BURGERSCOOT

I remember when I was in high school, we had a speaker who filled the gym. He spoke a lot about responsible relationships, marriage, and abstinence to a full house of randy teenagers. Mind you, I was the loser when it came to the ladies, so it wasn’t like I was a sperm cluster bomb ready to inseminate as many teenage girls as would spread their legs for me—quite the opposite.

He said things that sounded like what a parent would say even though he was only about fifteen years older than us. The only thing I remember him saying was something like, “sex is about 10 percent of a good relationship.” Some of my fellow students, heavily into self-abuse, objected to the tiny percentage.

That turned out to be about the right percentage in my long-term relationship. Over the years I had plenty of sex, but moving into my fifties, it definitely cooled down. These days, sex, as far as anything that is acted upon, is zero percent. However, my brain hasn’t slowed down when it comes to thinking about the subject. After my T bottomed out about eight years ago, I went on hormone therapy. As it turns out, not for sex, but because of a bone density problem. I’m not interested in going through a second round of synthetic testosterone shots or patches. My wife and I are happy watching TV together, discussing books, or ragging about Donald Trump and other politicians. I still miss sex, though. But it is more like I miss the days I was intimate with my wife in that specific way.

These days I am quasi-flirty with my fellow elderly yoga students. There are about four women, specifically, who I chat it up with every time I walk into the yoga studio. These are not difficult classes. When I try a vinyasa or hot yoga class, the demographics remain overwhelmingly female, but the age drops significantly.

When I started these easier classes, I became a bit of a — dare I say it — (old) chick magnet. This was certainly not because of my looks: I am overweight, short, bald; I could keep going, but you get the idea. It is because I am the white rhino of the herd. The few other men who inconsistently show up to the classes I take are younger than the rest of us and, probably because of that, keep to themselves. I would say hi to someone new, and another student would say to the newcomer, “Don’t mess with him, Donna; he’s a troublemaker,” followed by a warm smile.

This encouraged me to crack jokes related to yoga and yoga equipment (blocks, bolsters, straps, etc.). Later, I started buying T-shirts for practice with yoga messages or cracks on my age. Suddenly, the ladies started swinging by while I was prepping for class to see the latest joke on my shirt. I’m not going to lie, I dig it. The first time I got a comment about a shirt, I wasn’t trying to be provocative; I had bought a T-shirt with an image of Woody Guthrie’s famous guitar, which he had written on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” I got a few comments the first time, and it led to talks about progressive politics.

I can’t explain what this camaraderie with the opposite sex does to me. I’m not aroused, but the feeling when one of the ladies walks up to me and starts a friendly chat, I feel an emotional response that is far more pleasurable than when the one guy who usually sticks with yoga talk or his fishing exploits, which I politely listen to, but have zero interest in. Even when the attractive yoga teacher praises me for one thing or another, it does not have the same effect as chatting and laughing with my fellow oldster yogi.

I’m not going to lie; I get mildly excited when one particular student starts talking to me. We are both happily married, so there is this natural wall that prevents either of us from going too far, but I love it when she rolls her mat out next to mine and leans in to tell me something she doesn’t want anyone else to hear. When she enters the studio with a friend and follows that friend to the opposite side of the studio, I’m disappointed. I usually walk over to her, squat down so we’re eye to eye, and crack some joke. (And at my age, squatting is a dangerous game, the sphincter muscle not being what it used to be. I would drop down to my knees, but the class would have started and be halfway over by the time my caps would have found purchase.)

After every yoga practice, I walk across the parking lot to a coffee shop and get a cold brew or something hot. Many of the women in the class know about this ritual of mine because they comment on it from time to time, but no one has ever asked if they could join me (like in the AI pic I made for this post). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying in my cappuccino over this fact; I just wondered what kind of (plutonic) relationship might flourish if someone joined me for java now and then. I may never know, and that’s sad.

As I said earlier, the older ladies at my yoga studio all get a kick out of my funny message T-shirts, and I love the attention. Up to the point the beautiful woman spoke, I felt like she was looking at me, not my shirt. How foolish! I remember getting that look back in college, but I never had the nerve to do anything about it; but here it was: my funny message shirt, and I’m not even aware that I was wearing that shirt; it was hours after my yoga class, the shirt now was –just a shirt, not the elder chick magnet it is inside that yoga studio.

Anyway, she kept walking, leaving me with nothing but a clean set of teeth, a dumb grin, and a reminder that at this age attention can feel like sunlight through a window: warm, brief, and not something you try to grab. Maybe that is what I have been chasing with my elderly yoga ladies—not romance, not danger, not even the ghost of my younger self, but the small human charge of being noticed. Then my wife pulled up, I climbed into the car, and we went home.

And there it was: the ten percent, the zero percent, the coffee I drink alone, the jokes, the mats, the women who laugh. That works for this old post-sex man. It’s going to have to.