Sometimes, in moments of crisis, it's instructive to look back in time, to think anew about the old family stories we once found so amusing.

Like the night of the Shrine Dance in Conway, South Carolina, way back in 1988. Family stories have a way of fusing fact and fiction together after a few dozen tellings, and this is one of those.

It was getting late, the story goes, and Chris was getting antsy.

He'd wanted to speak with Nancy's father, but he knew the timing needed to be right.

When he finally saw his chance, Chris asked O'Neill Cannon to step outside. And he said,

Mr. Cannon, I would like to propose to your daughter, and I want to ask for her hand in marriage.

And my dad said, well, son, I got something to tell you first.

What followed was a long story about Nancy and a squabble she'd once had with her brother

Neil when they were kids, something about a backyard baseball game.

Anyway, this is how Nancy tells it.

He said, when Nancy was a little girl,

she and her brother were playing ball in the backyard. So whoever was catching was calling the strikes or balls. And Nancy happened to be catching. And when she called her brother out on a

strike, he got so mad. He took the aluminum baseball bat in his hand

and slammed it down on her hand that was on the ground as she was catching. And he said, oh, Nancy

screamed. What Chris was thinking as he listened to Nancy's father way back then, we cannot

know. But listen, he did, polite as any supplicant would be, as the story went on and on, until O'Neill Cannon said this.

In the middle of the night, I hear Neil screaming at the top of his lungs, and I run to his bedroom, and I see Nancy was standing on top of the bed, straddling Neal,

and she had the aluminum baseball bat, and she was swinging it like Paul Bunyan chopping wood.

He said, and I grabbed her and pulled her off of him, and she still threw the bat at his head.

According to family lore, Chris stood there slack-jawed, as Nancy's father got to the point.

And he said, well, son, I'm going to let you marry her, but I am going to tell you,

if you ever hit her, don't go to sleep. And that was the prequel to our marriage. Rather appropriate,

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