Romance For Beginners

Some of you may know that I’m spending my geezer years eating pie and raising a Grandson, or maybe he’s raising me. I’m new to this game. I only had girls, and boys were a creature that sent flowers to the girls and ran when I caught them on the property. Now I’m responsible for one. If you believe in Karma you probably think I deserve this because of my being mean to a plethora of young men over the years. It’s true that I tortured the potential suitors of my daughters. It’s also true that if a boy hung around the house I’d put him to work. When my girls were teenagers I rarely had to mow or change my own oil.
So Boy 1.0 is officially a middle school, junior-teen adolescent cisgender male. In case you’re wondering, cisgender means his daily life reflects the gender on his birth certificate. In other words, he’s not insane. You gotta love the modern activist trendy-talk.

This life stage involves fewer toy cars and more incidents with razors and buckets of axe cologne. I’m serious, I think he’s got a mud bucket full of axe and he takes a dunk at odd times. It’s hard to breathe when that stuff is aloft. His young teen world also involves some male arrogance which makes him puff up his chest. The arrogance makes him think for a moment he can take me on. He also pays attention to a creature he calls “girls”.
Teen boy and girl relationships are exactly the same as 50 years ago. They’re the same, except for texting and Snapogram and Instachip or whatever. Come to think about it, the technology has made teen years a lot more time-consuming than half of a century ago. No teen has the chores we geezers had. No teen has to slop the hogs, get in the coal, and work in the salt mine like I used to do. They type and will end up with thumb arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome. Not the same thing.
Boy came in the living room and interrupted my episode of “Swamp Thing”. He announced that he and girl are “Going out”. I asked, “Going out where?” He rolled his eyes like I was the stupidest person on the planet. “We’re going out. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend. Going out” he explained. It seems that “Going out” is the same thing as “Going steady” or “Dating Exclusively”.
I asked him where they were going, and he said “Nowhere”, which to me defies any interpretation of “going out”.
In compliance with the new normal of courting, the girl sent the boy a photo via messaging. Girl put on makeup before she took the picture. Boy’s response was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Boy texted back, and I quote, “What’s wrong with your eyes? Did someone beat you up?” When asked about it, he really thought she’d been hit in the eyes. He didn’t understand why she was upset.
Eventually he went to church with her. Well, he sort of went to church with her. I delivered him to the church she attends and picked him up. Even though it’s winter I kept the truck window rolled down in a failed attempt to breathe around the cologne vapors. I hope they kept the church ventilation on high because I’m sure he filled the sanctuary with his man-scent. I didn’t see any gas masks or decontamination booths when I picked him up, so it must have went well.
Boy and girl have since broken up. In his words, she “dumped” him. Other than meeting up at church, they never went out while they were “Going out”, and now never will. It’s all very confusing. The only differences I can detect are that he’s not texting as much and I can breathe better. He’s still puffing up his chest, but it does him no good. I caution him that he could end up looking like he has makeup on, but he won’t have any.
Fini.