How I met your grandfather

I met your grandfather at a dance hall, which is a thing that hardly exists anymore and is a great pity. Friday nights the whole town went, and the band played and the floor was sprung so it gave a little under your feet, and the air smelled of hair oil and cigarettes and the perfume we all wore far too much of. Tom was standing by the wall in a borrowed jacket that was a size too big, and I noticed him because he was the only one not pretending to be somewhere better. He asked me to dance and I said yes, and within about thirty seconds I discovered that he could not dance at all. He trod on my foot twice and apologised four times. Most men would have given up and gone back to the wall. Tom asked me for the next one. That was the whole of him, really, in one evening. He was not the cleverest man in the room or the handsomest, and he certainly was not the best dancer. But he did not give up on a thing once he had decided it mattered, and somewhere on that sprung floor he had decided I mattered. It took me a little longer to come round, but not much. He worked on the railways, which his father had done before him. He was steady in a way I had not known I was looking for. He remembered things, small things, the way I took my tea, the name of a girl I had fallen out with, what I had said I wanted three weeks before. Being remembered like that, I have come to think, is most of what love is. We married the spring I was twenty-two, in the church up the hill, on a day so windy my veil tried to leave without me. We had next to nothing and we were entirely happy, which are two facts I have never found to be in contradiction.