Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Advice I Want to Share With My Girls About How to Choose a Mate

This is a real life story of a first date from a long-married farm couple

Archie Lieberman's Neighbors: A Forty-Year Portrait of an American Farm Community, Bill, Sr and Mildred

Mildred (on the story of how she met her husband in 1938): "Bill was about eighteen. I was sixteen. He was with another boy in Scales Mound. It was  Sunday noon, and maybe they were playing pool. This boy had a date with me that night, but he didn't have a car. This boy wanted Bill, who had a car, to bring him to see me. They called up and wanted to know if I could get a date for Bill. I got a girl for Bill and I went with my date, and we went to a show in Sullsburg. It was wintertime, and a real snowy night. Bill was driving, and we took his date home fist, because she lived closer to town than I did. Then, going to my home, we had to go up a steep hill called White's Hill, and we couldn't make it up. Bill had to get ou and put chains on. He was whistling and work, and this guy I was with was doing nothing but grumbling and grunting, and I just decided right then and there, that I liked whistling better than groaning and that I liked Bill a lot better than the guy I was dating.

pg 47.

I really loved that story. Something similar happened to Jon and me on our first date skiing in snowy Madison, involving a flapping edge of his cloth Jeep cover that he had to keep getting off the highway to re-duct tape together. There was something so relaxed and unnaturally cheerful about him.