Bereavement eat-out chronicles

Nifty. (iPhone photo by BobbaLew.)

—For the past five or six years Yr Fthfl Srvnt has been eating out once per week with fellow bereaved people.
It started when the daughter of a recent widower suggested her father missed having someone with whom to eat dinner. We began patronizing a nearby restaurant.
His wife died a year after mine, and he was distraught.
A lady soon joined us. She was also attending the Grief-Share my widower friend and I attended.
Years ago she and her husband founded a successful flower-shop near Canandaigua. It lasted a long time, but then her husband died of cancer.
Occasionally another widow joined us. She and I worked together at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper. Her husband also died of cancer, but before my wife.
Time passed. My widower friend and I are both car-guys. He attends car-shows with two cars to display. I tagged along a few times, but he’s not a dog-person. He got upset if I brought along my Irish-Setter, which I always do.
Years passed, but we kept eating out one day per week. It was a meal I didn’t hafta cook myself.
We stopped attending that Grief-Share, or it ended — I forget. It was religious, which could be irksome.
The flower-lady and I gravitated to another bereavement group, and the widower joined us. We did that a while, and began eating out at a supermarket café. Attendance of the two widows was occasional; often it was just the widower and me.
Then the widower had a stroke at a car-show, or fell. He was hospitalized with a broken back.
So it was just me and flower-lady for a while, which gave us a chance to patronize restaurants ritzier than that supermarket café.
It also became apparent the widower didn’t like any restaurant that didn’t serve hamburgers — Mexican for example.
The widower recovered well enough to go back to showing his cars. He’s a car-show junkie, and me and flower-lady aren’t. Beyond that he wanted to avoid restaurants not serving hamburgers.
Having discovered I could talk to women, I suggested a few widows join our weekly eat-outs. Most bombed, which made me loathe to ask any lady. I always get perceived as “on-the-make.”
I have a female lifeguard friend at the Canandaigua YMCA swimming-pool who poo-poos that.
But I stopped the suggestions. Too many wipe-outs!
Only one widow success so far. I have no interest in remarrying. I’d be hard to live with, and have always been my own best friend.
I did far better than expected with the one I married. How she put up with me 44&1/2 years I’ll never know. She said it was because I made her laugh.
Often schedule conflicts keep flower-lady from attending our eat-outs, plus my widower friend is doing car-shows.
On two occasions it was just me and my one successful widow suggestion.
Just the other day we did Canandaigua Yacht Club, which she lives next to, and they have a restaurant.
What a nifty place! We sat outside on a porch up a hillside with Canandaigua Lake in view.
The weather was fabulous, and sailboats were out on the lake. And unlike the Mexican restaurant I also love, they serve hamburgers.

• My wife also died of cancer.