RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

They don't have to fret about the road not taken

Leah and Bruce Dawson right after they started dating in September 1999
Leah and Bruce Dawson right after they started dating in September 1999

The day Bruce Dawson first saw Leah Cantrell was one of the best of his young life. She was 6 months old. "I don't remember that," Leah says. "I think I was asleep."

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On their second date, a late-night trip to Faded Rose in Little Rock for dinner, they talked about poetry, and Leah told Bruce that her favorite poem was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” “Bruce started reciting the whole thing, out of his head, verbatim. And I thought, ‘I might marry this guy.’”

Bruce was boyhood friends with Leah's cousins, Rodney and Ryan. He spent a good deal of time at their house, riding bikes and hanging out, and when he was about 11 years old he went with them to visit Leah's mother at her house in Pine Bluff.

"On that trip to Pine Bluff, I remember that in the garage they had all these cool choppers, and her mom let my best friend go riding on a pony that started trotting, and he [the friend] went straight up in the air and bit the dust, which was one of the funniest things of my childhood," Bruce says. "There was a little baby over there -- that was Leah. That's when I met her. It was a great day."

Truth be told, it was all the other fun stuff -- not baby Leah -- that made that day so great. But he would see her again and again at various functions, especially after her family moved to Rison when she was 7.

When Leah was 16, she gave her aunt a copy of her dance photo. Her aunt displayed that photo on her refrigerator and Bruce spotted it instantly.

"I said, 'Oh, Leah! How old is she now?' And I told her aunt I was going to marry her," he says. "She took the picture down and put it in a drawer."

It became a running joke for the family. Ryan badgered Leah about going out with Bruce, to which she always replied, "Bruce is too old."

She remembers, though, seeing him at her aunt's house when she was in high school and he was home from law school.

"I remember thinking he was funny," she says. "I probably thought he was cute, too."

Bruce turned it into a routine.

"I would say, 'So what's your cousin up to? What's Leah doing?' They would say, 'She's only 14.' And I would say, 'Oh, OK, I was thinking she was 17 or 18,'" he says. "And then the next event would roll around and I would say, 'Hey, what's your cousin up to?'"

But his actual interest in her was growing with time.

"It was really joke-y ... and then it was not so joke-y, and then at the end it wasn't joke-y at all."

Over the next few years, Bruce dated people and Leah did, too, and even though he genuinely wanted to date her, by then they weren't unattached at the same time.

And then they were.

Leah was 21 when Ryan called Bruce and told him she was single.

In September 1999, he convinced Leah to call Bruce.

"We ended up talking for about three hours," she says.

She was the reigning Cleburne County Fair Queen then and had responsibilities that night, but when she was done, she and Bruce watched a movie at her grandmother's house.

Bruce, who had known Leah's grandmother since he was 5, remembers feeling self-conscious about the 11-year age difference between them as he sat with Leah on the couch that night. He was well-liked by the family but the changing dynamic felt strange.

"It was like, 'We like him, he's a good kid, but, whoa, he's made it into the castle,'" he says.

Their second date came soon after, a late-night trip to Faded Rose in Little Rock for dinner. They talked about poetry that night, and Leah told Bruce that her favorite poem was Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

"Bruce started reciting the whole thing, out of his head, verbatim. And I thought, 'I might marry this guy,'" she says.

"It took a little longer for me," Bruce says. "It was probably the next day, at least, that I started thinking, 'I might marry this girl.'"

In December of that year -- 1999 -- Bruce bought an engagement ring. He gave it to her in March. They married on Aug. 12, 2000, in the Methodist church in Rison.

The Dawsons found each other in the yearbooks from their kindergarten through 12th-grade, and they have two copies of their hometown newspaper featuring the ads their families placed for their graduations -- his from law school published on the same day as hers from high school.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don't notice the age difference much anymore. Their days are focused on work. Bruce is a banker at a community bank in Fordyce, and Leah is in a graduate assistantship, working on her doctorate in public health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. They have three children: Nicholas, MacKean, and Allie.

"We still do romantic things," Bruce says.

And they laugh.

"That's one of the things I still love about him," Leah says. "That he can make me laugh, even when I don't want to laugh."

If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or email:

cjenkins@arkansasonline.com

High Profile on 05/01/2016

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