true romance, chapter 5

i just realized that i forgot to keep posting the chapters about my grandmother's early romance with my grandfather. oops! this was because the story was buried under a mountain of papers in my studio...i really need to get it together!

here are the links to chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4.

and now for chapter 5...

this was a college town and we went to football games. we went to albuquerque to see a game and went to the sun bowl in el paso for a game new year's day, just before we were married.

it was also a cowboy college. all of the guys wore jeans, boots, and white, long sleeve shirts. it was like this was their uniform. i think i had a little hesitancy about dating leroy because he wore jeans and boots. i didn't care for cowboys. we had them in spur and i never wanted to have anything to do with them. sometimes they would come into town on saturdays. they'd generally hang out in the drug store, but were not what was called drug store cowboys. these guys were real cowboys and worked for ranches around spur. some of the girls would flirt with them or date them, but i never would. i think they represented a lifestyle i didn't want.

i was raised in the age of when girls never chased boys, at least that they could tell. leroy and i broke up one time. i can't remember what it was about. this went on for a few days. i had decided i would never see him again, because there was no way i would ever contact him. but here he came one evening as i was getting ready to leave work. we were very much love.

while we were dating, his folks moved to las cruces on a pipeline job. it's almost unbelievable, i had never heard of a welder. didn't know such a thing as a pipeline existed, nor knew there was such a thing as a trailer house. he took me to visit his folks, who lived in a trailer. it was nice, but all the time i was sitting there, i was wondering where the electricity and water came from.

he asked me to marry him sometime around my nineteenth birthday. i was a little scared thinking of what daddy would say. i had never been to a wedding in my entire life and had no idea what to do to get married. having been on my own and completely supporting myself for two years, i think i kind of felt i wasn't obligated to tell anyone.

western union paid pretty good and we always got some overtime, but it was still just enough to exist on. leroy didn't have any money and was going to school on the gi bill. he didn't want to get a job. somehow, we came up with enough money to rent what i thought was a rather nice apartment, in back of a store that was in downtown, just a couple of blocks from where i worked.