Some of you may know that I'm a This American Life junkie. I get the podcasts every week (although iTunes hasn't been updating them right lately, so I've been missing weeks... grrr.) and I'm not gonna lie, I kinda look forward to some car time on the days when I have some fresh podcasts to listen to. It makes my day.
For those you that are not familiar with This American Life, its an hour-long weekly radio broadcast put on by a public radio station in Chicago and broadcast on public radio nation-wide. Every week, they pick a topic and tell stories about that topic - usually 3 or 4 "acts" to fill the hour.
The one I listened to yesterday was called "Slow to React," and one of the stories was just so sweet. It was about a man who was always a good kid, always quiet, never a partier, and the last person anyone in his family would expect to find love and settle down. As a young man stationed in Korea, though, he had met a woman and fallen in love. When he wrote home to his mother that he was in love and wanted to bring this woman back with him, his mother suggested against it, and being a good Irishman, he listened to his mother.
He lost touch with the woman, and some years later realized he'd made the mistake of his life. He spent the next several years trying to track this woman down - calling people, taking out ads in Korean newspapers, doing anything he could think of until he finally found her. He wrote her a letter asking to meet, and it took another year for her to agree.
At their first meeting, he asked her to marry him, she said no (she'd apparently built quite a life for herself in Korea), but they kept meeting a couple of times a year, having a great time together. Every trip ended the same way - he asked her to marry him, and she said no. Seven years later, she got really sick, and he called her every day, sometimes even twice a day, while she was sick. It was then that she realized that she needed to marry this guy. Her doctors had told her that she shouldn't work anymore (she was some sort of trainer and owned several gyms), and she realized how much he truly loved her.
So soon after she was cleared medically, she came to the US, and 2 days later they got married. Now mind you, the man had not told his family ANY of this while it was going on, so the first they heard was when he announced that she was coming to the US and they were getting married. So for most of them, the first time they met her was at the wedding. But the overwhelming opinion was that they were perfect together. The mother said that if she'd known then what she knows now, she never would have told him not to bring her back to the States back then.
After 20 years, this couple, against all odds, got married and are living happily together. Doesn't that just give you hope? It sounds like a movie plot - a feel good, romantic comedy, perfect for a girls night in with popcorn and wine kind of movie plot. Sigh...
Oh, and you can listen to the story on This American Life's website by clicking here - you can pay $0.99 for the download or stream it for free.
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