a love story Part I

yesterday my dad and my step mom celebrated 18 years of marriage and i found myself thinking about their wedding and their courtship and how they found each other.

and then i found myself being very, very, grateful that they found each other.

she had been on her own for 12 years after her marriage stopped being a marriage. writing rent checks all those years, she had finally taken the plunge and got her "own" mortgage on her "own" place. she had come to terms with her life. . . fair or not, it was still her life and now she could live that life in something she owned.

and he, well, he had just become an unwilling widower after 36 years of weddedness (i'm pretty sure that is not a word but "wedded bliss" is a cliche with a lot less truth than use. . . ).

my sister and i knew what we had to do when mom died - we took dad out to breakfast and laid down the law. our mother had been pretty emphatic that if anything happened to her, dad was to remarry. she knew him best and we kids wanted to honor her by giving him our blessing.

(side road here - giving a blessing to the remaining parent to remarry while still knee-deep in the grief process is not easy or painless. . . it is an act of will. it is self-less and takes courage - courage on a daily basis. it takes a fierce love and a tremendous amount of trust. my sister, Kris and i had none of that in our heads or hearts that morning in Denney's - let's be honest, we were afraid of mom. if anyone could make it back from the other side, it would be her. . . and she would not have been pleased if we had been stingy with that blessing.)

seriously, all Kris and i knew is that we loved our dad and wanted him to be happy. we had just lost our mom to cancer and we didn't want to lose our dad to a broken heart.

you would think that all it would take at this stage of the game is a chance meeting at church, the grocery store, a favorite restaurant or mutual friends. but you see, he was in Phoenix and she was in Denver. chance meeting at any location was not in the cards.

so how did these two people destined to find love again actually find love again???

well, it all started with a Christmas brunch, a forgotten camera and my mother. . .