"Your place or mine?"

Anne McElvoy thought that going out for coffee and a piece of pie was a lame excuse for a date. She had inferred from how her coworker had talked about her father that he was “loaded”. Judging by the run-down restaurant where he suggested that they meet, he must have very low tastes. Well, she could help him with that.

Jon Peterson, for his part, hated driving to the city and loathed the metastasizing weirdness of the entertainment industry. The best he could do was to meet the blind-date his daughter had set him up with at MorningLori*, a mom-and-pop diner in Dimondale, a hamlet tenuously attached to the extreme edge of the city. It was a place that he and his wife had sometimes visited before she had passed away from cancer a year ago.

He hoped that the memories would not intrude. He still wept...well, his eyes started leaking, anyway…even after a year. His daughter thought it was time for him to get back on the horse, so to speak. Gwen, his wife, would have agreed. She had made it very clear near the end that she wanted him to find another woman. She knew better than anybody that Jon was not wired to be alone.

Walking through the door, Jon saw a petite, red-haired woman of about the correct age sitting in a pool of light to the left-center of the room. Walking over, Jon introduced himself.

“I am Jon Peterson and I think you might be Anne.”

“You mean you don’t know?” Anne asked.

Jon, flustered, asked “Well how could I?”

“Didn’t you look me up on Facebook?” Anne asked.

“I don’t use social media. In fact, I don’t even have a Facebook account” Jon said.

Anne frowned. No wonder she had not been able to check Jon out. This was quite the mess. She would have to ferret all the important details face-to-face.

Jon was also perplexed. This date was not off to an auspicious start.

Jon sat down. “Did you order?”

Jon was late. The slow leak in the left-front tire of his truck had suddenly decided to become a fast leak. He had to swap tires and change his close. Jon was ALWAYS early. Except for this time. Not being early put him off his game. And his hand were dirty.

“No” Anne said. “I was waiting for you.”

In fact, she had been within five minutes of walking out. She didn’t want to eat at this dump if she didn’t have to.

The waitress came over and looked at Jon expectantly. “I will have a glass of ice-water and a coffee with cream and a slice of apple pie” Jon said. Apple didn’t stain if it smudged. Jon felt his composure waver. He remembered an incident with blueberry filling from when he and Gwen had first started dating. He inhaled and calmed himself.

Anne asked the waitress, “What kinds of coffee do you have?”

The waitress responded “We have regular and de-caf”.

“No, I mean, do you have like Columbian or Kona or fair-trade Rwandan?” Anne asked.

Baffled by the question, the young waitress responded “I think it is Folgers.”

Anne snorted slightly. “Then I guess I will have ‘regular’ and a piece of whatever kind of pie that you have that is freshest. And warm it up for me.”

Jon thought that that was a cheap shot. The large sign on the wall clearly said that the pies were baked daily.

The waitress was immune to rudeness. She cut two slices of apple. The rude woman had made her job easier.

Jon looked his date over while she was ordering. Brilliant orange-red hair. The color was not a natural shade and had undoubtedly came from a bottle. She looked to be physically fit which was a point in her favor.

At first glance she didn’t appear to have a lot of make-up on but up close Jon could see that she had applied ample amounts of spackle to hide the cracks and holes and craters that the ravages of the decades had wrought. Jon was not opposed to spackle. He had used it himself on drywall many times over the years.

Anne’s face seemed frozen. "Perhaps she is afraid the plaster will crack." Jon thought.

Jon had never encountered anybody three-weeks after a series of discount Botox injections.

Anne’s voice was animated but every sentence seemed to end with a dragged-out hiss that made him think she was bored to the limits of her endurance.

“So why aren’t you on Facebook” Anne asked.

To Jon’s ears, her tone was combative rather than inquisitive. Jon gave her the benefit of the doubt. Many of us rely on conversational gimmicks and we cannot hear how we sound to others.

“It is a waste of time” Jon replied.

“But how do you know what is going on? How do you interact with people?” Anne queried.

“There isn’t a lot going on that I care about, at least on social media” Jon responded. “And what people post on Facebook is phony. People are competing for status, not communicating, for the most part” John said.

“How droll” Anne said. Anne was not 100% sure what “droll” meant but it seemed less insulting than “eccentric”. She still hadn’t decided if Jon was worth her time.

Jon cocked his eyebrow as if to invite her to say more. When it was not forthcoming, he asked “Why are you on Facebook?”

“Because everybody is on Facebook” she answered. She was amazed that anybody would have to ask that.

“I know a few ladies on Facebook. They use it to cyber-stalk their grandchildren” Jon started to volunteer.

“I don’t have children. Never wanted any. I have my career” Anne interrupted him.

