THAT SEX THING

I was thinking about sex this morning. I thought that might get your attention. It's not the easiest subject to discuss so perhaps it's better that you aren't looking at me, that we aren't both in the same room.

I've had a vision, most of my adult life, of what good sex might be like, an idea that formed right after I discovered what bad sex was like. I figured I'd recognize it, it being good sex, right away, the way you know a good friend immediately when you've been introduced. You shake a hand that feels at once safe and trustworthy, as if you've been through all kinds of things together, sort of like coming home.

I know there is sex for sport and fun. I've heard of this or certainly seen it on television when they're selling toilet bowl cleaner or knives that cut through shoes. But at my age, I'm hardly up for games of that sort. If I were, I would imagine a panel of judges seated at desks beside the bed or beside the kitchen table or wherever this game is to be played.

There'd be an announcer. All official sports require a deep-voiced announcer. The microphone would drop down from the ceiling and maybe the announcer would be in a boxing ring sort of apparatus. "In this corner wearing no shorts is ..." and his voice would boom from the speakers with lights dimmed. "Come out fighting and may the best man win." Not that the man has to win but why break with tradition. "Judges are compiling their results," he'd shout, pretending to be speaking in a whispering manner while spitting into the microphone on the piling part. The crowd is hushed waiting for the scores. The judges look strained, as if the weight of such decisions is almost too much for them.

The Russian judge, always less lenient with the west, is the first to raise her card. 6.4 it reads. The audience exhales dramatically and they look at each other confused and uncertain. The judge tips her head and raises her eyebrows as if to say, "Well, there was definite excess skin on the neck and the upper arm could have been tighter and her rhythm was slightly off." She isn't swayed by the crowd's ill-placed affection with the underdog. I put my teeth together and suck the air through them as if I've just been given a flu shot in the hip with a ten-gauge needle.

The German judge holds up her a 6.8. Ouch again. I don't even imagine her reasons, but I'm sure it includes lost points for getting a charlie-horse in my right calf. I run my fingers across my shins to confirm if they were freshly shaven. Not. Damn. An oversight.

Then the Canadian judge leaps from her chair with a generous 8.0 and waving her card madly. "I'm sorry," she begins. Did I mention she's Canadian? "She did her best. She really tried. So the dismount was a little wobbly, the entry was smooth. She has had four children. Let's not forget that. She didn't ask for much in return. More of a peacekeeper really."

Bless her soul. Can always count on the Canadians.

That's the scene that plays out in my head, sometimes with a sprained ankle or twisted knee. Perhaps my first inclination to take up tennis instead was the better choice. So, sex for sport just isn't in the cards for me.

There was a time, probably somewhere in my teen years while trying hard not to imagine my parents in the clutches of sexual passion, when I thought sex was abandoned in middle age in preference for reading or meditation or cycling. I may have been a bit presumptuous. I do apologize. It seems the longing for physical contact and intimacy prevails through our entire life.

Nudity at my age seems a scary proposition. But it shouldn't be, should it? If sex is about caring and intimacy and respect and all those wonderful things that each of us craves and wants, then sex should be easy and fluid and there shouldn't be a panel of judges present. There should be trust before there's anything else, trust that assures you that what came before certainly had value, but it is this moment that counts. Trust that assures you no comparisons are made to younger participants and no instruction or evaluation is necessary, just the gratitude that being together is all the ingredients required.

I think life is about relationships and the rest is just details. I saw that on a notice board somewhere. So, if we're lucky enough to have someone that we wake up thinking about and go to sleep caring about, then the cuddling up and all the rest of that stuff called sex should not require a rating of any kind.

I've always been a bit of a dreamer, longing for things that maybe don't even exist, imagining how it might have been had I been whole. Perhaps my vision of sex is just the nonsense of foolish schoolgirls. Or ... maybe not.