Every Valentine's day before he passed away in the 2000's, my grandfather would retell the story of how he and my grandmother had fallen in love and gotten married.
My grandfather proposed to my grandmother on Valentine's Day sometime in the early 1950's. Grandpa was a dashing World War II veteran working on his Ph.D. He was kind of sort of stepping out with his third cousin, and she had urged him to help with the church's annual pancake feed sometime in January. Shrove Tuesday? Mardi Gras? Anyway, he was there. Meanwhile, my grandmother was encouraged by her dorm mates to attend the annual pancake feed at Grandpa's church because, they claimed, it was a wonderful venue for meeting new people. So she went with a group of girls. I think she was in her third year as an undergraduate because she'd had to interrupt college for a couple of years to help her mother care for her father who was dying, slowly, of brain cancer.
As Grandpa told it, he met Grandma and that was that. It was fate. It was love. They stepped out for three weeks or so and then he popped the question on Valentine's Day, she accepted, and they were married six months later and lived happily ever after.
As Grandma told it, Grandpa was indeed handsome, kind, virtuous and full of energy, but he was also dictatorial. He'd had the nerve to scold her for riding unaccompanied on a bus across town after they'd had just one outing. Her father was very unpredictable due to his brain tumor, and he had always been very strict and authoritarian and Grandma wasn't sure she wanted that in a husband.
Grandpa would refute that, his eyes twinkling, saying, "Nonsense! I've always been your tootsie-wootsie," and he'd give her the usual annual awkward one armed hug that characterized their mutual discomfort with physical contact, and Grandma would smile while trying to frown at the same time and swat him with a dishrag and say, "Away with you, you rogue!"
Happy Valentine's Day!
Not my grandparents, but sweet!
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