I was 57 years old — divorced almost 25 years — when I met Jim on Match.com. He was a year older than me, divorced for an equal number of years. His children, like mine, were grown and gone.
Right away I knew I liked this man. He was smart and funny and handsome and quietly sexy. He knew how to listen, but when he spoke — in a voice I loved, soft and deep — he had interesting things to say. He had great hair.
At the restaurant where we met, three hours passed like nothing.
On our next date, Jim picked me up in his beloved convertible, a very old and not particularly valuable Porsche. Riding in the passenger seat beside him, headed to the ocean, I felt like Audrey Hepburn in “Two for the Road.” We hiked for hours, then went for wine and oysters.
On our third date he came to my house. I made pasta with pesto sauce, some of which must have ended up on my wrist without my noticing, but Jim did. Very tenderly, he took my hand and brought it to his lips. He licked the pesto off.
Now comes the hard part of this story. The first hard part. The harder part comes later.
At the end of this perfectly terrific and romantic date, I told Jim how much I liked him. “I hope I get to know you better,” I said.
There was just one problem, I told him. “You’re too short for me.”
I’m not proud of this statement. But there you have it.
I’m 5-foot-6 on a good day. I estimated that Jim was 5-foot-7. It’s not as if when we walked into a restaurant together I’d be towering over him.
But I had always seen myself with a tall man — 6 feet tall at least, and on the burly side.
I know why I’d dreamed up this picture. By the time I met Jim, I’d been on my own a long time. I could not name a time in my life when a man had taken care of me. And though this made no sense — worse, it was idiotic — I had come to equate strength, and the ability to protect me, with height and physical girth.
That wasn’t Jim.
We were sitting on the couch in my living room when I delivered the news to Jim that he was too short to be my boyfriend. He’d been about to kiss me. A stricken look came over his face.
“I’d better go home,” he said.
“We can still be friends,” I told him. (The kiss of death.) He shook his head.
“I’ve been falling in love with you,” he said. “If we can’t be together — really together — I can’t see you again.”
But he did. Not that I revised my position on height as a requirement for a romantic relationship with me. He just decided to hang in there a while longer. I didn’t know this yet, though I’d learn: Jim was a fighter.
We took another hike. He brought along his Nikon. It turned out he was a serious photographer. Also a bass player in a band. Also an Eagle Scout. Still 5-foot-7, however.
A week or so later I invited Jim over to my house again for a meal. It was a weekend known as Fleet Week, when the Blue Angels fighter pilot team comes to San Francisco to perform amazing air stunts in the sky over the city. All that day, in preparation for the big air show, they’d practiced their maneuvers over Marin County, where I lived. I loved watching them.
I set out a plate of some very nice cheese. Jim brought a bottle of wine. The two of us sat out on my deck waiting for the planes to appear overhead. Jim lit up a cigar.
Then there they were: a phalanx of six planes, swooping and dipping just over our heads at Mach speed, their wings nearly touching but not quite.
“There’s just something about the Blue Angels,” I told Jim. “They’re so incredibly sexy.”
He lifted the cigar to his lips. Blew out a puff of smoke, his gaze fixed on the wild blue yonder.
“There’s an interesting requirement for becoming a Blue Angel,” he said.
“I guess you have to be really great at flying a plane,” I offered. “With excellent eyesight.”
“To qualify as a Blue Angel,” Jim said, taking his time, “a person cannot be taller than 5-foot-7.”
Then he just smiled.
We were married a year and a half later. With the high heels I chose to wear for our wedding, I was probably a little taller than Jim. He was unfazed by this. He was never anything but proud of me, and proud to stand at my side. I had a name for him: my guard dog. Because no matter what, he looked out for me.
Now comes the truly hard part in this story.
A year after our wedding, Jim was diagnosed with stage 2 pancreatic cancer. He survived a 14-hour surgery, a year of chemotherapy and radiation, the loss of his hair, the loss of feeling in his fingers — which meant he could no longer play his guitar. The loss of just about everything he loved other than me. His weight dropped to under 100 pounds by this point. Though I knew the pain was terrible, he refused morphine until the very end. He didn’t want to lose consciousness. He didn’t want to miss a minute of being alive and at my side.
Jim has been dead eight years now. I still think of him every time I see the Blue Angels — and so many other times. I never felt a need to check the accuracy of what he told me about height requirements for joining that elite squad of pilots, though I learned recently that his claim was inaccurate — just a brilliant strategic invention that allowed me to see what was in fact true: My husband was brave and strong in ways that had nothing to do with physical stature.
Sometimes, still, I wear a particular checked flannel shirt he loved. Also his blue jeans. And it feels good to me that we were the same size. I know this now: You don’t need to be tall or burly to be someone’s guard dog.
