A good bet: My mother and father meet

It was a neighborhood dance held every Friday at the Catholic school; this was just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My father attended the dance with his best friend and my future godfather Jimmy, who would become a big man in the Teamsters union after the war.

My father noticed a beautiful girl dancing with another young man. She bowed when the dance was over and walked to the side of the gymnasium and sat down next to her girlfriend Grace, who would marry my mother's brother Steve.

Grace then got up and went onto the dance floor where she nodded that she would dance with the young man who had just asked her.

My mother sat and watched the dancers.

My father went over and sat next to her.

"Would you like to dance?" he asked.

"I have to wait for my girlfriend to finish. We share the dancing shoes," she said.

He looked down and her feet were bare.

"Oh," he responded. "I can wait."

And they talked … and when the shoes came to her, they danced … and they talked when Grace was wearing the shoes.

The next week both of them came to the dance and my father went up to my mother and said, "I have something for you. I hope I got the size right." He handed her a box.

It had dancing shoes in it.