Unexpected reconnect

—Hooray-hooray! ***** and I are still talking.
“Here goes,” I said as I entered the Canandaigua YMCA swimming-pool area.
***** waved as soon as I walked in. She was far across the pool, and walking toward me. ***** is a lifeguard, and they “rotate.”
After mucking up royally a few weeks ago, I was dumbfounded. ***** gave me a restaurant gift-card in exchange for an extra train-calendar. She got my calendar for a railfan friend.
And I was dumb enough to suggest the one I most wanted to use the gift-card with was her.
***** is married, happily I guess. Yrs Trly is a stumbling geezer age-76, no longer in shape.
My excuse for such stupidity is never having got the hang of interacting with women. Only now, since my wife died eight years ago, do I find myself interacting with women.
***** said hello to me by name months ago, thus beginning complete reversal of my childhood. “NO PRETTY LADY WILL SAY HELLO TO YOU,” yet ***** did.
Off-we-went, striking up a friendship despite my many gaffs.
***** and I are worlds apart, but I make her laugh. My wife told me the reason we lasted 44&1/2 years is because I could make her laugh. (Her mother declared we wouldn’t last four months.)
What am I doing talking to *****, plus many others since?
A really pretty girl told me what women love most is laughing.
Some time ago ***** told me she used Google-Chrome© as her Internet-browser, and G-Mail.
“The Dark Side, eh?” I said. ***** laughed.
She dipped her foot in the pool once and “Hey, you can’t do that! I been coming here three years, and I’ve yet to see a lifeguard get wet!”
Then “When ya gonna play footsie with the pool again so I can pick on ya?”
“You talkin’ a-me?” reprising Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
I coulda asked why ***** began talking to me again after I goofed up so bad.
Don’t say anything! Just play along like I never goofed up.
“I thought you were going to FL.”
***** pointed to her tan. “Already been there,” she said.

• I do aquatic balance training in the Canandaigua YMCA’s swimming-pool, two hour classes per week — plus a third hour on my own.