Lois and Wendell Wyse were teenagers when they first knew each other back in the early 1960s.
“We were sweethearts,” in high school, she remembers.
After high school, they drifted apart; Wendell moved to Dartmouth and later Toronto. They thought of each other sometimes of course, but life and circumstances happen. They married other people and each had children.
“I moved away and I didn’t see her for 25 years,” Wendell says, as he sits at a picnic table with Lois at his side at the Ward 1 Rec Centre.
Their reunion was at the inaugural New Glasgow Black Gala Homecoming, which was held back in 1990.
“We saw a lot of the people that we grew up with and hadn’t seen in 25 years,” says Wendell.
“It was very nostalgic.”
It was also very life-altering, for both of them.
He was divorced back in 1990. She was separated from her husband and according to Lois, “I had to be introduced to him because we didn’t recognize each other.”
The pair exchanged phone numbers, got together for a lunch date and the rest is history. They had a long-distance relationship for a while. She was working in Dartmouth. He was still living in Toronto where he worked as a software developer – but eventually they were married in 1994 and settled in Dartmouth.
They have been nearly inseparable ever since and both retired on the same day in April 2006.
“We love each other’s company and we love to do things together,” Lois says. “He’s my best friend and I love him dearly.”
If she goes away for any length of time – for example, if she travels back home to New Glasgow to visit family while he stays behind at their home in Dartmouth, “I’m lost without her,” he says. “If anything happened to her I don’t know what I’d do.”
Maybe it was their destiny, or perhaps merely a chance encounter 25 years after high school that grew into something lasting.
“I think it has to be fate,” Lois offers. “I also think it was in God’s plan.”
