I have been pestering Matt to write this for a few days... enjoy!
Part one: Procrastination and implausibility
Okay, so I’ve been enlisted as
narrator in the brief saga of Us Getting Married, or at least of us getting
ready to get that way. I actually got enlisted some time ago, and I’ve long
since committed to the task verbally, but much like the marriage itself, it’s
been percolating for a little longer than some people might feel is right or
proper. So anyway, then, let’s get to it.
Like I said, this deal had been
brewing for a long time before there was any real action or traction on my
part, and blessedly little nudging from other concerned parties. After a long
battle with her baser maternal instincts however, my mother finally started
dropping some not-so-subtle hints about a year ago.
These hints reached an apex (though not an end) with the production of an
heirloom ring, just right for finger-slipping, that Mother had just so happened
to retrieve from her jewelry box and have cleaned and refurbished. “Just in
case,” she said. As I mentioned, Mother had decided to abandon subtlety as a
serious component of any coherent strategy at this point.
So anyway, I had this ring, and I was
intending to use it—swear!—but I didn’t really want to just pop the question at
some random time out here on the Oklahoma Plains. It seemed like it would set
bad precedent, for one thing, as most of Brandy’s statements about anything to
do with anything that might happen more than two hours beyond the present
moment tends to begin with “When we leave Oklahoma…”, and for another, I thought
that a bit of romanticism should be involved considering my general lack of
romantic gestures in other traditionally-romantic situations, like Valentine’s
Day (I once got her an ice scraper), birthdays (a St. Louis-emblazoned,
multi-purpose funnel), and pre-marriage anniversaries (February, right?). So I
needed a really good plan for a really good proposal, and I was holding out for
same.
I thought the plan had presented
itself when I noticed that the PBS television program Antiques Roadshow announced an upcoming stop in Tulsa. It was to be filmed right around
Brandy’s birthday, we have
many fond memories of Tulsa,
and Brandy comes from a long line of antiquers, and has varnish in her blood.
This all seemed rather obvious to me, as I’m a pretty sharp tack. I’d get her
some tickets for her birthday, and kill two lovebirds with one precious stone.
Awesome birthday present? Check. Marriage monkey off my back? Check and mate. It
was absolutely, stunningly perfect.
Perfect, but unlikely. This was my
plan: get me and Brandy some tickets—which tickets had to be won, not
purchased, in an online lottery—and then, after I won the tickets, to contact
the producers of the wildly popular (for PBS anyway) television program and
arrange to have my mother’s ring appraised, on camera, with Brandy by my side.
Further, the ring-appraising scenario would play out according to a script that
I would write, wherein the Roadshow
celebrity appraiser would inform me that, unfortunately, the ring was worth
very little, whereupon I would drop to my knee, propose, and force the touched
and teary-eyed celebrity appraiser to revise his or her appraisal of my
now-priceless ring and tell me that, yes, the ring was now truly worth more
than all the gold in Fort Knox, love is priceless, all you need is love, love
me do, etc., etc.
Or something like that. It seemed
reasonable at the time, really.
So anyway, I promptly entered the Antiques Roadshow ticket lottery and
went about my business, confident that my elaborate plan would come together in
the end. (I love it when they do that.) In the meantime, naturally, Brandy knew
nothing of this well-thought-out, totally awesome and plausible proposal
scheme. In fact, the only person besides me who did know anything at all about it was a witheringly-sarcastic
construction manager in Dallas who also happens to be an old, old
friend of mine. This acerbic house-builder had actually called me just a day or
two after I had put in for my tickets to tell me about a particularly amusing
round of skirt-the-municipal-regulations he’d been playing in the greater Dallas area that week. Along with that,
he’d called to pester me about marrying Brandy, which pro-marriage pestering
I’d learned from many long years of being single is one of the primary
activities of married people. He found my lottery-dependent proposal plan to
his liking and highly interesting, and said so, but then changed the subject,
and didn’t say anything else regarding the matter, which I found odd
considering his initial enthusiasm.
Part two: A little help from my friends
But that was near the end of spring,
and as the year trundled along from springtime to what our post-apocalyptic
barbarian descendents are probably going to refer to as the
“hot-time-before-the-Now,” or something like that, I began to lose hope that I
would actually get my tickets and, as is usually the case, the scenario in
which one does not get what one wants proved to the smart bet. I was notified
via email that I wouldn’t be getting my tickets, and so I immediately abandoned
my plans to marry Brandy and began to fill out my application for the circus.
Halfway through that, though, I remembered that Brandy and I had cooked up a
trip to North Carolina to see friends and sell some of her jewelry, and so I
took the less-drastic measure of just doing that instead of running away for a
life of rigged ring-toss games and purloined codeine. Baby steps, you know;
there’s no need to be rash.
Anyway I hadn’t entirely given up on plans to one day, maybe, perhaps sort of think
about proposing to Brandy, even if it was just to see what she’d say.
