BoomerGirl Diary

"He doesn't respect my work," B.K. says to me about a man whose name she can't, actually, remember. Referred by a friend, he called B.K. to ask her out on a blind date. She was not available all weekend, she told him, because she had a project due on Monday and needed to work.

"And he was like, `Oh, you have to eat sometime,' " B.K. reports. "And, `You sure you don't want to take a break for dinner?' "

I'm jutting my chin forward waiting for the part where he doesn't respect her work. It turns out that the story is already over.

"Can you believe that?" she says. "Why would I go out with someone who does not respect my work?"

Hoo-boy. I go to the cabinet, take out two wineglasses, fill each with a solid slurp of merlot. "Sit down, sister," I say. I try to guide her, as a friend does, on a tour through her ... cognitive slippage. "He doesn't know what the heck your job even is!" I say. "This has nothing to do with your work. He wanted to take you out to dinner. He wanted to meet you. What is your problem?!"

"Well, you don't have to yell at me," B.K. says.

"You're blaming some stranger for your inability to say yes to a date," I say.

She puts back the wine in one gulp. "You don't have to yell at me," she says.

"Yes," I say. "Yes, I do."

It's tough love time. When was the last time B.K. went out on a date? I can't even remember. Why is she hiding? I put these questions to her, but she keeps going back to Mister-Name-She-Can't-Remember.

"I'm not sure I liked his phone manner," she says. "And I never have luck with Jewish men. And it just rubbed me the wrong way that he didn't respect my work."

Oh, brother. I put my fingers in my ears and shout, "La! La! La!" until she shuts up. "There is something else going on," I say.

She surrenders, nods. She says she doesn't understand why this feels like such a big deal, or why she feels so scared.

"So go out with the guy and find out," I suggest.

"I'm sick of talking about this," she says. "Can't we just watch TV?"

I surrender, click on "Dancing With the Stars."

Five days later, I get a phone call from B.K. "OK, I went out with him last night," she says bluntly. "His name is David."

"Oh, my God!" I say. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

"It wasn't like that," she says.

"OK, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you like him?"

"I'm gonna say 5," she says, adding that his enthusiasm for her was about equal. "But that's not the point, either. This was a much, much bigger deal than either you or I anticipated."

I ask her to please walk me through the evening. She tells me she ordered pork. "I wanted him to know right off the bat what kind of Jew I am," she says. He ordered the sea bass. He started filling her in on his background, his kids, his two divorces. "He complained a bit about one of the wives, but not overly. He was respectful, not whiny at all." Then, she says, he asked if she wanted to say anything about her own romantic history.

She wondered what to tell him and found herself, without warning, beginning a sentence this way: "For the past two years, I've been kind of busy with ..." She caught herself. She nearly choked. She was about to attempt a leap across a seemingly impossible abyss that had, up to that point, not been named or even identified. Her eyes got wide. Should she finish the sentence? Should she deflect and start over?

"And I thought what the hell," she tells me. "And I said, `For the past two years, I've been busy battling breast cancer.' "

I feel the weight of the sky fall on me. Duh. I had not put this together: B.K. has not been on a date since her cancer diagnosis. The cancer had taken her completely out of the game. And now she's past it, and now, it seems, she's ready to return to the playing field. "I never knew if I'd have the courage to tell a guy about it," she says.

"Wow," I say.

"Yup," she says. "I had no idea until that moment. I seriously thought I was going to choke. I had no idea how scared I was to tell a guy I had had cancer."

I ask her how David reacted to her story. "He didn't recoil like I was damaged goods," she says. "He seemed genuinely curious, compassionate, and just went on treating me like a normal person." She says that reaction, that normalizing, was like a breath of a new kind of air.

"You think he'll call?" I ask.

"I have no idea," she says. "None of that matters."

She says this stranger, who came out of nowhere, transported her from a person who could never tell, to a person who now can.

"He was kind of like an angel," she says. "Don't you think?"