Book 3 Part 1: Rapping to Lin Manuel Miranda (Gavin the Golden Girl)

After Chad, I jumped back on online dating sites within a month. Looking back, it was too fast, but I was lonely and missed the happy brain chemicals. I convinced myself I was ready again.

“Gavin” had an interesting profile with clever humor. He was super up front about the fact that he was paralyzed, in a wheelchair. He had a kind smile.

Pay attention. This is important later.

We started chatting in the app. I was so happy to have someone to talk to again like that. He asked for my actual number very quickly, unlike Chad, and I told him I wasn’t comfortable giving that out yet. It was still extremely hard back then for me to lay out boundaries in any aspect of my life, so this was an alarming thing for me to say to a stranger, but I also wanted to see how he’d handle that boundary. He accepted it. We chatted more on the app. Our conversations were wide-ranging and interesting.

Gavin told me he was a history-lover, so I asked what his favorite period in history was. While I’ve never considered myself a history buff, I have favorite historical periods. As a girl, I was obsessed with the period around the American Revolution; I memorized Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech for fun in third grade, gobbled up biographies of the founding fathers as well as Indigenous Americans and women at the time. I also loved the 1800’s thanks to American Girl, the game Oregon Trail, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. As an adult, Connie Willis’s sci-fi (historical sci-fi?) books Blackout and All Clear showed me a fascinating window into World War II, and I’ve long loved the Middle Ages. So it seemed a natural question to me. He said I didn’t talk to him like other women, and seemed very pleased by it.

We chatted politics, our kids (he had a daughter a bit younger than my son), and sports (he played wheelchair rugby when COVID wasn’t holding everything at bay). He told me about how he’d been paralyzed, and about the revolutionary treatment he’d undergone after his accident. He sent me the article from when it happened when he was a young man.

It was the end of May 2020, and as much of the world stayed in some form of quarantine, America began to ease its door open and peeeeek through the crack like that one kid who can’t wait for Christmas morning. Meanwhile, COVID numbers continued to rise, politicians were gearing up for the presidential election, and George Floyd was murdered. Many people protested. Other people got mad at the protests. This was not new. But there finally seemed to be some (at least surface-level) progress in our country on an issue that had been going on for far too long: companies posted statements, streaming services featured a Black Lives Matter section at the tops of their pages, and everyone on my social media feeds posted a black square as their profile pictures one day. Obviously, this did not fix the underlying problem. But it seemed like a step forward, to see people who had been poo-pooing the issue and criticizing players taking a knee a professional sports games changing their tunes at least. (Note: I’m not an expert on this issue, having lived my life with the inherent advantage of having white skin—and blond hair and blue/green eyes, to boot—I’m the opposite of persecuted for my appearance or origins).

Meanwhile, people continued to fight over how to handle COVID. My son and I continued to social distance. My son finished his third grade year at home, and his teachers had a drive-through end-of-year celebration for the kids to see their teachers. They blew bubbles and waved signs, and someone dressed in an inflatable t-rex costume. Then when we pulled up, they handed us all the supplies and belongings that the kids had just left at school back in March through the windows of the car. It was so strange, to think about how those items been sitting in the classrooms abandoned for months, like the meals left unfinished on tables in Pompeii. It turned out that was the last year his school was open.

I was getting stir-crazy, so we ventured out a bit—we biked to the bakery in our little downtown area and got pastries at their outdoor window. As we waited in a socially distanced line along the white bricks of the building, I fussed constantly over the fit of our masks—my mom had sewed several for each of us, but this was the first time I’d taken my son around other people in months. We got our treats and settled under an ancient oak to eat in the spring morning. We could almost pretend life was back to normal, except that I felt like a guard dog, eyeing anyone who looked like they might walk too close to us.

My friends and I did an online fairy-tale escape room together. People from all over the world were taking my and my teammates’ virtual workouts. SpaceX launched, and my son and I watched it through live-streaming, with my dad on a video call so we could share the experience.

SpaceX launch Zoom call with my dad.

I finally gave Gavin my number—I’m not sure how long it took me, but I think it was under a week; certainly under two. His first text was about how he’d never talked with someone on the app for that long. It hit me as a bit passive aggressive, but I brushed that off and gave him the benefit of the doubt that it was just a joke. I liked that he was smart and interesting to talk to, even if he didn’t quite make me feel like Chad did. We talked about a wider range of topics than Chad and I had, and there was more depth to our conversations. We joked together, sent silly memes, and by the time our first date rolled around, we had a standing agreement that I would rap “Satisfied” from the musical Hamilton if he would sing the entire Golden Girls theme song for me.

He jumped to sexual jokes and comments more quickly than I wanted. Something I’d appreciated about Chad was that the most “inappropriate” our conversations had ever gotten was sharing a website of pictures of mushrooms that looked like butts. But again, I brushed my discomfort aside. Men liked talking about sex, I knew this, and I figured I couldn’t expect all of them to be like Chad. Besides, Gavin was charming and attentive and made me feel less alone. As a friend puts it, he “gave good text.”

By May, I was using the story of Kevin the Kidder to my advantage. To this day, I find “What’s your worst first date?” to be a great question on a first or second date with a guy. It opens the door for humor usually, and their answers always tell me a bit about themselves. Their reactions to Kevin tell me even more, and I use it as a gentle way to set up boundaries early on (i.e., Hey, don’t slap me on the ass on our first meeting). I told Gavin the story at some point around this time. Later that day or the next, he texted me asking what I was wearing. It was a joke, but it made me uncomfortable, felt like he hadn’t heard my boundary, and like he didn’t understand that it had bothered me. I can’t remember what I replied.

I had two very dear friends who kept me going with socially distanced porch chats during COVID. I would go to Julia’s house on Tuesday afternoons when I didn’t have my son, and Ginny’s house on Sunday afternoons. These were the two people I saw consistently in person other than my son and my ex-husband. They were my lifeline. When I told Gavin about this, he was a bit baffled that we could get together and talk for several hours each week. I chuckled to myself at that and didn’t think any more of it.

At this point, breweries had opened back up to some degree. Gavin’s and my first date, maybe a couple weeks after we matched, was on a Sunday. I went to Ginny’s house and hung out and checked her opinion on my outfit, and then went straight to a brewery in Apex that had outdoor seating.

Gavin and I found a picnic table and sipped our beers—the first time I’d been somewhere to drink in months—and chatted. He had four brothers, and I liked that he was so close to his family. At one point, he called one of his brothers to ask him something about something we were talking about. He put him on speaker phone. It was sweet.

We talked about history, life, divorce, and family. The sun began to set, and he offered for me to come sit on his front porch and talk more, since the brewery was closing (I believe there was still a curfew in effect back then). I hesitated a moment, and then accepted.

Part 2 Coming Soon