Opal’s great-grandson from California came to watch and squirmed into more photographs than the bride really wanted as we stood on the balcony of a former orphanage where Opal once learned how to sew aprons. She is one day older than our home town of Sand Springs, Okla., and grew up at the Sand Springs Children’s Home.

At age 76, she wrote a book about her idol and surrogate father, Charles Page, an optimist who promised his mother that he would care for widows and children if he had the means. He struck oil in a land newly formed as a state and followed through on the promise by building a town that supported an orphanage and widow’s colony.

Opal still calls him “Daddy Page.” He’s been dead for 87 years.

As she gazed across the green lawn to watch her grandson in his new Oklahoma souvenir headdress, she reminisced about drinking water from the spring and catching lightning bugs in a jar and hoping no one would come to adopt her because then she would have had to leave these sacred grounds.

Paul learned the story from reading Opal’s book. They had met at a grieving seminar hosted by a funeral home,shared a few dances and hours of conversation. Her husband had died in 1988. His wife died a few years ago. When they started spending time together, he was seeing someone else. And she had a male friend — not a boyfriend, she insists — but a friend who was in poor health and even worse spirits.

One day, Paul sat next to Opal on a lobby bench and offered up the kind of pickup line that makes any author swoon.

“I hear you wrote a book,” he said. “I’d like to read it.”

“You know after Paul read my book and started asking me about Mr. Page, he’d want to come up to my 10th floor apartment because he said he liked the view,” she says, and I know that if we weren’t on the telephone she’d be winking. “But, he was seeing another woman back then so I told him that I didn’t think it was such a good idea.”

Things settled into a friendship pace until “he finally had a falling out with the other woman.” Next thing Opal knew, a marriage proposal was on her doorstep in the 10th floor apartment — the one with the good view.

“He surprised me one day and said he’d like to get married. Oh, I forget, first he wanted to go to Eureka Springs, and I told him that I’d lived all this time doing things right, and I didn’t want to do things wrong about the time I was knocking at heaven’s gate,” she says.

The 100-year-old widow refused to spend the night with a man without a ring. So the 88-year-old bachelor proposed on bended knees that ached a bit when he stood back up.

“I told him it was ludicrous, just ludicrous, to marry someone who’s just shy of 100, and you know what he told me?”

I don’t know. I can’t wait to hear.

“He said, ‘A short time of happiness is worth more than a lifetime of browbeating and making yourself miserable.’”

Those were marrying words for Opal. She said “I Do.” So did he. They came back from Eureka Springs, Ark., and celebrated with a reception with friends and family and a blessing by the church. Then, they packed their bags again and went on several honeymoon — two trips to Branson, Mo., and several weeks in California.

Last year at the Sand Springs Cultural and Historical Museum built by Lucille Page in honor of her husband, Charles, Opal Clark Moss introduced the new love of her life to the century-old love of her life as part of the town’s 100th birthday celebration. When the newlyweds kissed, a member of their family leaned over and said, “They’re going out with a bang.”

Opal Clark Moss just giggled.