Where's the Silver Lining?

Robert's dream woman

Robert loves to tell stories, and I wish I could make a record of them all. In fact I'm asking him to record each story as it comes to mind.

One story he has shared with me and with others concerns his "dream" woman, the woman who he wanted to marry some day.

When he was a child, he wrote an essay for English class about the woman he wanted to marry some day: He wrote that she would be tall, beautiful with long dark hair, and love him.

Years later he visited his sister Pat at the college she attended. Pat and her fiance, David, were in a music appreciation class that I also attended. We were to attend the Oklahoma City Symphony each week for an assignment for the course. I worked most Monday nights, the night of the performances, so I could only attend on nights I didn't work for some reason. I had to borrow a ticket from someone not able to attend and find a ride. November 7, 1961, I was off, found a ticket, and was waiting to see if I could take the place in the car the person whose ticket I borrowed. The young man rode with Pat and David each week, but David didn't know if there would be room because Pat's brother was going with them. If I was willing to wait and be ready to go at the last minute, if the other person who usually rode with them decided not to go, I could take her place. I dressed and waited. Five minutes before we were to leave, I was called and told the car was parked outside the lobby of a dorm adjoining mine.

Robert says that David asked him if he would go into the lobby and see if I was coming yet. They needed to leave in order to be at the Civic Center on time. Robert went inside the lobby and sat where he could watch down the long hall that joined that building with my dorm. He saw a slender, dark-haired young woman hurrying toward him. Suddenly, the person from his essay appeared, he said. He jumped up and hurried back to the car, afraid that it was me, afraid that it wasn't.

When I walked out the door of the lobby and looked for the car, a short, grinning man climbed out of David's tiny car and held the door for me. I think he said maybe three words to me the whole evening. I went back to my dorm later that night thinking, "Well, I certainly didn't made much of an impression," never knowing until months later that the opposite was true. He said and says that he fell in love with me when he saw me walking toward him that night. I was the woman he had dreamed of while growing up.

Poor Robert, I'm far from anyone's dream, far from perfect, but I do love him, and have for many, many years. Bless his heart, he says that's what matters.