I'm telling you, Cupid had it in for my family big time, eh.

The men on my dad's side of the family that I knew were all kind of practical down-to-earth guys who weren't much into sentimentality. Except that my dad, his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather--each and every one of them--fell in love at first sight.

Don't you just love the way some stories travel down through families? This story was a hard one to dig up, though.

My dad was a difficult guy to talk to about anything involving feelings, he just didn't want to go there. But my mom died when I was a kid and I only had a few memories of her. After I had my own kid, I wanted to know more about her.

So from time to time I would ask him questions. Usually his body would clench up, he would answer in monosyllables, and then change the subject. Then one day I asked him the magic question, "So how did you two meet?" Even though there was a lot of pain tied up with remembering my mother, when he thought back to that first meeting, he just got this wonderful shite eating grin.

To understand my father, you need to know that he ran off to WWII when he was only a few months short of his 15th birthday. That's him on the left in this picture with his parents and sisters, just a short time before he disappeared.

As you can see, he was a big, strapping Ottawa Valley farm boy, well over six feet. He was good with a gun, and I'm thinking the recruiters knew that dad wasn't 18 but they didn't guess he was 14. He hid under an assumed name so my grandparents couldn't drag him out of the war and when he turned 18 he sent word to my grandmother that he was still alive.

Dad saw things someone that young should never have seen, fought in the brutal, bloody Italian campaign. He came home a man who was older than his years, a man who had a hard time dealing with feelings.

When the war was over he didn't tell his mother exactly when he was discharged, decided that he would come home, stroll into the kitchen, and surprise her.

He was the one who was surprised, because when he walked in a beautiful pale skinned brunette with light green eyes was drinking tea with my grandmother. She was the best friend of my dad's kid sister, Gloria.

Lois turned around to see who he was, smiled at him, and my father said he knew at that moment he was looking at the woman he would marry. Just like that, butta bing, butta bang, butta boom.

It took him over five years to convince her, he said, but he knew from the moment that he looked at her that she was The One for him, the big love of his life.

Marriage is a complicated business, though, and it takes more than love to make it work. Although my parents loved each other, they didn't find happily ever after in their marriage. But then, not everyone does.

Anyhow ... speaking of The One, hey, have you heard the one about the travelling hardware salesman and the farmer's daughter?

No? Well that's the one about my grandparents. It's a silly one.