(Honestly, you’d be surprised by some of the things she says.) So I put the
ring in my backpack and off we went in the car, galumphing down I-40 toward the
strange environs of Asheville, North Carolina.
Asheville, besides being weird, is also home
to Matt and Maggie Reynolds, and Matt (henceforth to be known as “Reynolds”) is
an old and dear friend, and one prone to theatrics.
The very first night we were in town, Reynolds and I left the girls at the
house and slipped off to the pub, and when Reynolds asked what I’d like to do
during my stay in Asheville (meaning, presumably, would I like to see the
sights or something like that), I blurted out “I’d like to propose to Brandy.”
Now normally if you hollered out to
someone from the bottom of a pint glass that you’d like to propose to a girl,
even one you’d been courting for some time, you’d get a reprieve the next
morning and the buddy to whom you’d been doing the yelling would give you a cup
of coffee and a slap on the back and never say another word about it. Not so
Reynolds, who by the next morning had hatched a pretty serious proposal plan,
and, seeing as how I would be one of the principals, was kind enough to fill me
in on the details. It seems there is a mountain in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park called LeConte that, while some
6300+ feet in elevation, has not a single automotive track, with the summit
attainable only by walking. There’s a lodge at the top, too, that’s supplied
thrice-weekly by llama train, and you can call up to the park and have yourself
a hot lunch reserved at said lodge and, if you’re lucky, see some llamas.
Reynolds’s idea was to hike up the mountain, keeping Brandy in the dark the
entire time as to the existence of the lodge. Once at the top, it would be up
to me, but it looked like as long as I didn’t totally choke under the pressure,
I should be able to make it back down the mountain with a wife-to-be. (Again,
you’d be surprised, so I wouldn’t have called it a done deal at that point.)
All this sounded great to me, and so we made the reservation and started
piecing together the rest of the plan.
The rest of the plan mainly consisted
in tricking Brandy into walking up this mountain, which I (correctly) predicted
would be a chore in and of itself. To put it delicately, Brandy does not
prescribe to the adage, oft-repeated in gyms and athletic stores all across the
country, that without pain there is no gain. In fact, I’d put Brandy on the
opposite end of that old saw, and so I was a little worried about getting her
to the top without the two of us becoming so angry at one another that we just
called the whole thing off, which would of course be less than ideal and
totally screw up the plan, to boot. I immediately began a campaign of low-level
psychological manipulation, which mainly consisted of making her feel
preemptively guilty for cheesing out on the hike and thus upsetting our very
accommodating and athletic hosts. (Nothing motivates a Southern woman like the
possibility of transgressing some unwritten rule of mutual hospitality. It is a
powerful goad, gentlemen, and while it might be undignified, drastic times
sometimes call for drastic measures.) There was also the food situation. You
could set a clock to Brandy’s meals, and there was absolutely no way she was
going to make the five-mile hike to the top of the mountain without something
to eat, or at least the promise of same. To that end, me and Reynolds went so
far as to pack show-lunches, filling our packs with apples and bread and other
miscellaneous hiking snacks, nattering on all the while about how good they’d
be up on that mountain.
Part three: Lies and deceit, the solid foundations on which
marriages are built
There was also the matter of the
weather. It rains constantly in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, and the day of the big hike dawned
with the promise of torrential rains, rains that Brandy had already duly noted
and decried. “I don’t want to hike up that mountain in the rain,” she said.
(And not just regular said, like a
suggestion or an observation, but like a woman
said, where there’s all this implicit suggestion of passive-aggressive malice
and bad times for everybody should the thing that is said come to pass, or not
come to pass, or just generally play out in a manner unsuited to She Who is
Saying.) Reynolds and I laughed off her concerns, providing a very neat and
utterly fantastic explanation of Smoky Mountain weather patterns, and made
vague pronouncements about the storm “blowing itself out” within the hour while
flopsweat poured down my forehead in roughly equivalent proportion to the
frog-choking rain that was even them dousing the greater Asheville metropolitan
area. And so, into the breach for our quartet, with three conspirators nervously
watching the slate-gray sky, and one mark looking at the same sky with an
eye-glint and nose-wrinkle that promised a lot of bad action if the weather
didn’t get with the program real quick-like.
Amazingly enough, the weather did
straighten up somewhat, and Reynolds and I—both of us with literally years of experience acting like the
weather was doing just exactly what we expected it to do—took it in stride and
congratulated ourselves on knowing just exactly what the weather was going to
do, and when. With
that taken care of, however, there was still the matter of making it up the
mountain without (a) some lame-brained tourist blabbing to Brandy about the
lodge at the top of the mountain, and (b) getting Brandy to the top without her
leaving me for a helicopter pilot, or someone else that can get her off said
mountain quickly and easily.
