How Joseph Got Marri (ed)

"Tell them about the first time you saw me," I coaxed my husband, wanting him to relate the story I had heard him tell many times in sermons.  He told how he was sitting in a car with friends before church and noticed me getting out of my dad's car and walking into the church.  To hear him tell it, he was smitten!  (It may have been the time I first saw him, when an incredibly handsome youth entered the church and I was smitten myself!)

We were in a nostalgic mood  recalling old memories as we sat in my niece's living room after coming in from a festive lunch for my sister's 84th birthday. "I'll tell you the first time I saw my husband," my sister volunteered.  She went on:  "We lived in the country, but sometimes Mama and Daddy would let me go to Grandma's in town for the weekend.

"I got acquainted with a girl next door to Grandma who invited me to a Christmas program at her church, which happened to be The Salvation Army.  'Who is that playing Joseph?' I asked my friend.  He was handsome!   She told me, then after the play, a bunch of us were gathered outside, and he talked to me.  He asked if I wanted to go to the show the next night.

"I got permission, and planned to meet him and his friend (who I thought was really cute) at the theatre." My 13-year-old sister only had a dime, enough for a child's ticket, so that is what she asked for, thinking she would already have her ticket when they bought theirs.

"'How old are you, honey?' the lady asked from the box office. "Eleven," she told her nervously.  She was handed the ticket, and turned around to see the two boys standing behind her!  "I was so embarrassed!" she remembered.

I have a dim recollection of a couple of snapshots of two bright-eyed teenagers at a camp put on by the Salvation Army, looking incredibly young as they perched on a rock in their rustic surroundings.  Their  romance must have blossomed there, because by the time I was five years old my sister's  handsome beau was a fixture at our house. 

When he joined the Navy, they got married and went to California together.  He got shipped out, and Daddy had to go get his newly-wed daughter and bring her home to Oklahoma,  even though she was a little girl no longer.  She still looks young for her age!