"Sarah, I love you like a hounddog loves his puppies."

A lesson in pick-up lines: Compare your love to someone to a dog. Think it doesn't work? Take a look at my grandparents, married now for almost 50 years.

They have some amazing stories. My grandfather is a talker. And it's why my grandmother fell in love with him -- or so she says. I think the hounddog similie won her over.

I found out tonight what exactly happened at the Homecoming dance. My grandmother, Sarah, was "dating three or four men at the time. [Looking shocked at our shock.] What? That's how it was done then! It might have been five... or six." She had met my grandfather, John, three years earlier at a gathering put on by their respective churches. She wasn't impressed. According to him, he was -- and, also according to him, so was she. And then, during their senior year at ECU, after three years of having not seen each other since that one unimpressive meeting, they met again. My grandfather "took a number at her dorm -- sometimes I was six, sometimes I was one." He fought to the front of the line one night, after he had delivered her safely to the house mother. She looked out the window at his car. Fourty-five minutes later, it was still there. She later learned he had "met up with Hugh," my grandmother's other man, who had the intentions of taking her to Homecoming. That meeting consisted of my grandfather convincing Hugh to switch dates. "Any man who switches his date is not a real man." Hugh consented and instead took Merle to Homecoming. My grandmother watched them dance from the bleachers as my grandfather was part of the Homecoming band. "You know the term 'twiddling your fingers?'" Weeks later, Hugh asked Sarah to marry him; she declined. Hugh then proposed to Merle, who accepted.

"Hugh was a putz," my grandfather said.

"Hugh was a nice man," my grandmother said. "But you were funny. That's why I married you."

"I'm nice, too."

"You're funny and you've got initiative."

"And that means I can't be nice, right?"

Here they are today, arguing about Hugh the successful banker who wouldn't know how to fish and whether my grandmother was wooed over by the hounddog reference.