I'm Single Now, he said to me.

At 7:30 this morning, "and 71 years old.  So I just love to come in here and eat this oatmeal, ya know, because I don't always cook for myself."

To which I replied, of course.  I completely understand.  But instead of telling him that my wife was gone for 2 weeks, abroad, which is true, I instead nodded again vigorously, to avoid the possibility that he would tell me that his wife recently passed away, making him single for the first time in 50 years.  And because I was a a stranger, I didn't inquire further, and we settled into silence for the next 30 minutes after some quaint talk about tehneed to keep stretching and working on one's body.

And when I said goodbye to him, and wished him well, there was a moment wherein he realized how searching and pathetic he felt before, how insecure, how reminiscent of his early 20s he may have been there, for that moment, in his early 70s, and I felt it too, he brushed it all away by being relatively gruff, instead of desperate, and I wanted to tell him it was okay, but I was also not willing, in the previous moment to endeavor down the possible dead-wife path.  So it is on a Friday morning.