My mom was proposed to five times before saying yes. How does that happen? Did she seriously lead a bunch of guys on, then dash their dreams? Were things a little more flippant back then, and you asked a girl to marry you on the second date?
My mom was fun, pretty, and social. She loved to ride horses, go to dances, and waterski with her Catholic youth group in college. Those were more innocent times, and the only way to get farther with a girl like my mom was to marry her.
What all those guys found out was that you could only marry her once you committed to Catholicism.
Awesome filter. I’m pretty partial to my dad, so all of those nos led her to him. The fifth guy. The one whose astrology-loving mother and barely Lutheran parents raised a slightly-churched choir boy with the prepubescent voice of an angel. “Golden Voice,” so he was called in his youth.
They met on Bourbon Street before it became the Sodom and Gomorrah it is today. She was a nurse helping deliver babies at Charity Hospital and he was a petroleum engineer working out on oil rigs for Shell. They lived just down the hall from each other and he never seemed to notice her. I bet he assumed that his cerebral nature didn’t align with her social nature. It all changed the day his roommate asked her to stay with him while he was sick.
They got to know each other over orange juice and aspirin, and got married three months later at Saint Louis Cathedral – once he’d finished the proper steps to becoming a Catholic, of course.
I give him a lot of credit for that. He must have really loved my mom. It’s actually a good idea – ‘Do you love me enough to do all of this religious stuff for the rest of your life?’ And you see who’ll stick around. Good one, Mom! Perhaps more people should try that one.
to be continued…
Copyright © 2020 Edee Kulper, excerpt from a book in progress
