia.

(How the stars seemed to shimmer,

the sweet scents of the garden …

how she then entered, so fragrant,

and then fell into my arms.)

Surely he has sung this to other women in other places. Surely that, I thought.

Italy. I was in love with this place.

Strutting about, he kept glancing my way, pleased with his rather clumsy Italian seduction. What is he thinking, I wondered? Is this how Italian men behave in a laundromat?

Then I remembered Paul sashaying slowly down a street in the Bronx, his enchanting tenor crooning "La donna è mobile" in wide swoops of magical song, conducting with his left hand, looking back to make sure I was keeping up.

The machine stopped rattling. Mario’s rough hands carefully folded my clothes. I was embarrassed. Did I know an eager foreigner would fondle my underwear this day?

A rousing assault of anger left me heaving and trembling. What right did Mario have to touch my bras? The old heartache returned. Surely that was just an innocent, playful act. Still, it catapulted me into remorse thick with guilt at the merest hint that any long-stifled sensuality might supplant the insatiable, ongoing grief. A whiff of the naughty and I recoiled as if he had unsheathed a weapon. Was I a cheat and a fraud for flirting with a stranger doing my laundry? Would every fancy rend and tear my fixed devotions? Would ordinary emotional flutters become crises of conscience, whispers of betrayal?

And yet, perhaps it would happen. A good man would find me. I would love again. Here in Italy, slogging my way toward a new wholeness, I might come to that belief.

You cannot reproach yourself for human longings, I told myself. You are a woman. And lonely. You miss the gift of touch. Paul would surely say, It is a good thing, Pammie, to eventually be with someone. You deserve that now.

I offered my hand, heavy with euros. Mario bestowed a foxy look which left me skeptical and confused, hugged me fiercely with muscular heft, booming ciao as I moved on out, the laundry neatly arranged in my landlady’s basket. Was it lighter for the flirtation, or heavier for the implications, I couldn’t say. He waved me off, throwing kisses, greeting Augusto, a delivery boy on a bicycle.

A believer in serendipitous encounters, what would I take away from this one besides clean laundry? The resurrected dream of engagement? Bittersweet reminders?

My scuffling to retain former aspects of myself while patching on new emotional particulars of this solitary condition brought only struggle. Would that these mysterious distinctions, sifting and shifting over time, eventually blur, rearrange themselves, settle down.

"Ciao, bella signora. Torna presto, come back soon!" Mario shouted as I stumbled on down the street.

Paul is dead. Pancreatic cancer.

My intent was to remain shrouded in our rooms, desperate and monastic. Keep vigil in his honor though I was barely sixty. How could I go out and about when he could not? Yet I now found myself comfortably ensconced in Florence for eight weeks in an appartamento a long block from Piazza del Duomo, this temporary space, now home.

What had happened? And how? I still marveled.

Almost three years since he died and then, my keen design of withdrawal was sabotaged by an unfamiliar voice on the phone.

Would you like to live in Florence for two months? she asked.

Florence, Italy? I wondered.

Who is this? I asked.

Pat, she said.

Paul’s childhood friend. Someone I had met only briefly in thirty years. And now, this surprise, this kind offer extended from her dearly held memories of him.

I’m going to school to refresh my Italian, she said. We could share an apartment almost astride the Ponte Vecchio. Will you come?

Oh, no. I thought. Too much beauty and splendor without Paul.

Never.

I listened dreamily to her soothing descriptions, her attempts to persuade.

The view looks into the courtyard of the Uffizi Gallery. Between its piazza and our rooms, the hazy waters of the Arno. The second bedroom whose windows open to the river will be yours. From the kitchen, sightings of the cypresses in The Boboli Gardens. Everywhere, the tolling of bells, the cooing of doves.

Do come.

I can’t.

You’ve never been to Florence, Paul’s voice reminded.

Impossible, I thought.

Say yes, Pat prodded.

Well, okay, I said. I will.

Yes.

