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Sunday, Nov. 15, 2009

Ageless love: Couple with combined 182 years between them ties the knot

Maybe it was his laugh. Or, better, the way he made her laugh.

It might have been the walks along the river: the ambling Ocmulgee at their side, the whoosh of interstate highway breezing through the box elders, and them, the boy from Georgia and the girl from Tennessee — 182 years between them — advancing at a pace all their own.

And, yes, of course, it could have been the mistletoe.

Then again, it may well have been the month he got sick. She had been a nurse a lifetime ago and hardly left his side after the cough and the weakness set in.

But more likely it was everything — the jokes, the smooches, maybe even the regular trips to Wal-Mart — that led her, at age 88, and him, at 94, to the altar last week.

Nan Ojala and Tom Hasty had been friends going on two years. Nan’s daughter from her first marriage, which lasted 53 years, is married to Tom’s doctor.

And, well, what good doctor doesn’t know a thing or two about keeping old hearts thumping?

“He told me his mother-in-law might be interested,” recalled Tom, who’d been a bachelor since the mid ’90s when his wife of 40 years died. “She was at his office one day and I was there too, and that’s why we met.”

Tom, born two months before the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania in 1915, has lived on the outskirts of Jeffersonville all his life. He drove equipment in the kaolin pits until he retired in 1979.

Nan, who’d been a nurse when her kids were teenagers, was a homemaker most of her life. After her first husband died, she remarried. She and her second husband were together for about a decade. He died in 2007.

After that, she had no intention of getting hitched again. She moved in with her daughter, the wife of Tom’s doctor.

Then Nan met Tom.

“The girls at the doctor’s office all loved him. They said if they weren’t real young they’d be going after him,” Nan said. “He’d come and get me and we’d go out to eat and come back and watch the big TV at my daughter’s ... and just talk and enjoy each other because we can relate.”

They wondered if they might become more.

“But,” Nan recalled, “we talked it over and said, ‘Well, at our age, let’s just be friends.’ ”

On their walks along the river, Tom had an eye for spotting clusters of green stuff growing in the trees.

“Every time he’d see a piece of mistletoe, he’d have to have a kiss,” Nan said. “So I’ve had lots of kisses.”

Tom got sick a few months back. Weak and coughing, he was in the hospital 28 days. The way he tells it, he needed more sodium and potassium: “They said my electrolytes were low. I didn’t know I had them till they told me I didn’t have any.”

Nan sat with him. A lot of days, she wouldn’t leave until visiting hours were up.

“I realized then that I cared a lot about this man,” she said.

Said Tom: “I think we both fell in love there.”

Before long, he was kidding her about marrying him.

Nan played along, until one day, Tom said, “No, I’m serious.”

“Well, I’ll have to think about it a little bit,” Nan said.

Then she had a question for him.

“What do you do when people our age get married?” she said.

“Get some rings,” Tom answered.

Then about a month age, he dropped to a knee in his living room and made it official.

“I accepted,” Nan said, “and he put the little engagement ring on.”

They had planned a wedding for late November. That proved too fussy.

So last Monday, they popped in at Prospect Church, the Methodist chapel 50 yards or so from Tom’s place in Twiggs County. And before the preacher, the preacher’s wife and one of Tom’s friends, they tied the knot.

“A simple little wedding,” Nan called it.

Three days later, at Tom’s place, the newlyweds shared the story of their union, how it came to pass, how it was the right thing for them.

“Somebody told us we didn’t have too many years left,” Nan said. “But my daughter said, ‘You guys might live 10 years longer than you would have, if you get married and are happy.’ ”

Tom said, “Living by yourself is no fun. Everybody needs a companion.”

Nan said, “I have a man who has the best sense of humor. ... A good belly-laugh will keep you young. It’s better than medicine.”

Tom said, “I might be old, but I don’t let it bother me.”

Nan got to talking about how she was from the hills of eastern Tennessee. “Up near where Dolly Parton country is,” she said, making a point to add, “Now I look nothing like Dolly.”

“Yes she does,” Tom chimed in. “She looks gooder than a gunnysack.”

“Well, anyway,” Nan said, “he loves me and I love him.”

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.