I always knew he’d come back.
the story of Laura Alice & Claude Jr.
“I was sitting on the front porch,” the story went, “and I looked up and saw two young men come in the little gate and amble up the walk. But I really only saw one of them. And I said to myself, ‘Why, that’s Claude Jr.—and that’s the boy I’m going to marry.”
It was just like that. Both of them testified to ‘love at first sight’. And though that’s a rather dubious concept in our ‘enlightened’ age, I have to say that I believe them with all my heart.
He officially asked in the fall of 1941. A moment’s bliss—and then the war. Grandma’s eyes always grew misty when she got to that part in the story. Granddaddy was one of the first to go, and one of the last to return.
“Forty-eight months in the South Pacific,” she would murmur, as if to herself. “And I always knew he’d come back.”
When you hear a love story it is the description of something that happened, not a prescription of how to make that very same thing happen in your own life.
(Natasha Metzler in "How to Read Love Stories")