By Request

At the request of Lux, following his recent engagement to Melisa (yay!), the story of how J and I were engaged:

People love and need traditions, especially the ones who are convinced that they don't. No matter how determined someone is to buck convention at every opportunity and to be their own person, when it comes to getting married, having babies, paying off a mortgage, or turning twenty-one, they will do exactly what everyone else has done for hundreds of years, even if by handing out kazoos as party favors instead of candles they've managed to convince themselves that they are doing something original. This is a very good thing. A healthy human community is one that is strongly connected to its past by way of these traditions, and the western traditions of love and romance are well worth keeping up.

I had a ring in my pocket.

It was Christmas break, and I was flying with J back to her parent's house to spend a little bit of the holidays with them before coming back to New York for Christmas at my parent's during my last year of graduate school. J was pretty sure that a proposal was coming. Her parents certainly knew that a proposal was coming. I knew that a proposal was coming, and I was attempting to work out the last few details of how to pull it off.

I felt like it needed to be creative. It wouldn't be enough to just take a knee and open the ring box. I'd been teasing and hinting J all semester long that this was going to happen and that it was going to be special. It was characteristic of our relationship at that point to write elaborate and extravagant letters to one another which might be coded in characters or contain crossword puzzles or be written from five years in the past or five years in the future. We hardly ever saw each other, and it was one of the ways to make letter (and email) writing more interesting for two people who were expecting to get married and (in my case, at least) just waiting for school to be over.

I did my research beforehand, and tied in what I planned to do with an idea that had been coming up in our letters for the previous few months. The idea was that J was a princess. I was particularly into the theological idea of the Messiah as a royal figure and his people as adopted into the royal family in my reading and thinking at that point. I think, though you'd have to ask her, that J was in a place where she found it encouraging to be told that she was special--special like a princess. At any rate, I repeated some variation of that sentiment to her quite often.

We started the evening by dining at a restaurant in Hanover that I knew she held in high regard, a place where she'd only ever been a handful of times on special occasions. She knew almost from the beginning that something was afoot, and her Mom confirmed it further when she told her to relax and enjoy herself no matter what happened.

We went to Bay City and ordered some food of which I have no recollection. I was too nervous to have much of an appetite, and I don't think that she was particularly hungry either. She was apprehensive about being proposed to in public, and I wanted dinner to be over quickly so that we could get to her church.

I'd planned something like a coronation service at a church. I had originally planned for it to take place at a grand looking cathedral-style Methodist church downtown, but the plans had fallen through at the last moment and I ended up resorting to her home church, which was not particularly impressive looking on the inside but may have helped her to be more at ease as we drove into the parking lot.

There were other people there. Other people that we knew.

As she asked why her friend Meg was there, I could only stammer that I truly didn't know as I tried to think of a way to clear out the space. The friend was meeting and counseling another woman in one of the back classrooms of the church. J went to say hello to them and I attempted to complete the setup that I needed to do in the sanctuary. I gave her a pink gown that I'd hidden in the back of the car and asked her to change into it, if she wouldn't mind.

She obliged, and then I came out of the sanctuary to look for her. Everything was ready.

One of the ongoing differences I've had with J's religious upbringing is the whole point about the rapture and the so-called "last times." Occasionally I'll chat about it in a friendly sort of debate with her father or brothers, and it remains a big part of her church's worldview.

I walked out behind the sanctuary to the big Sunday School timeline of bible history that shows approximate dates of the patriarchs through the New Testament times, the early church, Protestant reformation, and ending in a giant question mark slightly past the modern era with the word RAPTURE? written over a picture of a big cloud. Underneath the cloud were J's shoes, coat, and clothes.

I pursed my lips, looked at the pile of clothes and shoes for a moment, and thought to myself: "Well, I'm PRETTY sure I wasn't wrong about that."

J appeared several minutes later having changed into the gown. She looked beautiful.

The details of the service are embarrassing. I recently found a copy of what I'd prepared to say to her (because of course I wrote it down beforehand) and apparently my instincts on how to have human conversation haven't changed at all in seven years. (I might be a little better at self-restraint now.) There were a lot of pompous things said that sounded quite lofty, including some Latin words with a definition. I talked about how she really was a princess in Real Life, and gave her a tiara. For some reason which I don't currently recall, I put on a wumple at one point. I think that I'd come up with another reason related to the service, but mostly I just liked the word wumple.

When it came time to take the ring out, I couldn't remember whether I was supposed to descend to one knee or both knees. I frantically tried to recall a time when I'd heard the tradition talked about, and the only association I could come up with for the phrase "take a knee" (in the singular) just echoed of Bills games ending sadly. I decided I ought to get down on both knees, just to be safe. (This turned out to be wrong.)

She waited a moment and looked at me, unconsciously twirling her dress back and forth, before she said yes.

She changed again before we left, and her friend Meg was the first to know the news. She even snapped a picture of us (I think I still had the wumple on) before we left.

Traditions are very good things. The best parts of that night were the parts most traditional, and the parts that ended up being a little silly were the parts that I thought were original and creative at the time. But I wouldn't ever take back having to formally ask the question, or having to get into a bowing posture to do so, or even having to save and scrimp for months beforehand to purchase a precious stone.

When you're going to speak with a real Princess, it's best to follow the practices of time-honored tradition.