Matchmaker Sans Discretion

My great aunt recently had surgery to eradicate an internal enemy: cancer. That’s why I’m doing this. For the past few years, she’s been overly concerned about my sister and I finding husbands. My sister is 27 and I’m 24 ½. My parents think that my sister might require a dowry. (Sorry, Julie.)

“Please. I want to go to a wedding before I die. Do you think that can happen?” says my Polish, Holocaust surviving aunt.

Nothing like Jewish guilt to make a serial single girl question her place in the world.

“Probably not,” I say. I think I left my filter somewhere.

She says that we’re both too picky. What’s wrong with being picky? Picky might keep you single (though not indefinitely, believes the optimist in me), but it also keeps you from swimming in the same pool as 50% of the population who find themselves divorced. And people often treat pools as if they are a loo.

She says that if we don’t use our female anatomy, “it’s going to get rusty.”

Nothing like Jewish guilt to make a serial single girl question the livelihood of her inner thighs.

While being treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, my great aunt is staying in the facility’s residential complex with other cancer patients and their families. My aunt met someone who she thought would be great for my sister.

She called Julie to tell her about the potential match.

My question-prone sister: “How old is he?”

“47.”

My quick to negate an opportunity sister: “That’s too old.“

“Why do you have to be such a picky pain in the tuchus, huh?”

My rational sister: “My mom is around 47.”

“And?”

My increasingly inquisitive sister: “How do you know him?”

“He’s a cancer patient. Cancer in the leg. I think part of his leg was removed.”

My dream-crushing sister: “I don’t think it’s going to work…”

“Why???”

My straight and to the point sister: “Because he’s FORTY-SEVEN and HE HAS CANCER.”

When I heard the story, I wished she had tried to set me up because I thought it would have made for an interesting blog post. I mulled it over and realized that I could write about someone other than ME (imagine that). So hear it is – the story of my sister’s life.