Introduction to John and Sallie

Some people are surprised to find that John and I have only been married for just over three years.  Since we are both in our sixties, it’s normal to assume that we’ve been together for decades.  We are sometimes asked how we met.  The fact is that we met decades ago when I was fourteen and John was sixteen.  We were in youth group together at the First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge, LA.

Here’s how we got to be good pals:  back in those high school days, my older sister drove herself and me, her kid sister, to Sunday evening youth group meetings, but always wanted to find a way to end the evening going for ice cream with her friends instead of driving me home.  One Sunday evening, she asked John to drive me home, and he did.  Before long, this became a regular event – at the end of the evening, my sister would depart with her buds and John would give me a lift home. John and I had great conversations in the car and, over time, once he drove me home, we would sit in front of the house in his mom’s Buick and talk for an hour or more. No romance, mind you, just friends, but two people who enjoyed each other’s company.

When John started college at LSU in Baton Rouge, I was still in high school so, even though we were in the same town, we rarely saw each other. Two years later when I started LSU, we were once again spending plenty of time together, even living in the same fourplex in a student ghetto right off campus for a bit. We saw each other often and rode bikes together, had lunch sometimes, studied together, or just hung out.  We only ever went on one real date, and that was to my sorority formal when I was a freshman.  I’d had a date lined up who had to cancel, so I asked my pal John to take me.  He did and we had a great time.  Here is the picture from that evening – I was 18 and he was 20 or 21.

Eventually, though, he met someone and a romance developed, and I did the same.  We each married, moved away, and had children. John went to medical school and opened a medical practice in Covington, LA, a town about an hour east of Baton Rouge.  I got a graduate degree in Library Science and took a job for a consulting firm in Atlanta. 

We lost track of each other for more than 25 years but reconnected in 2015 when I was in Baton Rouge, sadly, for my mother’s funeral. I ran into his cousin and asked her for John’s phone number.  By now, he was divorced and living in back in Baton Rouge.  I called him, we had dinner, and, after a whirlwind romance, we eloped to Savannah, GA nine months later!

Our journey so far has been wonderful and we are very excited about our upcoming worldwide travels!