Real-life love stories are often every bit as wonderful as the movies

Sometimes things surprises us, and sometimes the surprises are even pleasant ones.

I don't read Nicholas Sparks' books, and I think the only one of his movies I had seen was "Message in a Bottle," back in 1999. I never saw the one so many people seem to like -- "The Notebook."

The Notebook

I finally saw it, nearly 10 years after it was released. It wasn't because of Ryan Gosling and Rachel MacAdams. I gave it a try because of James Garner, who I have always enjoyed, and Gena Rowlands.

The story touched my heart deeply, because it reminded me so much of a good friend who is now gone.

The thing that makes "The Notebook" special isn't the story of young love. It's the eternal nature of love, the story of a formerly young man whose lifelong lover is slipping away into dementia and no longer remembers him most of the time.

It touched my heart because the story -- at least the older part of it -- was almost the same as one I knew from a friend of mine.

I was 31 years old and editor of the campus newspaper at George Mason University when I met Walter Masterson. He was 60 that spring, the baseball coach at GMU and a veteran of 15 major league seasons from 1939 to 1957. I covered the games, partly out of a love of baseball and partly because I enjoyed the postgame conversations I had with the coach.

Walt

We would start out talking about the game, but then move on to an hour or two of non-sports subjects. We talked about education, one of his favorite subjects, and he told me why there would never be major league baseball again in Washington unless a new stadium was built.

We stayed in touch into 1984, when my career as a sportswriter had taken me to South Carolina. Walt made a call for me to the sports editor of the Oklahoma City paper, for a job I was trying to get. He told me he thought I would get hired, but it turned out a hiring freeze got in the way.

I moved on to St. Louis, then to Colorado and eventually to California. I lost touch with Walt after that, but I used the Internet to locate him in 2005 and re-established the friendship. He was long retired by then, and at Christmas 2005 I visited him at his home in Durham, North Carolina.

He was 85 then and his beloved wife Ginny was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's. He was living alone in their home, but the next year he sold the house and moved into the assisted living part of the nursing home where Ginny was.

I visited him again at Christmas 2007, the last time I saw him.  He was living in the equivalent of a hotel room with bathroom, and he spent part of every day with Ginny. She no longer recognized him, but they had been married for 66 years and he wasn't going anywhere.

We talked frequently on the phone. I had been trying to help him write a baseball book in which he would pass on some of the things he had learned over the years. It never got finished. He had a stroke and died on April 5, 2008.

I still miss him, and I'm aware that as I write this, I am three years older now than he was when we first met. I don't expect to live to 87, and I would have to live to be nearly 109 to be married to my lovely wife for 66 years. But as long as we both are alive, I will be with her. She is the love of my life, and we will be together even if one doesn't know the other.

Not because of a movie, no matter how beautiful the sentiments are, but because I have a lot of good examples in real life. My parents were married nearly 52 years, my grandparents nearly 65. Then there were Walt and Ginny -- 66 years and he loved her till he died.

That's a great love story.