my father's spelling and syntax

My father was an excellent speller. After he retired, he and my mother did the New York Times crossword every day at lunch. My mother is very good at crosswords but has a tendancy to swap vowels and create other unusual spellings. My father relished knowing the correct order of letters.

He shared with my mother a devotion to proper grammar. Shortly after my father died, my mother, an English teacher from an era when sentences were regularly diagrammed, told me, "I think I fell in love with your father because of his complex sentences." After a pause, she added, "And maybe he fell in love with me because I could tell him why they were beautiful."