These problems presented themselves
with varying degrees of difficulty, and it was generally when they doubled up
that they gave our gang of merry pranksters the most trouble. For instance,
whenever Brandy’s evil taskmaster of an appetite started to rear its ugly head,
I could just fall back on the aforementioned tactic of shaming her sense of
hospitality, and adding a dash of blame-Reynolds, i.e., I kept telling her that
Reynolds had a very special picnic
spot at which to eat our lunch, and no, I
didn’t want to wait that long, but you know
how Reynolds is when he gets these ideas and it means so much to him and
blahblahblah let’s just humor him. At the same time, Reynolds, myself, and
Maggie would take turns pairing up and walking ahead, reconnoitering the
tourist situation and shushing those hikers we deemed most likely to blab.
(You’d be amazed at the favors you can elicit from complete strangers by
asserting, without any proof whatsoever, that you’re about ask someone to be
your co-signatory on reams and reams of official documents, and to yell at you
for forgetting to wipe your feet or whatever.) But when the two big components
of our ruse collided it would get dicey, and I would have to whisk
Brandy—hungry, tired, and also very enamored of the breathtaking scenery
unfolding all around us as we made our way up the beautiful ridgelines of Mount
LeConte—through the most amenable picnic and picture-taking spots, which spots
were inevitably teeming with tourists and sightseers whose cooperation we had
been unable to elicit. “This place is no good,” I’d mumble as I briskly pulled
Brandy through some of the most amazing and spectacular places in the country.
“There’s a better one just around the next bend.”
All of this profligate dishonesty led
to us spending a lot of time sightseeing from places on the trail where no one
in their right mind would choose to stop and sightsee, as you couldn’t really
see anything.
It
was all starting to reach a head, and I could tell that if we didn’t get to the
top soon that the jig would be up. Right in the nick of time though, with
Brandy starting to really tire of the whole enterprise, we reached the top of
the mountain, and out of the fog and the gloom appeared a nice cozy lodge, with
hot chocolate (it was chilly at the top of the mountain, and good 50 degrees
cooler than we were used to out on the Plains) and lemonade and soup and the
whole nine yards. Brandy was pleasantly surprised by the whole business, and we
all shared a nice lunch.
And
this, of course, is the part you’ve all been waiting for: The Proposal.
But,
sorry, you don’t get the whole thing. I didn’t write out anything to say to
Brandy, and I don’t think I can recreate it here. Suffice to say we were
outside the lodge on the deck, with the whole world stretching out before us to
the west, and I asked and she said yes, and I do believe that’s all that
matters. It is to me, anyway.
And
so that’s how it went down. Reynolds and Maggie were there to witness the whole
affair, and Reynolds had even toted up some wine (along with the ruse-enhancing
snacks we were never going to eat) with which we had a toast, and all was well.
We hung out on top of the mountain, chatted with some tourists (I was less wary
of them now that they no longer posed a serious threat to my
increasingly-elaborate deception), and sent some postcards from the top of the
mountain via Jerro the Mail Llama.
Epilogue
And
so that, as they say, is that. We got engaged, and by the time we got back to Oklahoma we decided to just go ahead and get
married. We had decided to take the last step on July 4th in honor
Brandy’s grandparents. That put us in a difficult spot, vis a vis a Justice of
the Peace, as government folk don’t work on holidays. This brings me back
around to Mike, the loose thread that this story has so far left dangling.
Mike,
the acerbic construction manager from Part One, had been pretty impressed with
my hypothetical Antiques Roadshow
stunt, even if it did smack of a subconscious desire to prolong making any
real, official, and court-documented commitment. As such, as soon as he got off
the phone with me that day, he had immediately signed up for the ticket lottery
himself, and gotten his wife and family and friends to do the same. As such,
unbeknownst to me I had an entire network of people rooting for me to get
married, at least in a random and arbitrary way.
That’s pretty nice of old Mike, but
by the time I called him and told him the big news, our wedding was four days
away and Mike had no tickets. (Not that I knew, as Mike still hadn’t told me
that he’d coordinated an attempt to get them.)
Of course, neither did we have a person to officiate our wedding, and
that’s what I was telling Mike when he once again latched on to what I would
have considered to be a relatively-inconsequential matter, at least to someone
way off down in Dallas.
“No preacher? No JP?” he asked, and
when I replied that no, there was no one as yet to officiate and that it wasn’t
looking very promising, he suddenly came down with a bad case of the
call-you-backs, and hung up the phone. He was back on the horn in twenty
minutes though, pleased as punch with his recent ordination into the Universal Life Church. Within 30 hours he was registering
as an official minister in the County of Cleveland, State of Oklahoma, and not too long after that he was pronouncing
Brandy and I man and wife, while his own wife Brooke took pictures and my old
friend Zeno, his wife Leslie, and Baby Quinn made up the coterie of witnesses.
And that was about the end of things,
and after the ceremony Mike was packing up to leave for home. He had one last
thing for us, though, and produced from his pocket a wedding gift: two tickets
to the Antiques Roadshow that had
arrived in his mailbox just minutes before he made the mad dash to Oklahoma to beat the clock and get registered
at the courthouse.
And all of that, my friends, is
beyond appraisal.
