The Other Hand

This is the story of how my grandparents met. It was such a sweet story i wanted to write it and put it up here.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she asked him playfully as they walked hand-in-hand across the quad. He paused, looked off into the distance for a moment as if pondering a great decision, then leaned forward and kissed her.
“…and I suppose that’s what he was thinking about,” ended my grandmother, matter-of-factly. She had been telling me the story of their meeting all afternoon. They had met her first year of college at a small Christian university in Tennessee. He was sophomore biological sciences major and she was a spunky freshman who wanted to be a lab assistant. While learning to mouth pipette acids, she met him in the lab. She quickly overcame his shyness and they became close friends.
“One night,” she continued. “We were studying for chemistry in the library. We had apparently hidden ourselves away in stacks quite well, because when we came out the library was deserted. Your grandfather walked up to the door and declared it locked. We were stuck and late for dinner. Now at that school, if you missed dinner, everybody noticed. And if we missed dinner together…well. Your grandfather and I ran around the entire library trying all the rooms without any luck. Visions of being forced to spend the night in the deserted room began to fill my head. Then, and I’m sure this was God’s grace, he spotted an open window! Now I wasn’t much of an athlete, so he had to help me down out of the window after he had jumped down…but he didn’t seem to mind too much.”
She giggled to herself and then proceeded to tell me that they had indeed been late to dinner and got quite a talking to afterwards from their professor who apparently had no appreciation for the fact that they librarian had locked them in. So they decided to start dating the second semester of my grandmother’s sophomore year. My grandfather was double-majoring at the time and was incredibly busy, yet he always seemed to have time for grandma. By the time my grandfather was in his senior year, he was fairly certain that she was the one for him.
“Late that night, he took me out by the fountain and we were walking hand-in-hand. Oh, it was quite taboo in that time to do so, which was just silly, but we figured nobody was watching. We talked and talked and I could tell he was getting at something but he never quite got up the courage to ask me straight out. Well, we kept walking when suddenly Dean McClelland walked up behind us, pointed to our clasped hands and said, ‘What are you saving for marriage, Mahley!’ Now your grandfather turned around, looked him the eye and said, ‘The other hand, sir.’ That was quite saucy, but fortunately Dean McClelland thought it was funny. So did I.”
I later found out that my grandfather did not propose to her that night, but he did eventually. He dropped to his knee, held out a ring and offered her his other hand.