Generally, it’s a couples’ world, and you notice it as you travel the world. But I felt it most vividly years ago when I was dropping my son off at college in upstate New York. Driving back home, I passed The New York State Fair. I had never been to a state fair, and I had the urge to pull over and see the 700-pound sows, and the faded rock bands, and eat the sweet sticky stuff purveyed from booths, luring passersby like forbidden fruit.

So I parked and entered, and what I found, because I was looking, was that on that particular summer day, among thousands of milling visitors, I seemed to be the only one on my own. Oh there was the occasional man or woman waiting outside the portable toilets, and a frazzled solo mom or dad with a kid in tow. But otherwise everybody seemed to be with somebody or somebodies they could talk to.

I could have been in one of those old science fiction movies from the 1950s when a strange creature is dropped into Earth and walks among the people, looking just like them, but not of them. I felt like one of the “Coneheads” from  those old Saturday Night Live skits, where Dan Ackroyd, as the father, Beldar,  talked almost naturally, but not quite. “I would prefer a cooled cola drink.” "Could you lead me to the correct corner?” “May I place my hand on your spherical appendage?”

Yes, I felt I had a cone on my head, but I ate the sticky stuff – flannel cakes and fried dough and bright red candied apples and pink cotton candy. Just a bit of all of it. And I touched a rooster’s comb for the first and only time in my life, and it felt like a giant Gummybear. And I listened to banjo music and felt free and easy that summer day, and thought about all the single people who may not have gone to the fair, just because they were alone.

For those of you on your own this summer, go to the fairs, or the shows, or the concerts. Straighten that cone on your head, plow into the crowds, and eat the sticky stuff. In fact, let's all go out and enjoy the simpler joys of life.