I'll admit to being a sucker for a love story. But I don't want to know all the details of the story, of course, or to really have a similar memory. That would make it less a love story since my empathetic response would come to the fore. In my opinion, a good love story is the Princess Bride. A great love story is A Room with a View. The former gave us "as you wish." The latter makes me check behind all framed art in hotels for question marks. It's a plot point, but I digress.

In this week's edition of the East section, I write about the Hangens. They're a young couple who plan on spending a lot of their lives away from home, doing mission work. Talking with them, I got the sense that not only are they dedicated to their respective callings, but that what they have between them is this amazing love story trifecta: there's the love they each have in their faith, the love they each have for the people they work with abroad, and then the love they have for one another. Those three loves are made mammoth by the doubling of them, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think they'd agree.

My literary and cinematic love story examples, above, are complicated, beautiful pieces of fiction. The Hangens' love story is simple, straightforward, and fearless. Maybe that's what made my writing turn to the fictive when I was trying to explain what was so enormous about these humble people. They do have some of that boy-meets-girl, loses-girl, gets-girl in their story, but what's less common about them could be written like this:

It was freezing in the safari jeep, they’d pulled the canvas top back and Grace is a wisp of a woman anyway. She remembers the cold, and viewing birds, giraffe, maybe some hyena and antelope. She remembers her boyfriend taking her through savanna grass taller than she, following a Hippopotamus trail, and she remembers the bench at the edge of the river.

"How do you like Africa?" he asked.

"I like it very much."

"Would you spend a bit more time here?"

She squinted up to him, "how much more?"

"Well," he laughed nervously, "enough that you’d have to marry me?"

"Matt, you know I’d marry you," she smiled, then looked to the river a moment. When she looked back, he was on a knee holding up a ring made of bone.

"Will you?"

* * *

Matt Hangen remembers a lot less of that day. His nerves were pretty high. "I was being lead to two things at once," he said, "to marry her and to move to Togo. They both had to work out. It was kind of a package deal."

It might be written that way, but not in a newspaper. Obviously I had to invent the dialog after interviewing both of them and hearing their accounts of the proposal. Not very reporterly behavior at all... but I was just so taken with the story. Their story. That the proposal happened in a game park in Kenya is exotic, sure, but these are people who weren't there on holiday.

The Hangens married last December. Wednesday you can read about what they're doing about the Togo part of Matt's "package deal."