An Unacceptable Proposal

I met my wife only a year before I totally crashed and burned with the anxiety problem.

It was this time of the year in 2002 and I had just come back from a Dave Matthews Band concert in Portland where J-bro lives and had not completely recovered from the experience. Not only was I getting progressively more freaked out by big open buildings and stores but our DMB seats didn't help.

Picture your typical stadium. Now pick a seat on the floor level, directly opposite the stage. Now go up. Up past the second level, up to the highest level, up all the stairs to the last row of seats, then up to the concrete ledge behind the last row of seats on folding chairs. I'm not kidding. Dave looked tiny even on the huge video monitors. Agoraphobia + Vertigo = not so good times.

Allow me a quick digression:

Add to the vertigo the fact that they played about 6 songs that I had heard before, out of a 15 song set. I do my homework before going to a rock concert. I listen to the newest album. What I don't expect is to hear 9 songs from an album that has not even been released yet. That is crap. If you have ONE song that has won a Grammy, play that song at every concert. If you have new songs, great, but mix them with your whole catalog if you have an extensive catalog. End of rant.

Along for the DMB ride was one of Jason's best friends, Traci. Traci lives in Anchorage and goes to visit J-bro more than I do. She had visited for the U2 concert the year before and is always a kick in the pants but we didn't really hang out together in our own hometown. After DMB, she called me one weekend that I actually had an extra day off and we hung out and went shopping.

Traci had recently “met” a guy online but not yet actually met him in person. Most of this shopping expedition revolved around me trying to tell her not to get too caught up in this guy she had never met, employing the technique I am most successful with: listening carefully, asking questions until the person comes to their own conclusion, and then spending the rest of the adventure mocking them. Hey, it works for me. The last store of the day was the store in which Traci worked as a pharmacy technician.

That was a Saturday; the following Monday I got an email from Traci asking if I remembered the cute chubby pharmacy tech with the blonde curly hair who we saw when walking past the pharmacy. Traci said this girl wanted to know if I was single because she thought I was cute.

My response was a firm: “Fuck you! Just because I mocked you about your internet crush is no reason to be mean. I may have no soul but I do have feelings!”

Several emails back and forth between Traci and I lead me to believe she had not been kidding and that, furthermore, Traci would tell my mom if I didn’t at least come say “Hi” to this girl named “Kelli.” Well I certainly didn’t want my mom involved in my love life (no offense, mom).

Well, I screwed up my courage and took an extra half of an Ativan and went to the pharmacy, fully expecting to fail the “hello test.” We were both nervous and we both gave a very high speed “Hi, pleasedtomeetyou” before she scampered away back to the mysterious depths of the pharmacy.

I was smitten. Several days of emails, phone calls, internet messaging, and actual dates ensued. By February, we were living together and by April I had asked her to marry me. We joke that she saw me across a crowded grocery store and said to herself, Mmmm, I wants me one of them. And she got me.

While we had discussed marriage, I hadn’t formally proposed because I did not have an appropriate ring. I had figured that we would come up with something suitable at the last minute, which is my normal modus operandi.

I knew enough to not rely on my own taste when it came to jewelry. I never wore jewelry, seemed too much trouble. I did see a black titanium ring that looked pretty cool so Kelli bought it as my wedding band. It took forever to get used to wearing a ring but it’s part of me now.

Kelli had definite preferences: princess cut diamonds and yellow gold. Princess cut is in fashion but yellow gold isn’t. Everything is platinum these days.

Enter Hannibal, the pawn shop queen, who called me one Friday in July and said “come down to Alaska 1^st Cash and look at this ring TODAY. It was a yellow gold ring with a .74ct diamond cathedral-set on top of a row of nine channel-set diamonds which gave the ring a grand total of 2.1ct. Bling freaking bling. (No, I don’t actually talk like that). The pawn shop had sent it out for a certified insurance appraisal which identified not only its approximate replacement value but a map of every flaw in the larger diamond. A $3500 appraisal and after Kelli saw it and gave the nod, I bought the ring for less than $1600. Yes, it’s a pawn shop ring but she loves it so.

After I did the deal (which sounds so much more dramatic than saying “Okay, we’ll take it; here’s my credit card.”) I handed it to her and said “okay, do you want to wear it out of here?” as if it was a new pair of shoes. She handed it back and said “No, actually you have to GIVE it to me first.”

Whoa boy. I had spent so much mental energy on figuring it out how to buy the ring and making sure we got it before anyone else bought it and how to get Kelli over to look at it so she could give the approval that I hadn’t thought of a big grand gesture in the actually giving.

We walked to the car and I got into the driver’s seat while she got into the passenger seat. I said. “Should I officially ask you to marry me while sitting in a car in a pawn shop parking lot?”

“That’s up to you. You already know the answer; you just have to ask the question.”

But I knew that proposing in a pawn shop parking lot would be unacceptable.

“Okay, buckle up,” I said and drove off downtown.

After about thirty seconds of driving I thought of a perfect place that would be romantic and special enough to serve as the location of this moment. I drove Kelli to the Delaney Park Strip Rose Garden.

The rose garden isn’t very big. It consists of a 40 foot square of rose hedges with several varieties of individual rose bushes planted inside with a path running through it. It’s pretty, but it’s more important than that.

My Grandmother’s older sister, Reva, was married to a man named George until his death 57 years later. Uncle George was a seabee in the Pacific theater in World War II, then worked for the City of Anchorage until his retirement. After retirement his main hobby was volunteering to tend the city rose garden. Each year he would help move the rose bushes from one of the empty Nike nuclear missile silos in Kincaid Park, where they were stored for the winter, to the Park Strip closer near downtown. He tended the garden all summer and was very pleased with his results, if rather humble about his role in the garden.

This was a special place to my family so this was the place I wanted to start my own family.

After walking ahead of Kelli to check the bushes for drunks sleeping in the shade, I led her by the hand to the center of the garden. On bended knee I asked her, very carefully, for the honor of being my wife. She looked into my eyes and said a very simple, eloquent “yes I will.”

Then I placed the ring on her finger and we kissed quickly then ran off back to the car because we were starting to draw some attention from people walking through the park. We’re both pretty shy and we don’t, as a rule, talk to people, so we beat feet to get back to our little cocoon of love.

November 14 of 2003 we were married and I have never for a moment regretted any of it. From “Hi, pleasedtomeetyou,” to “I do,” I have hung on her every word and my heart warms to see her smile, to look into her golden eyes, to smell her hair, to touch her skin.

We are actually quite uncomplicated and informal people but we both knew a pawn shop parking lot was not the place for an appropriate proposal.