Setting My Dad Up with Christie Brinkley

For real. Does anyone have her cell?

I have started and stopped a post about my dad’s dating life about six times in the last week. And here I am. Will this one get me over whatever barrier is keeping me from writing about this? Yes, because I am over the torturous process of writing and deleting. I’m too busy for this shit. But I now have a clear goal: I want to set my dad up with Christie Brinkley because it’s the only solution.

My mom, who was hilarious and beautiful and sweet and all the things, died in 2018. My dad, who is adorable and sweet and goofy and FUN, started dating about two years after she died. I wrote about my sisters and I navigating the strange new world of watching a widowed parent date in the New York Times back in 2021. You can read it here for some background. The thing is, as painful as it was back then listening to him deal with Russian bots and catfishing, it was also endearing and funny. Now? Not so funny.

I adore my dad, who just turned 75 and is living his life like a (kind, grandfatherly) frat bro let loose after several years in captivity. The man has never been to a Houston “speakeasy” he doesn’t love, and his social calendar makes my head spin. I know this is mainly because he’s lonely at home without my mom. They married in 1970 when they were 19 because she was feisty enough to say I want marriage and kids and if you don’t want that BYE! So he proposed.

They stayed married nearly 50 years, had 4 daughters, and my dad was a devoted caretaker to her for four horrible years when she was enduring chemo and other experimental treatments. So I give the guy some space and, I guess, grace, when it comes to his dating life. I’ve listened to stories about “great nights” he’s had where he says things like, “And then I went to her place for a drink—” and I yell, ‘DAD STOP! I don’t need to know the rest!!!!” I’ve watched him morph from a devoted husband to the septuagenarian Jerry Seinfeld of the Houston dating scene. One woman’s hands were too big. Another “tore into the seafood tower and food was flying everywhere.” If they have on too much lipstick or not enough lipstick it’s a problem. God forbid a woman have “sun wrinkles” on her arm. If you know the difference in a “sun wrinkle” and a regular old wrinkle, please enlighten me. When I blurted, “Dad, you think mom didn’t have ‘sun wrinkles??!!’” he said, “I don’t think your mom did.” It almost made me cry.

I think my dad is so picky because, well, my mom was perfect in his eyes. And he also still remembers her at 17 and 19 and 25 and 42. That’s how he’ll always see her, even though (mom please don’t curse me) she was 68 when she died and yes she had a few fucking wrinkles! Since 2021, my dad has dated women who are… much younger than he is. Since these posts are all about things I’m in a tizzy about, you can imagine that my sisters and I call each other in a tizzy pretty often. Why can’t he find a nice 73 year old who is financially self-sufficient and sweet? Hell, a 62 year old would be great. I just googled it and Christie Brinkley is 71 and I don’t think she’d do something as offensive as tear into a seafood tower, so I think they need to meet.

I don’t know the woman, but it calms me to imagine my dad getting the best of all worlds: someone who is age appropriate and also up to his impossible standards in the looks department. If Christie has sun wrinkles, though, god help her.

As I said, my mom was hilarious. She used to say things to my sisters and I like, “Girls you think your father is perfect but you’ll see! He’s superficial!” She said it with love, and we’d always defend his honor, telling her no way our perfect father was shallow!

Well.

Now I can imagine her saying, in her Texas twang that I miss so very much it hurts, “See, girls. I told you!” The thing is though, my dad has been through a lot. He lost an apparently wrinkle-free 68 year old wife that he adored and, less than three years after that, a daughter. His 18 year old cat died about a year ago. He has friends and a full life, but he’s lonely. He wants to live it up, not settle. And so while I still fly into a tizzy from time to time when it comes to his dating, I listen to his stories and try not to scream at him too much. I want him to be happy, damnit. So please, Christie, just go out with the guy to a speakeasy and we can all calm down.