Jon was taken aback. Even though Jon now identified as antisocial, he once had a long and mostly successful career of his own. He recognized “interrupting” as naked aggression, a sign of contempt and a need for the other to establish dominance.

Anne would have let him finish his thought if she had a genuine interest in getting to know him. Clearly, she had some other motive.

Jon decided at that instant that the date was over. He would go through the motions required by politeness...but he had no interest in spending more time with this woman than was demanded by decorum.

Jon was rescued from having to say anything when the waitress arrived with their order. Jon opened a creamer and added it his coffee before taking a sip.

The coffee was fresh but weak and it was clear that the water softener was on the fritz. He could taste the iron in the water...it gave the coffee a distinctive, flat taste and made the color dark.

Anne added six spoonfuls of sugar to her coffee and stirred until it was dissolved. Then she raised her cup of coffee and wet her lips and then set it down. Her grimace suggested that she found the coffee undrinkable.

Trying another gambit, Jon asked “Which coffee shop in Lansing makes the best coffee?”

Delighted with the opportunity to showcase her sophistication, Anne went on a long, rambling verbal tour of all of the up-scale coffee-shops in Lansing, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor. She slyly insinuated that none of them were really all that good but each one had some concoction that was almost good enough, so she spread her custom as whim dictated.

She thought her monologue was dazzling and brilliant.

Anne asked Jon where he liked to traveled to.

Jon said “I don’t travel.”

“Yes, I know. You couldn’t travel while your wife was sick. That is so sad” Anne said.

Jon didn’t know if she was referring to Gwen dying or that he couldn’t travel.

“I don’t like to travel” Jon clarified.

Anne gave him a horrified look, the kind of look one reserves for an insect doing the backstroke in one's soup.

“You don’t travel?” Anne asked. “You must be bored to death.”

“Why would I want to travel. If there was some place I would rather be, wouldn’t I just move there?” Jon asked.

“But traveling is mentally stimulating” Anne objected.

Jon shrugged. “I had to travel for work. All hotel rooms look the same. Nearly all ‘destinations’ are like Dolly Parton’s wig...synthetic concoctions that might look good on the surface but are fake. At least Dolly has the grace and perspective to know that and poke fun at herself.”

Anne riposted “You don’t go to concerts in Chicago or plays in Stratford or...well...anything else cultural?” Anne had never met such a dinosaur.

“Live music hurts my ears” Jon said. “Most of the guys I know who go to concerts are trying to be twenty years-old again. They go to listen to old rock bands who flog songs from forty years ago. And since they are all half-deaf, the band plays too loud”

“And I can read Shakespeare’s plays sitting in my recliner.”

The conversation wandered about as Jon and Anne sought some kind of common ground.

Anne delicately probed “How much is your rent?” and was amazed that he owned a house. She was even more amazed that he didn’t have a house payment. She would have ended the date but she knew that Jon could mortgage the house and be rolling in spendable money if she could help him see how beneficial it would be. The first thing she would do would be to update his wardrobe.

Jon picked at his pie. It was no longer made by hand but was a commercial, frozen pie that was “baked on the premises”. It was bland and insipid.

Jon, for his part, listened to Anne prattle on about gender pay inequities, systemic racism and other current topics.

Anne would off-handedly note “...and of course I am sure you agree…” as she launched into the next trendy outrage du jure.

Jon didn’t have the energy to argue and he knew in his heart that it would not make any difference if his points were not what all of the coolest people agreed was true. He just grunted in a noncommittal way.

Anne did not notice that Jon was in less than wholehearted agreement with her presentation as she preened in the lime-light.

Anne showcased her great loyalty to friends by sharing how much she enjoyed of flying down to Texas or to Colorado for cocktails and shopping with her girl-friends.

Jon knew without having to ask that Anne had posted selfies of her and her posse drinking foo-foo drinks at all of the trendy bars in Denver and Austin on Facebook. With Anne, it was all about “flexing”.

Jon suspected that a relationship with Anne would be one where his value to her would be as an accessory for display...much like a designer handbag.

As the possibility of any potential common ground petered away, Anne decided to bring the date to its logical conclusion. “I suppose you want to sleep with me. Your place or mine?”

“No” Jon said.

“I beg your pardon?” Anne said absentmindedly. The comment about sleeping together had been rhetorical and "No" was not one of the two answers she had been listening for.

“No. I don’t want to sleep with you” Jon said.

“What?” Anne said...offended.

“Dates are for getting to know people. I know enough about you to know that we are incompatible. I don’t want to sleep with you” Jon said.

***

The inspiration for this piece was from a Jordan Peterson interview. What if the Jordan and the interviewer met on a blind date...

For those who might read too much into the story, Mrs ERJ is in great health. Thanks for your concern.

*MorningLori is actually a very nice mom-and-pop restaurant with good-to-very good food but the building is as described.