James B. Nicola
My three best friends, when they turned 30, 32, and 35, respectively, changed.
They started to want kids.
In their twenties they didn’t.
All three were still single, yet none was a female interested in males. Does a Biological Clock start ticking louder after 30 even in so-called “non-breeders” : guys, gals not into guys, and transcendents? (New word—whaddaya think?)
Here’s the thing, though. They didn’t know how to meet people. Manhattan can be one giant singles-bar—or museum—if you want it to be. But over the last few decades, such places have been fine for hooking up for a night, not so much for finding a potential parenting partner for life, once called dating.
Dog owners tell me that walking a dog is a great ice-breaker. None of these friends of mine own dogs. And they happen to hate museums.
Nor do they have time to take, or interest in taking, an evening class, or in joining a book group or volunteering at a switchboard, all tried-and-true techniques and places for meeting people back in my day. All three have high-powered jobs, so it has been hard enough for me to get them to take in a meal, a movie, a show, a set of tennis, or a stroll in the park or around the neighborhood with me, once or twice a month. And they’ve noticed that I seem never to have trouble meeting new people. That is, talking to strangers.
Probably because I’m not going to be having kids. Not this time around, at any rate. Which takes the pressure off any conversation. But their observations got me to start taking notes on how I did it.
For one, if something nice to say occurs to me, even to a total stranger, I tend to say it. Case in point: During the pandemic lockdown, remember when people could finally start taking walks outside? Well, whenever I saw someone with ornate hair, female or male—even the most severe-looking muscular, seemingly intimidating male, you know the type?—anyway, I’d say something like, “Great dreads,” or “Great locks” or “Great hair,” and 100% of the time I’d get a huge smile in response and the feeling that I’d made someone’s day. So I learned that even the most super-masculine guy—well, if he spends that much time on his hair, he’s probably “embraced his Divine Feminine” or whatever you care to call it. Because I have no designs on investigating a child-rearing partnership with such a guy, it’s been easy to blurt “Nice dreads” and just walk on—which I continue to do to this day.
My friends observed that I also say things like “Looking good” when I pass someone planting or pruning or painting or sweeping or stretching or whatnot. Now, when you are on the go, without dog-meets-dog to stop you in your tracks, there’s no built-in minute or two for conversation while the dogs do their thing. So, as with magnificently maned men, I’ll simply say “Looking good” and proceed. But every so often, a chat will ensue, for two minutes—or two hours.
For folks merely sitting—on a bench, a blanket, or a boulder in Central Park—I find “You’ve found the sweet spot” equally effective, particularly if they have found the only shaded area on a sunny day, or vice versa.
My three friends, though, said they could not do that. Talk to a stranger without an ice-breaker like a dog on a leash. Maybe it’s wanting a kid too much.
Eventually they remarked on another practice of mine: wearing clothes with words.
Like my PR cap. One day, right around PR parade day in June, the very first guy I ran into in the elevator was wearing one, too. His letters were red and mine were white, but the rest of the cap was exactly the same design and color scheme. I pointed it out to him, and the two of us, with our pale-skinned non-PR faces, soon found out about our Puerto Rican cousins by marriage, which couples in turn had kids. So we now know something about each other. Not our names, of course, but what’s a name?
During any Grand Slam tennis tournament, I favor my U.S. Open cap. I passed a person in the park last week also sporting a U.S. Open cap and just had to interrupt his palm-device obsession to say, “Synchronicity, hunh?!” Made him smile, at least.
Sometimes when I wear my Mets cap, I’ll find out how the Mets are doing. Being an incurable Red Sox fan and living in New York, I cannot wear a Yankees cap, nor a Red Sox cap—and live—until late in the season when at least one of the teams is out of the running. Boring, I know, but at least I am not a full-blooded hypocrite, just a partial one, insofar as baseball is concerned.
The same thing has worked with caps and tee-shirts that feature words like Telluride or Michigan or Yale. And also with my luscious Lansdowne pullover from Ireland with various gorgeous greens. Soon after I came back from Ireland with it, a bar opened katy-corner from me called Lansdowne. First time I went, I met practically everyone there, just as if I were in Ireland. Lansdowne is the football club in Dublin. Football being soccer, I presume, but possibly rugby too, since it is actually called a “rugby shirt.”
Anyway, I recommended Wearing Words to my friends and they tried it. And guess what? Each one has a partner and a kid now, all named for me. One’s named James, one’s Nicole, and one’s Jacquelyn, Jacques being French for James.
So even though I won’t be having a kid this time around, I have been making a small but positive contribution to the next generation.
I hope.
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