An Old-fashioned Love Story

salvation army bandHow my grandparents met is a true love story.    In the early years of the twentieth century, my grandmother Jennie Dunn was a member of the Salvation Army.    One afternoon while she played in the band to bring sinners to the service, a gang of young toughs decided to harass them.  My grandfather John Myers was  part of that group, but when John saw Jennie,  his life that changed.  Love at first sight for both.  She left the Salvation Army to marry him.  He found faith and wrote religious pamphlets that were very popular in Wichita, KS.  They had seven children, one of whom was my father.   I’m named for my grandmother whose name was Jane.  Jennie was a popular nickname for Jane back then.

I only knew my grandmother when she was much older, nearly seventy.  Completely deaf at that time, she looked a great deal like Whistler’s mother in Arrangment in Black and Gray.   She sat straight and unsmiling and never said a word.  I knew her children adored her but I knew her not at all.old fashion love story

But she had experienced a love strong enough to steer her life in a different direction, to leave what she knew and begin life with a man so different from her.

How often we judge people on how we see them not who they are or who they were before we entered their lives.   How much we miss out on!

Do you know an unexpected  love story you’d like to share?  I’d love to read it.