My Daughter Made Me a Dating Profile Without Asking. My First Date Showed Up on a Tractor

I want to be very clear. I did not agree to this.

I read the profile she’d made. It said I enjoyed “long walks on the beach, fine dining and meaningful conversation.”

I’ve seen the ocean exactly twice in my life. I think fine dining is when the restaurant gives you a cloth napkin. And my idea of meaningful conversation is discussing the price of hay.

“Kayla,” I said, “this is a lie from top to bottom.”

“It’s called marketing, Daddy.”

Before she went back to Nashville, she sat me down and gave me a whole lecture on online dating safety. Never send anybody money. Never give out your bank information or your Social Security number. If a woman you’ve never met has an emergency and needs a wire transfer, she’s not a woman, she’s a scam.

“There are people out there who steal retirement savings from lonely widowers,” she said. “Romance scams. Identity theft. It happens every day.”

“Then why did you put me on there?”

“Because there are also nice women out there,” she said, “who are just as lonely as you are.”

For two weeks, I ignored it. The phone kept buzzing. I figured most of them were the scams Kayla warned me about.

Then I got a message that said:

“Your profile says you like long walks on the beach. Mine says I like yoga. My granddaughter wrote it. I run a sorghum mill and I have never done yoga in my life. I’m guessing your daughter wrote yours. Want to get coffee and tell each other the truth?”

I laughed so hard I scared the dog.

Her name was Darlene Cobb. She was 63 and lived about thirty miles away, near Lewisburg. Widowed six years. Her family had been making sorghum molasses the old way for four generations.

We agreed to meet for breakfast at a diner in Lewisburg on a Saturday morning.

I got there twenty minutes early. I wore my good shirt, the one Bonnie bought me for our fortieth anniversary. I sat in a booth by the window and checked my watch about every forty-five seconds.

Nine o’clock came and went.

Nine-ten.

I started to think maybe this was the part where she asked me to wire her money.

At nine-seventeen, I heard an engine coming down the main street. Not a car engine. Something louder.