This is my favorite love story and it belongs to my mother and father. She was sixteen and graduating from the Normal school as a teacher in Camaguey, Cuba. She needed an escort to her graduation, a black tie affair, and a fellow graduate suggested her handsome older brother, home from his U.S. college, as a blind date. He was 24 and glad to help.

I have the pictures. She’s charming in a white ball gown, very 1957, with beautiful white shoulders and huge black eyes. He’s everything a girl could wish for, and looks like a young Ricky Ricardo, in a white dinner jacket.

My father says he decided she was the girl he’d marry, that very night. She says no such thing. He didn’t see her again before he left for college, and the Revolution intervened. He stayed in the U.S., unable to return, even when his father in died in Cuba of cancer a year or two later. She stayed in Cuba, waiting for a visa. The visa took 6 long years to appear.

Finally she arrived in Miami. My father had kept in touch with her older sister, and knew of her impending arrival. He told his boss he needed the day off, since his “fiancée” was coming. And there he was at the airport, the first face she saw when she stepped off the plane. She was surprised to see him. He told her he’d been waiting for 6 years. She thought he must be crazy.

Two months later they were married. She wore a white gown she borrowed from a cousin, and was the prettiest bride you ever saw. He wore his white dinner jacket again, the same one. That was 50 years ago. She calls him, affectionately, “Viejo”—old man, and he calls her, tenderly, “mi vida”—my life.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association.

For more favorite love stories, check out the Valentine’s Day symposium on NRO here.