Living single: Why alone is enough

I’d experienced this isolated feeling many times. A boyfriend of mine once told me he thought it was because when I was in first grade, I was put in the slowest reading group. Originally, I assumed I would be placed with the best readers, Mindy Weinstein and Mark Negropont, who also happened to be the most popular and best athletes in the class. Instead, I was put with a girl who’d stuck a bobby pin into an electric socket and a boy who, it seemed, had no understanding of the word “soap.” I went to my teacher, Mrs. Stevens, arguing that a mistake must have been made, and she assured me that, no, my reading was actually that bad. Unlike the other groups, each of whom had their own shiny, formica table positioned around the classroom, our group met outside on the stairs, sitting in single file, so people could go up and down more easily. This, my boyfriend said, was the beginning of my life as an outsider. “That’s when you started thinking in terms of you and them,” he said. “That’s what did it. You’re screwed for life.”

I arrived at lunch as the group was finishing up. The small camp site was nestled at the base of a lush, green canyon, surrounded by towering trees.

“We’ve been here an hour!” Kip said, waving to me with one of his delicate, liver spotted hands. “We thought we lost you!”

“He’s seventy-five and he beat us too,” a woman named Candace said, sliding next to me at a picnic table. “I mean, it makes you wonder why you bother at all.”

Candace and her husband Louis had driven up from Seattle, where they were visiting their new grandson. Candace’s gray hair was short and choppy, and she wore the kind of wacky eyeglasses that German, avant-garde architects tend to wear. The kind that say, “I’m creative!” I knew I liked her when she leaned over and whispered, “How many other Jews do you think are on this trip?”

I laughed.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “You’re the only one who’s obvious, Cohen. That’s an easy one, but the others?”

Louis chuckled to himself, patting his wife’s leg. “She does this on every trip. You should have seen her at The Vatican.”

Just looking at Louis, you could tell the nature of his and Candace’s relationship. She was the wild one, and he, with his balanced smile and everyman haircut and clothes, was her rock.

Candace pointed to an older woman named Audrey, a creamy blonde who looked of Norwegian descent.

“I mean, clearly she’s not a Jew, but there have to be more than three of us. Right?”

And just like that, it was the first day of camp. The first day of first grade. You make one friend, and you don’t leave her side. Candace was now officially my best friend, even though she’d just asked if my name was “Emily”.

In the afternoon, I rode behind her, squinting to make out the back of her helmet. I was feeling pretty good about keeping up with Candace until she told me she’d recently broken her ankle and it was still swollen.

The next day, the weather turned unseasonably cold, a thin frost covering everything, making the roads very dicey. Breathing, panting actually, as I peddled up an eight mile hill, I exhaled what looked like a fine mist of talcum powder. Since I didn’t prepare for cold weather, I was wearing all the clothes I’d brought at once: two tee-shirts and two sweatshirts under a Patagonia fleece; green thermal tights under my long, padded shorts; a lavender bandana tied around my head under my helmet, and gloves. Today we were visiting Lake Louise, which had the most beautiful water I’d ever seen, a glamorous turquoise poised against all the surrounding mountains, some transcendent in pine green, and others, all granite except for a little white of fresh snow. It was at Lake Louise that I had the humbling experience of meeting someone whose dog was in better shape than I’d ever be.

Video   Happy, fulfilled and single Sept. 26: TODAY’s Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford talk to Amy Cohen, author of “The Late Bloomer’s Revolution,” and psychologist Judith Sills about why some people choose to stay single. Today show

“Mildew went on a nine hour hike with me last Saturday,” his owner said, patting the black lab. He was the kind of guy whose bong was attached to the outside of his knapsack. “And we went on a sixteen day rafting trip. He also loves to jog. He never gets out of breath.”

This was all told to me as I reclined on a large boulder, wondering, after the morning’s ride, if I’d ever walk again.

At dinner, I was seated across from Ted, a man in his fifties who was also traveling alone. He was a genuine loner, I thought, unlike me. I was faking it for the time being. He didn’t need to make friends or fit in. He was happy leaving well before the group every morning and even happier never to speak to any of us. Ted had a fine stubble of hair that looked like glitter along his scalp and a businesslike stare when he addressed you. He didn’t say much until the conversation turned to bicycle trips he had taken before.

“Every trip I’ve been on someone lands in the hospital,” he announced, slicing into his venison. “In Tuscany, this gal flipped over the handlebars and when we flew back to America, no one was sure if she was permanently paralyzed or not. And when I was in Belize, this fella had a heart attack. And in Africa someone got this fungus. At first, they thought it might be a version of the flesh eating virus.”

Candace nudged me. “He’s a barrel of laughs.”

Tonight, Candace was wearing a white smock over a loose, flowered dress. She told me it was a cheese maker’s smock, which she had purchased in Paris. Looking at it, I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes, by the 19th century food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin, who said, “a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.”

“But then the fungus started to blister,” Ted continued.

“P.S., Kate and Rodney,” Candace said, referring to a bubbly, athletic couple from Newton, Massachusetts. “Jewish. They told me at lunch.”

