I very much appreciate the encouragements, as well as the caveats, from all of you. You too, you Mad Madpaddy!

I continue to make progress getting to know the new candidate. We e-mail each other every day, and are planning our first phone call for this weekend.
She's half Irish (what do you think of that, Madpaddy!---my brother's wife is also Irish) and half Caribbean black. Most unusual. Tall. Slender and feminine and very cute, and she prefers white men. So gentle and sincere and pure of heart in her messages, it overwhelms me.
She lives about 80 minutes from me. Not impossibly far, at least not until oil gets to $200/bbl. Plus there's a city midway between us where we could date.
She's totally committed to Christian ethics, but she's opened my eyes to the possibility that God would not compete with me for her love, but strengthen it. A shared faith can help cement a relationship, I suspect. I've had problems with faith as many of you know, but I've had something of a religious conversation that began before I met her. Misery and loneliness will do that to you.
I'm reading a textbook on the history of Western Civilization. What strikes me is that religion has been around since the dawn of humanity. It responds to central issues before which science and reason stand as mute dummies. In a sense, all religions are the same one force. What my own sense of reason may reject, I can accept symbolically. Perhaps that process is the key to faith.
Don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, but I have hope regarding this new person in my life.
Heine