It is late 1994. I have been widowed a year and am seeing Ed, whom I met in the bereavement group I had joined. He had lost his wife in 1990, and it took him a while (what, with being a guy and all) to join a group.

He is at this point in his life, winding down the strenuous bachelor style of living and looking for a more permanent connection. His heart is only half in it because, after all, the bachelor life has its excitement, although no one is making dinner, or holding your head when it hurts. Definitely a dilemma.

Ed is working out of his home at the marketing end of an ergonomics company he has founded with two partners and he manages his own time. He is also getting really involved in collecting Civil War and Revolutionary War muskets and is constantly educating himself on the history and markings of these guns. He goes to gun shows, he toys with the idea of participating in a Civil War Reenactment. He gives up this idea when he learns that the participants actually bed down in a field (in Gettysburg) and use trenches for their morning needs just as our soldiers did, whereas he had envisioned knocking off at the end of the workaday battle and going back to the hotel to kick back. “I can’t do it,” he explains, “I’m Jewish, I need my own bathroom.”

But he does go to every gun show within a 300-mile radius. One February there is a show in Albany. He is determined to go. I have been spending a good deal of time at his apartment. We get up really early because it is important to reach a show before the goods are picked over and you lose the chance to get a really good piece. We drive, starting at 4 a.m. We get to Albany. (Here's a tip on how to find the exhibition hall housing a gun show: follow the pick-up trucks.) We walk around the show, Ed does his thing. I look on. I am definitely a faithful friend. We drive back. Lots of driving in a short period of time, lots of fatigue.

That night Ed can’t breathe. He has a friend who is a therapist but she can prescribe. He calls her. She is willing to authorize a prescription for antibiotics if she can then come over and take care of him, on condition that I leave. Ed is afraid his condition is serious and he is contemplating this offer from, after all, a medical professional, when I offer my input using several four-letter words that mother did not teach me. The “friend” does not come.

I make chicken soup and hire a cab to take us into “the city” (Manhattan) to a doctor. The doctor sends us around the corner to get a chest X-ray. Ed has pneumonia. Home in another cab. I stay with him. I check in with my neighbors down at my East Village loft and they take care of Scratch and Sniff for me. Ed is a totally difficult patient but I am Mother Theresa. He gets better and I never leave. Later Scratch and Sniff come to live with us and Ed gets re-accustomed to cat hair. But he falls in love with the kitties and they can do no wrong.

Now, wasn’t that a fairy tale ending?

xx, Teal