Marry Me
by Cyndy Cerbin

Maybe romance
isn’t dead
after all.

While some of us are still trying to teach our guys to stay off the phone during a date, these four guys prove a little creativity can win hearts. Sorry, girls, you’ll have to find your own Prince Charmings. These are taken!

Jeannie and Cliff Smith

Engagement rings have been dropped from planes, baked in cakes and buried in sand. But there’s a very good chance no bride in history has received hers in the way Jeannie Smith did.

Jeannie and Cliff were teenagers when they met at a mutual friend’s party. “It was pretty much love at first sight,” Cliff remembers.

By their senior year, Cliff knew he wanted to marry Jeannie. He started saving the tips from his job bagging groceries. Every week he went to the jewelry store to put a few more dollars down on the ring he’d picked out.

That Christmas, all Jeannie had hoped for was a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume and the latest fad: a Space Hopper. It was an inflatable rubber ball for bouncing on, with two “horns” for holding on.

Cliff showed up at Jeannie’s door with something behind his back. “He handed a box to me, wrapped up all pretty. It was that perfume I wanted. And then next to him was this big ol’ bouncy thing that I had wanted so much. I was so happy, I thought, ‘This is the best Christmas ever!’ And then when I sat down on the ball I saw the ring. He had put it on one of the horns!

“I said, ‘Yes!’”

That was 41 years ago, but Cliff is still romantic. Recently while chopping wood he found a small piece that was shaped like a heart. He varnished it and gave it to his bride.

Jeannie says the Space Hopper turned out to be a symbol of their marriage.

“We figured we would just bounce through life together, through its ups and downs. As long as you hang on tight, you won’t fall off!”

Laura Ann Sills and Derek Mann

Within eight months of meeting each other, Laura Ann Sills and Derek Mann decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

“You just know,” Laura Ann says. “It’s cliché, but it’s true.”

Derek started thinking about asking Laura Ann to marry him. “Every day I was falling more in love with her. I realized she brought out the best in me.”

He wanted to make their engagement meaningful, so he built it around Laura Ann’s friends. “They’re really important to her. In fact, she calls each one of them her ‘best’ friend.” And he wanted it to be memorable, so he created a scavenger hunt.

Derek wrote six clues that would take Laura Ann from one place to another, eventually winding up in a carefully crafted romantic setting with him.

Laura Ann’s adventure began on a Sunday afternoon. Her roommate handed her a bunch of blue hydrangeas and a pink envelope. The note inside said “our journey is just beginning.”

The next note was in the mailbox. It told her to meet “someone special” at a coffee shop. She assumed it would be Derek and expected a proposal. But when she got there, she found a girlfriend
instead. They chatted, and then a voice mail clue from another friend in Nashville sent her on her way. At another friend’s house, the clue was a videotaped message from yet another friend. “My nephew, JJ, gave me my final clue. It was a great poem that led me to Derek’s dad’s lake house.”

There, Derek sat waiting, surrounded by candles, lanterns and soft music, nervously hoping she would get there before the sun set.

“I walked up the steps to the deck and he was there,” Laura Ann remembers. “He took my hands and told me how much he loved me and then he got down on one knee. I was so excited I said ‘yes’ before he even asked me to marry him!”

Laura Ann and Derek will invite 300 people to their June wedding. “We have big families,” Laura Ann explained.

And lots of best friends.

Sue and Randy Mauldin

Learning how to communicate is one of the toughest things a new couple must do. Even when they speak the same language. Imagine the challenges of communicating when one partner is deaf.

Sue Mauldin is what’s known as a deaf oralist. She has only a tiny percentage of hearing ability. As a child, she learned to reads lips and study mouth shapes and breathing patterns in order to “hear,” and to use her own voice to talk to others.

Sue met Randy Mauldin online. They connected through emails at first and then decided to give dating a try. It was a disaster.

“He didn’t like me at all,” Sue recalls. “He said I talked too much.”

But their connection was undeniable. The couple finally realized what was coming between them: their face-to-face communication.

“I loved every typed word,” Randy says, “but our spoken conversations always went downhill. So, we decided to work at it.”

The challenge was not just Randy’s. Sue, who is from Michigan, had trouble with Randy’s southern drawl. “I had to ask my son to mouth Randy’s words back to me,” she said.

Randy and Sue, both in their mid-50s, finally found common ground. Randy decided it was time to ask Sue to marry him.

He selected a swank steakhouse in Atlanta for the big event. A dozen red roses were waiting at their table. The maitre d’ delivered the engagement ring along with dessert. Then came Randy’s biggest moment: he carefully asked Sue, “Will you marry me?” in American Sign Language. Sue signed back: “Yes!”

Randy continues to take ASL classes, so he can better communicate with Sue and venture a little farther out of his own world and into hers.

Julie and Brian Wilson

The McKee Road Rock along Highway 80 in Upatoi has celebrated countless special occasions: Daisy is 7! Happy Retirement Boo! Welcome Home Daddy! If you drove by it last summer, you may have seen Brian Wilson’s proposal to his sweetheart, Julie Ann Pulley.

Julie and Brian met as students at Hardaway High School, but never dated. They went out once after graduation, then went their separate ways. But Cupid wouldn’t let go. One of Julie’s co-workers played matchmaker, and this time, the spark ignited.

Eventually, Brian started thinking about how to propose. “I’ve been driving by that rock on McKee Road my whole life, and it’s always been painted. One day I just decided I would paint, ‘Will you marry me,’ on it and drive her by it.”

Brian picked a day last August, when they were driving to Macon for a cousin’s wedding. He pulled off the highway near the rock, claiming the truck was overheating. He got out, popped the hood and called for Julie to come help him.

“I was so irritated,” she recalls. “Like, ‘Really? It’s 200 degrees outside and now the truck is overheating?’”

But Brian kept his cool. “As she came around the front of the truck, I was down on one knee.”

“I still didn’t see the rock,” Julie says. “I don’t know what I was thinking about why he was proposing to me on the side of the road, but I said ‘yes,’ and when he hugged me I looked over his shoulder and saw the rock.”

Friends and family arrived a few minutes later to share in the celebration. A good Samaritan stopped, too. “He asked if we were okay. I told him, ‘We’re not really broken down, we’re getting engaged!”

And then Ferrel Wiley pulled up. He collects photos of messages painted on the rock for a Facebook page called McKee Road Rock. He asked, “Well, are you going to put an answer on it?” They pulled out the paint can again for the three-letter reply.

Julie expects the rock to play a part in the rest of their lives. “Like when we have kids, that’s how we’ll announce it. Or for our kids’ birthdays. I just think of it as our special way of marking special
occasions in our life. Because it will always be there.”

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