Love, Thy Name Is Arrowsmith
Jun. 15th, 2005 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomTwo weeks ago, Percy and Florence Arrowsmith celebrated their eightieth wedding anniversary, earning spots in the Guiness Book of World Records for longest marriage and oldest aggregate age of a married couple. She's 100. He died today at the age of 105.
I think this needs to be a thread for any true, uplifting tales of love you might have handy.
I think this needs to be a thread for any true, uplifting tales of love you might have handy.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:35 pm (UTC)Thank you muchly.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:42 pm (UTC)(Sadly, I can't help but wonder if she'll last the year, now....)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:53 pm (UTC)My father's aunt died a few year's ago from lung cancer due to her smoking. She was 91 I think. Her husband who was 95 died about 4 months later. Just seems to be one of those things.
I miss her. She was LOTS of fun. I remember at her funeral my grandmother was mad at my father for something- I don't remember what- and my mother turned to me and my father after my grandmother walked away and said "I can just see Aunt Mae looking down right now going 'Ha Ha I got you in trouble!'"
->Later.....Spice
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 07:56 pm (UTC)*sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 08:00 pm (UTC)His passing is sad, but their 80 years together gave me the warm fuzzies. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 08:20 pm (UTC)This story reminded me of that. Thank you :}
True love stories
Date: 2005-06-15 08:25 pm (UTC)When my brother married, the wedding was attended by his family, her family, and her first husband's family, all of whom approved (my sister-in-law was widowed before meeting my brother).
My parents were married for 32 years; as far as I can tell, they were still very much in love when their marriage ended with my mother's death.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 08:32 pm (UTC)My grandmother's almost 91. Her gentleman friend, Wynn, is 95. They have a transatlantic romance, because they each have professions that are hard to move and adult families in their respective homelands -- he's a professor of engineering in Wales, she's an interior designer in Boston. They visit back and forth half a dozen times a year, or else go off someplace else together to see the world. They both like to travel. Wynn is slightly more physically agile than Mary at this point, but as Mary has, within the last ten years, ridden a camel in Egypt, walked over the lava fields in, um, I think Bolivia (but don't quote me, might've been Peru), and been shipwrecked in a typhoon off Bali, I think we can reasonably assume she keeps up with him just fine.
They met in their twenties. Wynn visited some friends in America and was introduced to a charming lady he intended to start courting. Except there was a slight hitch -- between his first visit, when he arrived in the US, and his second, a month later when he was passing back through after an excursion on the west coast, she got engaged to someone else (who became my grandfather). He sighed, transferred his approach to her to a platonic one, and they became good friends and remained so when he went back to Wales.
The families remained close for two generations. Mary married my grandfather, Wynn married a lady at home and lived happily with her for many years. During WWII, Mary's family sent care packages of things difficult to get in Britain, and when her daughter, my stepmother, went to Europe as a teenager she stayed with Wynn's family.
Mary divorced my grandfather, remarried, and lost her second husband to cancer in 1985 after a 25-year marriage. Wynn was a widower by then. He gave her a polite few years to adjust, and in the early 1990's, took up the courtship he had always intended. They have been together ever since. With luck, they will enjoy each other's company until at least the age of the couple in your article. They've only got ten years or so to go.
My Godfather and his First-And-Last Love
Date: 2005-06-15 10:13 pm (UTC)As is all too common with high school romances, John met Someone Else. (Or, as John's grown sons tell the tale, She met Him and Set Her Cap). Whatever, they were married early in WWII, shortly before he shipped out to Australia to build airfields for the Army Air Corps. Meanwhile, Arlene went to work as a secretary for a Chicago lawyer, who presently became a Chicago politician, and wound up in Washington D.C., where she spent the rest of her career without ever meeting Anyone Else. John came back from the Army to Valparaiso University and spent his entire career there in various faculty and administrative posts. They both retired somewhere around 1990 (as an average value).
Arlene came back to Evanston and started writing around to see how many of her high school friends were still breathing. She found John. His wife was quite ill by then, so they merely began a friendly correspondence. After John's wife died, they began visiting back and forth, going to cultural events in Chicago or at the University.
I met her at his funeral last August, frail but gracious.
She died last week.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 09:21 pm (UTC)There, sitting on a table in a matching burnt orange leather skirt and vest (over a lovely floral silk blouse) was this amazing looking woman. Long brown hair, deep brown eyes, curves to die for. It was love at first sight. This opinion was confirmed when she looked up, smiled at me and said "Ski Clubs over there... leave a note on their door and they'll ignore it." I blinked and said that no, I was looking for the SF club. This was met by the widest, toothy smile I'd ever seen. Oh yes, I knew she was for me!
It didn't matter to me that she was already engaged to another guy and I had a long distance girlfriend, such petty things did not matter.
And they didn't. Cause 51 months later, I married that woman. And we have been married now for 22 years and 2 months now.
Never let anyone tell you love at first sight doesn't exist...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 09:53 pm (UTC)sometime in their middle to late 80s my grandmother complained to my mother that my grandfather was starting to have problems getting lead in his pecker. Gives ya hope.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-16 05:18 am (UTC)I do not think I have the words to truly describe just how very much I love my husbands. Or how very lucky I feel to have found not just one, but two such relationships in my life.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-16 06:47 am (UTC)