​My Aunty Carol believed it was her responsibility—if not her calling—to set me up with nice Jewish boys.

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Not just one.

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A steady rotation.

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At one point, I’m fairly certain there were notes at the front door––messages from my Stepmother, Julia: NJB #1 called, NJB #2 returned your call, NJB #3 called—as if I were running a quiet little dating experiment out of my home.

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I was young, open, and, as it turns out, wildly naïve.

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The first was Perry.

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Perry the butcher.

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My aunt had spotted him at Nortown, the deli she frequented, and decided—on the strength of his being both nice and Jewish—that he would be perfect for me.

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We had a perfectly pleasant evening. Conversation, television, the polite dance of two people doing their best.

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And at the end of the night, he said it.

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“I’ll call you.”

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I believed him.

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That was my first mistake.

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He never called.

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It was a small thing, really. People say things all the time. But something about it landed harder than it should have—not because I was heartbroken, but because I had taken him at his word.

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I thought: if you say you’ll call, you call.

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Apparently, that wasn’t how it worked.

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At the time, I was a student at Ryerson, and in a moment that felt equal parts indignant and inspired, I decided to respond in the only way I knew how.

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I put a personal ad in the Ryerson paper.

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“Hey, P.I. (the butcher),” it began. “Thanks a lot for calling me again. What am I, chopped liver?”

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Signed: Carol’s niece.

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It was cheeky. Slightly outrageous. Entirely satisfying.

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A few days later, I was walking down the hallway at school when I walked by two girls sitting off to one side reading the paper together and laughing.

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“Oh my God, look at this,” one of them said, reading it out loud.

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They were howling.

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And every part of me wanted to turn around and say, I wrote that.

 

But I didn’t.

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I just kept walking, smiling to myself, carrying the quiet, electric feeling of being seen without being known.

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That was the moment something shifted.

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Not just in how I thought about dating—but in how I understood my voice.

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The setups, however, continued.

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There was the cardiologist—impressive on paper, deeply impressed with himself in person—who spoke at length about what he could provide, as if a résumé were the same thing as a connection.

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There was another blind date who, in my memory, has taken on the shape of a kind of human metaphor for “not quite right.”

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And through it all, my Aunty Carol remained hopeful.

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“He’s a nice Jewish boy,” she would say, as if that alone were the magic ingredient.

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But somewhere along the way, I began to realize that I wanted more than “nice.”

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More than “on paper.”

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More than a shared cultural checkbox.

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I wanted a spark.

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I wanted to choose.

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Around that time, after one particularly uninspiring date, I asked my mother what I should say if I didn’t want to see someone again.

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She didn’t hesitate.

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“Just say, ‘Be well.’”

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Two words.

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Clear. Kind. Final.

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No false promises. No “I’ll call you.” No polite ambiguity.

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Just truth.

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And so I used it.

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“Be well,” I said, stepping out of a car one night, closing the door on something that didn’t fit.

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It felt clean.

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It felt honest.

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It felt like mine.

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Looking back, I can see that those early, awkward, occasionally hilarious encounters gave me more than just stories.

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They gave me a way to listen for what felt right.

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They taught me the difference between being chosen and choosing.

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And they gave me, quite unexpectedly, my first taste of what it feels like to have your words land in the world.

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Because in the end, I didn’t remember Perry.

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I remembered the hallway.

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The laughter.

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The moment I knew—even if I didn’t say it out loud—

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I wrote that.