by Joe Berkowitz and Joanna Neborsky
It’s pretty hard to reverse engineer a meet-cute. These things either happen or they don’t. If you were really serious about it, you could probably arrange for, say, an errant shopping cart to go charging off in someone's direction and then you could rush up behind it saying, "Sorry, sorry!" and that’s how you'd meet, but then you’d have to live with yourself for the next 50 years or so, knowing that, basically, you're Elmer Fudd. Sometimes when a radiant single lady comes floating along the sidewalk like a dream, I think about stopping her. But I never would. It just seems as intrusive as a catcall—or an errant shopping cart. I might as well be passing out handbills for a shady-sounding sample sale. So instead I say nothing and then she’s gone. We won’t be accidental seatmates at a dinner party later. It’s a missed non-connection, a moment less significant than if we’d been on line together at Whole Foods buying the same artisanal sherbet. How-we-met stories are overrated, anyway.
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