For Thursday, Sept 23, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 712 words

My fair gentleman (Part 1 of 2)

My wife and I talked with a friendly, garrulous senior lady down on First Street the other night. She's single due to the passing on a good while back of her loving husband. She was out with a girlfriend this night, listening to the live music at the Union Hotel, but told us without reservation that she still actively dates.

We asked her what she looked for in a man at her age. Her age, by the way, was hard to determine. She may have been in her 80s, but her spunk was pure 70s. She said she liked gentlemen only. Her husband was a gentleman who dressed nicely all the time, not just outside the house, and spoke without cussing.

She said the first thing she looks at in a man is his shoes. If they're not sharp and polished, she feels slighted. She said if a man was serious about winning a woman's affections, he'd take the time to shine his shoes.

She'd just had a date recently that didn't go well. The man wore ugly shoes. Immediately, she was on her guard. Into the evening she discovered that he didn't talk well and had poor manners. She put up with him for the night, but after that it was "Good-bye, Charlie."

Then she said to me, "You seem like a nice man. Let me see your shoes." Reluctantly, I stuck me feet out from under the table. I was wearing brown leather Rockports, but they were old and weathered, and I hadn't polished them in a month.

Her reaction was underwhelming. She said, "Hmm," rolled her head a bit, and politely tried to change the subject.

I wanted to say, "Hey, I'm married, not dating," but I knew I would go home with a bruise, for my wife's shoes were polished and sharp and well within range. I said, "I take it you don't care for my shoes."

She said younger women can take risks with guys with shoes like mine, because there is still time to make behavioral changes. At her age, she doesn't have the time or patience to train a new man. At that age a man should be fixed up already, if he's ever spent any quality time with a good woman.

Oh, my. I had a moment right then. I had one of those moments where the whole world slows down and fades away, and I'm left alone, suspended in my own dimension, sort of like Tom Hank's character in Saving Private Ryan when that shell explodes on Omaha Beach and the war around him fades to silence.

I was hearkening back to my early twenties, back when I was a perilous undertaking for any woman. I hearkened back to Janet, the first woman who made a conscious effort to teach me manners.

That memory triggered a reflection back over my entire childhood, and I replayed my life there in that silent bubble while the glasses tinked at the Union Hotel.

Yes, I had made it through four years of college, but dorm life and peanut butter dinners don't have much of a refining impact on a man.

I dated a lot, but dates and full-featured, fully functioning girlfriends are two different things. For dates I could fake it. I could polish my shoes, iron my shirts, and put on airs to keep the illusion going for days, weeks.

But underneath, the real me was a country bumpkin. I grew up in a town so small it said Welcome to Ridgway on both sides of the same sign. Tired of the hectic lifestyle of small town bustle, in my teens my family moved further out in the country to Boone's Mountain, land of hog farmers and junk yards, strip mines and folks who bought most of their meat on the hoof.

Our neighbor to the left was Russ, a one-eyed coal miner with black lung and his wife, Jeannette, who looked exactly like Mrs. Buttersworth on the syrup bottles. To our right was Ernie, a heavyweight, reclusive old man with Parkinson's Disease who never married and never moved. He was Jeannette's brother. Most of the folks on the mountain were interrelated.

Oh, I see my time is up. I will continue this reverie next week.