The superiority of face-to-face

One of my aquacise-instructor’s Facebook posts.

—“I know what I was going to say to you,” I shouted to my aquacise-instructor at Canandaigua’s YMCA swimming-pool.
“I’m getting all your stuff again, your Facebook stuff.
……Something about insects wintering in your dead garden stalks.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” she said. “Don’t tear up your garden too early.”
“Being silent when angry,” (above). “And something about water eroding a mountain with persistence.
Sometimes I get notified you posted something, then nothing for a while.”
That aquacise-instructor and I are Facebook “friends.” Long story: a SuckerBird Fast-One.
“Maybe it’s in my ‘homepage’,” I’d tell her. “But I never look at my ‘homepage’.”
“Suddenly there you are again. Okay, but I never know what Facebook is doing. Why now, but other times nyet!
We talked more after our aquacise class. I try to not interrupt.
I admit I enjoy talking to her. She smiles and her eyes sparkle. I get that from other women I talk to:
—Surprising ******* at my supermarket.
—**** at my physical-therapy.
—The pretty young jogger I met on Lehigh Valley RailTrail.
All counter my childhood: “No pretty lady will associate with you, Bobby! You are despicable!”
She’s probably that way with most people, but a pretty lady smiling at me was mind-boggling.
That led me astray = inexperience.
70 years late. Never again!
Another lady friend told me just because a girl smiles at you, doesn’t mean she likes you.
That lady was an easy smiler, and had to fight off loathsome lotharios.
I also said something else to that aquacise-instructor. Droll repetition of how I came to prefer face-to-face over text, e-mail, FB “messages,” etc.
Face-to-face gets her immediate reaction, instead of possible misinterpretation of what I wrote.
The written word can be very pretty, but it’s one-sided.
It shelters me from the immediate reaction of my contact — which might be negative.
Now I’ve had so many pleasant face-to-face female contacts I question the value of the written word.
Maybe at long last that aquacise-instructor and I are actually talking with each other, instead of just me talking to her (writing).
Face-to-face is much more productive — and pleasant.
I had to lose my wife to find this out — nine years next month.
And 70 years late thanks to Bible-beaters in my childhood.

• “SuckerBird” is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and head-honcho of Facebook.