I was good at it. I was very good at it, and I’m not going to be modest about that at sixty. I have former students who are now forty-five years old and still send me Christmas cards.
I never married.
I dated. Some of it was good. There was a man named Vincent in the late nineties who I came close with — we talked about a house, once.
But whenever anybody asked me why I never settled down, I gave the easy answer.
“I just never met the right man.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
I’d met him at seventeen.
Last Tuesday, I Turned Sixty
I live in my childhood home now.
After my parents died — my father in 1987, my mother in 2014 — I kept the house. I’d spent so many years moving between apartments in West Chester and Coatesville that coming back to that porch and that kitchen felt like putting something down.
That evening I made myself dinner and cut a slice of grocery store cake and ate it standing at the counter, which is a thing you can do when you live alone and it’s your birthday and you don’t feel like sitting.