Family photographs sprawled across the ancient refectory table. A seventeenth-century coffered ceiling looked down on my drawing supplies thrust into ceramic containers from Orvieto. Knowing no Italian and no Italians and a mere four words: ciao, signora, bella bella bella, and now, caldo, I was essentially alone, Pat gone to class the entire day. In the street, strange phrases were strung together in a rapid barrage of legato and staccato, a clickety-clack in my ears, lively and confounding.

But now, suddenly, in an Italian laundry, as Mario darted about, I was pressed to recall life’s unexpected, walloping dramas that led me here, a run along the dark side of the moon, long before I ever imagined of living in Firenze.

That is how memory works – unpredictable, urgent, needful.

Always the heart gives in, goes back, no matter the mind’s fierce resistance.

Stricken

My name is Pamela.

For thirty-six years, my husband Paul had called me Pammie. And then he died, and no one ever called me Pammie again.

He had an ulcer once, also an occasional bout of indigestion after a mushroom pizza at nearby Giorgio’s. And then a rather prolonged event of colon distress after Mexican peppers were shaved discreetly into his veggie taquitos at Pepe’s Tacos. But otherwise, he had an uneventful medical history.

So I was not too concerned when he came home one evening, bent over, rubbing his abdomen, palpating the discomfort though he looked a bit pale for a siege of minor cramping.

Not hungry, he had said. A doctor himself, he was trying to figure out why he had suddenly dropped seven pounds in two weeks when in the past year he was unable to lose the same weight with long walks at a good pace. A careful eater, unwaveringly slim and diligent about his health, he now asked, What is going on?

An ordinary complaint may rise up – a lump, a cut that won’t heal. A brown spot. Fatigue, headache. For him it was an unruly stomach, then a simple request, Doctor, I just have this little pain here, nothing much. Could you take a look?

And then we were into it, a fatal illness that ambushed, astonished, and hoisted us right out of our daily lives, brutally launched us into a calamitous cosmos we were compelled to navigate.

To where?

Tests without mercy, procedures without compassion. Arranged, managed, endured. Heartache, confusion, disbelief nipping at our throats, whipping up our shirts. Guesses, mistakes, detours leaving us aghast at the savage cruelty under which we so bitterly labored. And these as well – lawyers, accountants, pharmacies all pounding and pummeling as my husband grew weaker and sicker, straying further from me, from us. And then, this – my sick nightmares, his pain, the narcotic detachment.

And no time for soft married talk.

Paul’s disease slowly killed him, but it made me stronger as we partnered in vain to make him well – as I held myself together so that he might stand.

Please, I used to whisper, feel sorry for yourself so that I can feel sorry for myself.

Finally, the end to chemotherapy, to radiation, to Paul’s life, and to our marriage. It was over, done, my husband now lifeless in a wooden box, buried in the earth.

On a somber fall day soon after the funeral, I settled into an abandoned chair at a shuttered beach club and thought of this – that Paul knew everything about me, but this he did not know. That after he died, I found a lovely place where I sat without him, watching the striped underbelly of a gull as it shrieked and cackled, diving for fish. Off to the side, heroic boulders anchored a modest cliff wearing subtle striations of taupe and cream, a surprising eruption of deep purple.

Melancholy is familiar now, as easy come as joy at a birth. The tides rumble on in, almost upon me. Then, mercifully, ramble on out, a relentless thrusting then sparing, this abiding flow, the moon assigning their course, fixing their fate.

My friend Emma, also a recent widow, joined me, her husband dead eighteen months this June. His heart shut down right there at a red light just as they were chatting about their new golden retriever, Sam.

She sat, honored my silence.

Does the moon emit special rays that similarly direct the lives of humans? I mused, smiling, punching her elbow.

She waited, let me find my way.

In truth, Emma, none of this matters. My fight to save him, his passion to live. Both of us were helpless to alter any of the circumstances. And now, in the end, all I can control is my attitude, where my mind travels.

You think too much, she answered. "Keep it simple. You couldn’t have saved him simply because you wanted to, you know. A fierce will