“Well, I walked into the room at First Baptist Church for a single’s seminar. There were 30 women and two men, and the prettiest girl in the room was the one right here (he pats my grandmother’s knee).”

(Silence)

“Tell her the rest of the story,” she says.

“What rest? We got married.”

“Tell her the rest of the story.”

The best kinds of love stories involve redemption, being taken from a place of hardship and struggle, to a place of bliss, love and happiness. Kind of like a fairy tale. My grandparents love story is much like a fairy tale. Both my Granny and Pawpaw were recent young widows, both with children to provide for and love, both attending the same seminar for singles. My Pawpaw recounts…

“I had kind of given up. The topic that night was ‘alone v. lonely,’ so I went to figure out how to live with just me and my daughter. I’d given up on trying to find anything else. And then there she was.

“So I decided to go back a second time, and so did she, and so this time I asked her out. And guess what?”

“What?” I ask.

“She said yes!”

Their first date at the Fiji Island Restaurant (still in business, he adds) was April 9^th, 1976.

“I was trying to extend the evening and I went to her house to drop her off, and she said ‘do you drink coffee?’ And I said ‘yes,’ which was an absolute lie.”

My Granny takes over from there.

“We were talking about have a wedding in July, but in May, he was travelling late at night and crashed into a telephone poll. So that’s when we decided to get married. I was afraid he’d kill himself before July.”

He says “We asked ourselves, ‘what do you need for a wedding? You need a bride, a groom, a preacher and some witnesses.’ Well, we had four kids between the two of us!”

“So after a month and a half of knowing each other, we pulled the kids out of school and got married on a Wednesday afternoon at the church, and we had dinner at Le Gourmet Restaurant.”

“People thought we were crazy,” says my Granny.

“I don’t think my mother ever forgave me for not having a huge wedding,” says my Pawpaw.

“And here we are, 35 years later. And they said we’d never last.”

Happy Anniversary, Granny and Pawpaw.

My Pawpaw likes to pretend he doesn’t enjoy taking photos.