Chance meeting leads to life of laughter and love
Angie Harris asked to borrow a chair and she got some friendly banter that turned into a life commitment.
Angie went to dinner in downtown Hot Springs with her brother and sister-in-law in fall 2008. Their table was one chair short so she stood up and asked the people at the next table if she could borrow their extra one.
Those people were friends of Larry Elmore’s, and he walked up as he saw her talking to them.
“She’s pretty tall for a girl, and she’s very competitive — and she’s got a right to be, she’s very athletic. I used to be really athletic myself, really fit,” says Larry, a former football player. Angie played basketball when she was at Arkansas Tech University at Russellville.
“We started joking around and she started saying how good she was,” he says. “We kid a lot and it started then. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to take you to school then.’”
They exchanged numbers that night and talked on the phone a few times before deciding to meet at a park on the banks of the Saline River, not far from where they both lived.
“You could sit there and watch the river and throw rocks in the river and that’s what we did — we threw rocks in the water and we talked,” Larry says.
They talked well into the evening, in fact, moving to the car as darkness fell.
“We sat in the car and talked about and listened to music,” says Angie, who prefers country to Larry’s heavy metal music. “We listened to random stuff and the hours went by.”
Larry has three daughters who were in their teens then, and he was cautious about who they met. They kept their dates low-key for a couple of weeks, until they were sure their chemistry was the real deal. When they knew, Larry brought his daughters to Angie’s house for an introduction.
“I wasn’t sure how it would be because I’m not their mother and I wasn’t going to try to be,” Angie says. “I didn’t know what they would think of me. But it was really good. It was amazing.”
Favorite dates over the next year and a half or so included pizza, bowling and hiking, and sometimes just hanging out on the back porch together.
Larry ordered an engagement ring for Angie, which took longer than he anticipated to arrive because of a shipping snafu. He told his daughters to be on the lookout for the box, and to take it inside if it arrived.
He and Angie were out driving around on a Saturday when his daughter called to let him know it was finally there. He had planned to propose at the Crater of Diamonds in Murfreesboro but it was already midafternoon so he wasn’t sure he could pull that off.
“I couldn’t wait any longer,” Larry says. “I said to myself, ‘There’s no way she’s going to want to go to Murfreesboro.’ I said, ‘Hey, let’s go to Murfreesboro and dig for diamonds.’ She said, ‘Well, OK. Isn’t it kind of late?’”
He went by his house and picked up the ring on the way out of town.
“I wasn’t nervous at all up until that point and then I started to get nervous,” Larry says.
In Murfreesboro, he diverted Angie’s attention while he tossed the ring into the sifter they had rented from the park and covered it with dirt. Then he handed her the sifter and suggested she look through it while he looked elsewhere.
“I said, ‘Man, I really hope there’s a diamond in this,’” he says.
Of course, there was.
“I saw a little glimpse of it and I thought I really had found a diamond,” Angie says.
They exchanged their vows on June 12, 2010, on the lawn at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, and then honeymooned in Costa Rica.
“I was 32 when we got married and Larry was 40, but we still acted like kids,” Angie says. “We got shirts that said, ‘Bride,’ and ‘Groom,’ and then ‘Newlyweds,’ and we just had so much fun.”
Angie teaches first grade at Fountain Lake Elementary. Larry owns Elmore Photography. He is also the children’s minister at Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Benton, and he preaches in churches around the state.
They have three children — Macey, 5, Titus, 3, and Copelyn, 1. Larry’s daughters — Lauren House of Glen Rose, Lindsay Edgin of Maumelle and Logan Shuttleworth of Arkadelphia — are grown and he has two grandchildren who play with his own younger children.
Life is full for the Elmores and though there are fewer opportunities for spontaneous trips, they still find time to enjoy each other’s company.
“We laugh like we used to
when we first met,” Angie says. “Life is more serious now with things like what are we feeding our kids and doing the laundry and that kind of stuff but I just think you have to keep fun and laughter in your relationship.”