Friday, February 11, 2000

For love, she gave up her life in Mexico

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
Enquirer Contributor

        Picture this: a couple enjoying a romantic dinner at a Cincinnati restaurant, sharing a bottle of wine, shooing away an attentive waiter.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        She is dark-complexioned and beautiful. He is fair-skinned and handsome. Her English isn't good. His Spanish is worse. They met just two days earlier, but the look in their eyes says it all: They've fallen for each other.

        It's Feb. 13, 1993, the night that Bob Grace proposes to Rose Elena Rodriguez.

        Now, step away from this intimate scene for a moment, and consider: What would you do for love?

        Would you leave your family against their wishes? Forsake your professional career? Move to another country? Immerse yourself in a foreign culture? Learn a new language?

        When Bob asked Rose to marry him that night seven years ago, she said yes.

        She had come to Cincinnati from her native Mexico to visit a younger sister who was living here temporarily. Five days later Rose returned home to Toluca, near Mexico City, with news her family didn't want to hear.

        “It wasn't easy for my family to accept,” says Rose, who is 39. “First of all, I was going to marry a divorced man, an older man, and (would be) coming to a different country.”

        What's more, Rose, who has two architecture degrees, had a successful career. She was running a graphic-design business with a sister and teaching at a state university in Toluca while living in her parents' home, as was the custom for unmarried Mexican women.

        Says Bob, a 58-year-old lawyer: “I think I was thinking — and Rose was, too — "what did I commit to?' It would have been easy for her, or even for me, to walk away.”

        Instead, a year-long, long-distance courtship ensued. They stayed in touch via daily hour-long phone calls.

        Sometimes Bob or Rose would try to impress by speaking the other's language. Once, he thought he was calling her his pumpkin. She thought he was calling her a gourd.

        But love never got lost in the translation.

        In April 1993 they became officially engaged in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Bob designed a two-piece ring especially for Rose. At dinner, he dropped it in a glass of champagne when she wasn't looking.

        The following February, Rose packed her belongings for the move to Cincinnati. The day she left home is “something I don't even want to remember,” she says.

        Her mother, in tears, pleaded “Don't go!” Her father refused to speak to her at all. Her three sisters and two brothers brooded. None of them would take her to the airport.

        In Cincinnati, she was happy to reunite with Bob. But he left home each day for work, and she had no other friends or family here. It was, she says, like going “from this world to the moon, and you are alone.”

        She practiced her English skills by listening to TV soap operas. She pored over the Enquirer every day. Every night she'd pepper Bob with questions about what she had heard or read.

        She spent hours in grocery stores, eavesdropping on shoppers' conversations with store clerks. If someone at a deli counter said, “I want two pounds of ham, please,” she would repeat the sentence in a thick Spanish accent.

        Something unexpected always seemed to follow.

        How do you want that sliced?

        Gulp. She could feel the stares of waiting customers. She could speak Spanish and French fluently, and some Italian. But she couldn't tell the clerk how to slice her ham.

        The city, too, was so different. She enjoyed the snow, something she'd never seen in Mexico. But Cincinnati's personality took some getting used to.

        Says Rose: “I'm a Latin person with Latin blood. We like to move. We love to dance. We love to eat. We love parties. We love to socialize. You come to a city like this, extremely conservative. Where can you go to dance?”

        Learning all there was to learn seemed to take forever. And yet, she never questioned whether it was worth it.

        On a June day in 1994, she and Bob had an appointment with a judge in the Hamilton County Courthouse. As they motored along Interstate 275, she rolled down the car window, yelling to no one in particular: “We're going to get married!”

        So much has happened since then.

        A few years ago, Rose and Bob welcomed a visitor to their Clermont County home. That day — when her mother walked through her front door — Rose knew her life in Cincinnati was complete. In fact, everyone in her family but her father has come to visit.

        Rose now teaches Spanish classes for adults and children. She also has a home-based interior design business, Decora. And, to the surprise of no one who knows her, she has made many friends.

        One thing hasn't changed: She and Bob are still in love.

        “Sometimes I have to slow her down,” Bob says, “and she speeds me up.”

        Rose considers herself lucky. She knows people from Latin America who have not found happiness here. “They think I'm crazy because I'm the one yelling, "I love Cincinnati! I love my life!' ”

        But more than lucky, she's also capable. “Nothing is impossible to me,” she says.

        Certainly not where matters of the heart are concerned.

        “No matter how much you have to fight, or what you have to do,” Rose says, “if it's for love, you have to do it all.”

       

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