Ted then announced that he was off to bed. He wanted to get up before dawn. After Ted left, Jenny from Chattanooga said, “Do ya think he’s gay?” She leaned forward on her elbows, resting her pale face on her fists. “Eugene doesn’t think he’s gay.”

“He’s gay,” Candace said. “I think he’s one of those men who is, but nobody thinks he is. The kind of man who constantly falls under the GAY-DAR.”

“I didn’t think Elton John was gay so you might be right,” Eugene said, reaching for the white bowl in the center of the table. “Is there an Equal packet in there?”

“What do you think?” Candace asked me.

“He could be picky,” I said. “Or shy.”

“Shy!” Jenny said. “I never think of that.”

“He could be asexual too,” Candace chimed in. “He’s told me he spends a lot of time with his nieces and nephews.”

Ten minutes before this discussion began, I was planning on going to sleep early, but now I wasn’t leaving. What, I wondered, would they say about me? Poor Amy, maybe she aims too high, they might say. You know so many women her age have unrealistic expectations. Or maybe she likes the wrong kind of men. Or maybe she’s bitter! Recently, I’d seen a few of my single friends get increasingly bitter, growing weary and impatient with their lives, sniping at other people’s good fortune because they felt so forgotten.

“I want to make the word `victim’ fashionable again,” one of them said. “Feeling sorry for yourself is so out of fashion now, and I want to bring it back in a big way. I’m tired of looking on the bright side.”

I’d seen them become more exhausted with each disappointment, angrier at a world that had let them down. I’d felt a little of the bitterness myself, never strongly, but the vaguest sense of not being completely happy for a friend who announced she was pregnant with her third child, when I was debating whether to try online dating. Bitterness now seemed like a world into which you could pass without even knowing it, just by letting your guard down.

After the dessert plates had been taken away, Jenny drank the last of her decaf. “Yer sa brave,” she said, looking across the table at me.

Video   Why she stayed single Sept. 26: TODAY’s Matt Lauer talks to Amy Cohen, happily single author of “The Late Bloomer's Revolution,” and psychologist Judith Sills about why some people choose to not get married. Today show

I thought her response was to what I had said earlier about only recently learning to ride a bicycle. “That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “I must have been nuts to go to the Rockies on my first bike trip.”

She wrinkled her pert nose. “I don’t mean the bicycle,” she said. “I mean, because you came on this trip alone. I mean, I could never, never do it.”

“Me neither,” Candace said. “You are brave.”

“I agree,” Eugene said.

“You’re so brave,” can be interpreted in two ways. The first kind is what you might say to a fireman. This is the version that says, “I admire you. I’d love to be more like you.” The other is what you might say to someone who was just in a terrible car accident but is making a full recovery. This is the one that says, “You make me feel better about myself, because I’m not you.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I said, “No, I’m not.”

“No, you are,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “I just can’t imagine going somewhere alone in a million years.”

Candace nodded vigorously.

“I look at my mother and I don’t know how she copes with being alone all the time,” she said. “Although she’s getting senile. Which helps.”

The next day we visited the Columbia Ice fields, one of the largest accumulations of ice and snow in the Artic circle. There was an observation deck at the visitors center, where everyone stood admiring the dramatic expanse of ice in front of us. This afternoon, the group was scattered. Some were in the parking lot taking pictures. Some were signing up for the Sno-Coach tour of the glacier. Everyone else, exhausted from the forty miles we’d done that morning, had gone to their rooms upstairs at the Ice fields Chalet.

“Do you want to watch TV with us?” Candace asked, noticing me standing alone. “We can put Louis on the couch, and you and I can channel surf and raid the mini-bar!”

It was such a kind and generous offer. How could I tell her that the mere thought of it made me want to drink my way to the Betty Ford Clinic.

“That’s okay,” I said, waving. “I’ll see you guys at dinner.”

Although it was cloudy all morning, now the afternoon sun had come out: smoky and vibrant orange, and with it, crowds of people, delighted by the warm weather.

“Right there is a slow moving river of ice,” a man told his young wife, who held his thick waist from behind, resting her head between his shoulder blades. “I read in my book how they look powerful, but actually they’re totally fragile. Like, things die all the time, like the plants and wildlife, and sometimes you can hear avalanches in the distance. Survival is a daily struggle on those ice fields.”

Standing there, looking at that desolate, frozen mass, I remembered my father saying about his Safari, “after awhile. An elephant is an elephant.” I wondered if he thought the elephant would have meant more if my mother were still alive. I could imagine her watching the elephants’ enormous gray bodies, excitedly saying, “you know, they can live to be eighty!” and “According to The Guinness Book of Records, the largest elephant ever was from Angola and weighed Twenty-Four thousand pounds!” Or maybe she wouldn’t have said anything, and they would have just stood there, silently, content that they were not alone in the jungle.

Excerpted with permission from “The Late Bloomer's Revolution” (Hyperion) by Amy Cohen. Read another excerpt here.

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