I believe in love at first sight. The first time I saw my wife I fell in love with her.
I walked into a bowling alley that had been rented by a church for an after youth meeting get-together. a woman named Betty Richter almost picked me up bodily and plopped me into the midst of four girls. Ella was one and I fell in love with her.
She wouldn’t let me take her home that night, which is normal. She came with the youth group and she would have gotten in a lot of trouble if she had gone with me. And she was a good girl. For that matter , I wasn’t a bad boy, either. I accepted it. This was, of course, 1969, and things were very different then, for the better.
We saw each other a week or so later and then again in a couple of weeks. The third time it looked like we would not click, but I was not one to give up.
I showed up at her church on Sunday, April 6, 1969, Easter Sunday. I had moved to Houston the previous Friday and had a job with the telephone company. I had my own apartment and my own car and I was determined to have her as my girlfriend.
We went together until I was drafted in August. I saw her when I came home on leave and came back in January of 1971 to marry her.
I am not worthy of her. I am a will of the wisp, a wanderer, almost a life vagabond who would move in a minute, do something in a minute, consequences be hanged. We have never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and have never had the money she deserved. That was due to my jousting at windmills mainly, my own predilection for being mobile. I always had to see what was somewhere else.
I guess I was one of those guys who came west in the nineteenth century, except that I lived in the twentieth.
She always deserved better than I was able to give her, yet she has loved me with a love that is so intense. And I have reciprocated.
Now that she is afflicted with her illness, Multiple Sclerosis, I am her caregiver and cannot imagine any other work. I am not particularly fond of myself, but she likes me.
I think that when she was younger, she felt that she was ugly or fat, although she was neither. She had a beauty that was pure and good and she has gotten more beautiful as she has gotten older.
Our marriage has not been perfect, mainly due to my own peccadilloes, but still.
I love her and always have. I love and always will until I die.
I believe in love at first sight because it happened to me.
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