That man o' mine

I love telling people this: Frank and I met on Yahoo! Personals.

He found me. My search criteria had the ages settings set to exclude him (he's 9 years younger than I). His opening (email) line was "You have very alluring ... words." Turns out he's a newspaper guy from way back (reporter in Ohio and Yuba County, CA, and managing editor at Napa Valley Register) and a former college professor (journalism at Dominican College in Marin County).

When we met for the first time at a Fort Bragg cafe, I thought, "This is a face I would like to look at for a very long time." He likes Christmas and baseball and animals, and had just moved to the Coast a couple of months before we met. He was living 2 1/2 miles from me.

On our second date, I went to an abalone barbecue at his mom's house and met several visiting relatives.

The stats: He's 6'8", 275 lbs (he's lost 60 pounds in the past year on the low-carb approach), red hair, blue eyes. He laughs with his whole body, and he laughs often. The phrase "gentle giant" was coined for him, but there's a confidence about him, perhaps from years of athletic training as a football player in high school and college.

We have words, digital photography and gardening in common, as well as having moved around a lot as kids. We are far too much alike in many ways. Both of us often have trouble recalling where we put things (keys, wallets, gardening tools). Makes for some interesting living conditions. Politically we're both lefties, though he has a touch more anarchism (is that a word?) in his philosophy than I do. Although he is the youngest child (by 9 years) he acts like an oldest, no problem taking charge of various situations or having a game plan for any eventuality. He's wildly intelligent and maddening absent-minded. We have fun giving voices to the various critters we have (his dog, my cat, the chickens).

He spent more and more time at my house (had been living with his mother after Dominican) and when we bought the chicks together it was more or less official, we're living under the same roof. It works out pretty well, now that we've done some rearranging and he has the spare bedroom to use as an office. (Since I've been working full-time, I have no desire to be on my computer at home.) It's still a small two-bedroom house, but the price is right -- I pay less than half the market-value rent of $900 by trading several hours a week looking after my neighbors' brain-injured son and spending the nights next door when they travel. Frank pays for a lot of the groceries ("I eat the most," he says), and it works out.

Right now he's working at the local weekly newspaper as a reporter; for the Fort Bragg schools as a middle- and high-school substitute teacher; and occasionally drives County mental health clients from Fort Bragg to wherever there's an in-patient bed for them. He recently got his real estate license and is looking for investors for buying a local motel to convert to a board-and-care facility for elderly folks.

Ever since I really got to know him I've felt like we are "forever." He's helped restore my faith in a future. There's a steadiness about him, along with that whacky humor, that is just perfect for me. He's brought a lot of fun into my life, and he's a great cook.

We sometimes play the "what if we'd only met when we were younger?"game, but the answer is always the same -- we wouldn't have been ready.

What all this means
One evening during the worst of my recent cold and sinus problem, we were eating dinner and he said, "How come we never talk about getting married?"

"Ubh....." I said, acutely aware of my complete unattractiveness at that moment -- my red nose, stuffy head and yucky cough -- and was immediately also very moved. We enjoy spending time together, value one another's opinions, already feel "committed."

We don't feel like there's any rush, but we've been talking about getting married.....


Frank with his nephew Jack and Frank's dog Sturmz