Once upon a time, young fellas, your elderly Uncle Rand, at that time a frisky young buck of just forty-one summers, was doing battle with the forces of unrighteousness in an online political forum—and landing spectacular jabs, if I may say so, even though my magnificent sarcasms seemed seldom to register in the heavily-armored pea-brains of my interlocutors—when he received a message, the substance of which was "I like your moves," from an individual purporting to be a Sweet Young Thang. This led to a sidebar, which led to an exchange of personal particulars, which led after about six weeks to young Uncle R flying off to meet the SWT in a southern state, which led to an exchange of bodily fluids. So far, so good, if also a bit clichéd.

The SWT was a bite-ripe young Georgia peach (a sense of lingering chivalry bids me disguise her actual state) with many fine qualities in addition to a set of healthy Bartholins. She was twenty-six, enrolled in law school, and had formerly been an actress with an itinerant theatre company. Oh, and pretty. We conducted our May-December romance (actually more like a May-July affair if you assume a human life of 72 years, with the SWT in the first part of May and me nearing the end of July) transcontinentally throughout 1994, and I saw her last in "Georgia" early in 1995 shortly after the New Year's Eve wedding of two of her chums. Alas, the following month I permitted Valentine's Day (which had never been remotely an issue in any of my previous couplings, all of them with grown children of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—no sense of romantic "entitlement" there!) to pass unremarked, not only without flowers delivered by courier, but without so much as an email! …well, absent some lavish ceremony of contrition that the shrieking telephone conversation did not move me to undertake, I was not destined to return to her good graces, and you know, my friends, a man in middle age, even very early middle age, begins to crave peace and quiet, and will concede much ground to attain this. Many a critical salient has been won by a woman prepared to stage a hissy fit, but this only works reliably delivered in person: if the ramparts of answering machine and email are in place, the feminine nuke of "It's all over between us!" comes a cropper.

There had already been, even back in the salad days of what my late love V used to describe as "a lot of good-natured licking and sucking," certain signs that we weren't going to be a long-term item. She was, and apparently remains, an adherent of "Wicca," and took considerable exception when, the first time the subject was raised between us, I suggested that, far from being the present-day manifestation of an unbroken chain of European womanly folk wisdom dating back to neolithic times, it was in fact created out of whole cloth in the twentieth century. At one point when "The Beatles," a popular musical quartet (as I explain to some of my younger readers here) of a generation ago, were brought up, she said something to the effect of "They were all right in their day, I suppose, but of course not in a league with Guns 'N Roses," at which point I understood that I would not be heading into my twilight years with a woman fourteen years my junior sucking my

Where was I? Oh, right. The doomed romance founders at the beginning of 1995. Ten years after that wedding of her friends, the marriage ended in vast acrimony. I'm contacted via email by the husband, who is now engaged in a custody battle. He wants me to submit a deposition to the effect that his ex-wife was a professed Wiccan. This will, he believes, cut some ice with the "Georgia" judge, who's a grizzled auld Confederate Christianist. I liked the husband; I particularly liked the fact that when the four of us spent a weekend at Myrtle Beach I was able to take him aside and say, anent Wicca, "Surely you don't believe in this appalling codswallop, do you?" he laughed and replied "Shit, no! The things we do to get laid!"

I submit the deposition; I shortly thereafter receive blistering phonecall from SWT (whom I've not seen, mind, for over a decade by this point) raking me over the coals for disloyalty. "This is a small state! Everyone in the legal community will know that the unnamed friend is me!" I hold the receiver a foot from my face; wife says "Who is that?"; I cover mouthpiece and begin to explain—she already has some context—and she says "Ah. I can fix this," takes the phone, hangs it up. (I explain about the deposition. The spouse says "For someone who's usually eminently sensible..." and then sighs as if to say "What's the use?")

Fast forward five years to last month. Early in the just-concluded roadtrip (a cross-country odyssey by my siblings and me to reconnect with sundry relatives in New England and the Midwest; 35 states in 25 days) I receive a "friend request" on a popular social networking site. I do some due diligence. Let's see what she's been up to since the last time our genitals parted company…

Law degree, check.

Admitted to the "Georgia" bar, check.

Married, check.

Daughter, check.

Employed in (curious but by no means discreditable) narrow field of law, check.

[INTERVAL OF YEARS]

Divorced, OK.

Unemployed, OK.

On disability, uh, OK.

Apparently really, really reliant on prescription painkillers, like, oh wow.

Homeless; on welfare…?

Disbarred…WTF??

Disbarred??

At this point—we're still on the road; I'm still weighing the "friend" request"—my younger brother dryly observes "I give it two weeks before a request for money follows." In fairness, a full month elapsed in the event.

Yes, she's homeless, and her home away from homelessness is abruptly being taken away from her, and she needs two nights' lodging plus gasoline to get from "Georgia" (actually Georgia at the moment) to another benighted southern statelet without subjecting her daughter to a traumatic night in a homeless shelter. This I have just done (things are tight on the home front, what with the spouse having been essentially a drain on rather than a contributor to the household finances for about a year now), but given that I'm constantly going on to the wife about how we're spending too much—"no, we're not going out to eat tonight"—I'm thinking that "Oh by the way, I'm sending a couple of C-notes to a crazed ex-girlfriend" is a dinnertable conversational topic best deferred until around the time protons are observed decaying in statistically significant numbers.

And I'm also thinking, what is it about so many women? Like bicyclists who wish to claim the simultaneous privileges of the sidewalk and the road, there are women who seem to want to enjoy the best elements of emancipation and of dependence, and who contrive to hold in their minds simultaneously the notions of males as oppressors and males as cash machines. And I'm looking at this one and thinking, you were smart, and you were a lawyer, and what the hell happened? Ah, well, she apparently has suffered from "fibromyalgia," which four out of five doctors surveyed regard as, if not actually imaginary, at least as a dicey diagnosis, and which has also been described as "allergic to work," and although her accounts of her recent history are somewhat, ah, evasive, I have the sense that overuse of a prescription medication may have led to her professional collapse. I confess, though, that it's difficult to stifle a mean-spirited sense of "Geez, sweetheart, suck it up." Oh well. I don't imagine I'll see the money (notionally a loan) again, but it won't break me.

I think just once before I peg out I'd like to try being a "kept man," but I don't think it's going to happen.

cordially,