John Saunders

By this time I was accustomed to using the Internet for buying stuff, so it seemed natural to look for another partner there. I set up accounts with match.com and seniormatch.com. I had one date, who turned out to be looking for a tennis partner. There were some out of town contacts, which were not developing, and then I got an email from "Linnie" on seniormatch. Their system used pseudonyms and routed emails through their server, which deleted email addresses in the messages to ensure privacy. I had not seen "Linnie"s entry because she lived too far away for my preferences. This email was promising because both of us liked RV camping, and were of like age. I dropped all other contacts. Elaine liked my photo and the fact that I was a professional, like her. The system had narrowed down contacts according to preferences, and in this case it has worked out. Elaine was retired from a position of personnel manager for civilian employees at the huge Edwards Air Force Base. For that reason, she lived in nearby Palmdale, in the Antelope Valley part of the Mohave, or high, desert of Southern California. Elaine is also a professional artist. Elaine served in the US army in France and is the widow of a disabled army veteran who saw service in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. She is a native of Tacoma, Washington and is of Scandinavian descent.

We started exchanging emails. Before long, I was able to give Elaine my direct email address, since I have a web site, saunj.com, which contains it. The seniormatch server did not excise URLs. Afterwards we used our real names and were exchanging two direct emails each way every day, which got more and more autobiographical and personal. I was still at work, so was using both my work and home computers. There is something about the email medium which causes people to let their hair, and guard down, which face-to-face contact does not. In fact, after a few days Elaine sent me her phone number, which I immediately called. We had a banal conversation, and went right back to emailing. Emailing is not like chat, which tends to misspelling and nonsense. Emails can be thought out, structured, and revised. This medium was the right one for Elaine and I, since we are both highly literate, and accustomed to writing persuasive letters and reports for our jobs.

Ten days and eighty emails later we arranged to meet in person. Although we had each sent the other several full-body photos, and mine of course were revealing, it's not the same as seeing somebody in the flesh. The venue was near BAE SYSTEMS, so I was able to be there soon after work. It was the Friday one week before my retirement. We were both very nervous. Elaine, being a woman, was concerned about her appearance, and the ravages of time. I, because of my experience with Ana, wanted to be sure that I could commit myself fully, down to the depths of my being, before being irretrievably committed. We had been so intimate in our emails that casual dating was out of the question. Fortunately, at first sight we flew into each other's arms and kissed. All of our fears turned out to be groundless, and we have been living in blissful happiness ever since.

Elaine had chosen Escondido for our rendezvous partly because it was also her Mother's home. The first order of business was therefore to present me to her. This went alright, I stayed over, and the next day we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which is nearby. Then I had another week of work. As soon as I had completed the retirement formalities the following Friday, I left for Palmdale on my motorcycle. It would be a year before it returned to San Diego, because we always traveled together after that. The record of our travels is documented elsewhere. The first one was crucial. I felt I had to be approved by Elaine's daughter Laura, and by Elaine's best friend Lori, so these two were to be visited right away. Then there had to be a testing of consequences regarding nudism. I had told her about this aspect of my lifestyle before we met, but experiencing it is quite another thing. It would be a very long time before she would even confess that activity to Laura, and never to her friends at work and her Artist's club. After visiting Laura and Lori, I took her to Laguna Del Sol, a very nice clothing-optional resort near Sacramento. Elaine was very nervous but bravely walked in. The staff, who were told of the situation, are used to this, and gave us a tour of the grounds in a golf cart, and their usual spiel. She could see that it was like I had described: a fancy RV resort with the only difference being that some people were naked - no difference in what they were doing. Soon she experienced the pleasure of nude swimming, and was able to get acclimatized to a different kind of normalcy before nightfall. It's something like an alternate universe when you enter a nudist resort.

It was a foregone conclusion that we would eventually live at one of our homes, and Elaine in any case had had vague plans of moving to Colorado after retirement. In this case San Diego was the obvious choice. Although Elaine did not like to live in a large city, San Diego had a better climate. She was loath to abandon her lovely home and garden that she had spent years embellishing. By comparison my house was an old dump. We started moving the next spring. It took many dreary 160 mile trips with her truck and twice in U-Haul moving vans to haul to San Diego her furnishings, stuff, and lots of paving stones from the garden. To complicate matters, Elaine fell and shattered her left heel, and was in a wheel chair and then crutches for months. Most of the duplicates and surplus items to get rid of were mine because my furniture was mostly second-hand. The moving was done room by room in order to re-decorate and re-carpet everything. We will probably never consider the house perfect.