The engagement

Since neither of us was too much for prolonging the inevitable, it didn’t really come as any surprise to either Hannah or me that our conversations turned to talk of marriage and wedding plans by the end of the summer. Hannah was even comfortable enough to suggest it to her father, Chuck, who surprisingly enough seemed fairly warm to the idea, even though he didn’t want to talk wedding plans before there was a ring.  He did, however, suggest to Hannah that he would be willing to fund the event to the tune of about $20,000 when we got around to it.  Hannah was so excited by these prospects that she called me as she was walking out of the restaurant where she had just grabbed lunch with her dad.  She knew that I, too, didn’t really want to plan anything before I proposed, so she did her best to share the good news without freaking me out. “Guess what, T.S.,” Hannah asked, the eagerness to share her story very clear in her voice. “What’s that?” I said back, not wanting to really guess since things with her dad frequently did not go well or as expected. “My dad just said he’d give us $20,000 to plan our wedding!” she squealed to me excitedly. “Seriously?!” I probably squealed back.  That sounded like a lot of money to me, and I was quickly trying to process how cheaply we could do the wedding to leave us $19,000— $15,000 at the very least—to devote to our honeymoon.  (I later discovered that 20g’s didn’t go quite as far in wedding planning as I would’ve expected, especially when the average wedding in our city was closer to $25,000.) “Yeah.  He told me he thought it would make sense for us to plan the wedding ourselves if we wanted to and used the budget from my bat mitzvah as a guide.” I balked for a moment at the mention of the bat mitzvah.  Although I hadn’t been around 15 years earlier when this event transpired, Hannah had recounted to me on many occasions the hellish experience this was and the overwhelming concern of her mom and dad to make sure it was the party they wanted irrespective of what she really preferred.  My balk must have been audible since Hannah responded, “No, no.  This is a good thing.  He was saying it in terms of how much money he thought would be reasonable to spend on our wedding and thought the money spent on the bat mitzvah would be about $20,000 today.” “Oh . . . o . . . ok,” I stuttered back. This was a lot to take in, not just from the standpoint that we were now talking about a wedding in concrete terms but that we were talking about more money than I had ever seen in anything but student loans at that point in my life.  It also would involve serious generosity on Chuck’s part.  And he tended to be pretty tightfisted with his money, even getting downright vicious when it was money he didn’t think he should have to part with. So, believing that an offer that sounds too good to be true probably is, I had my doubts that this would really play out as we expected.  But at the same time, I still wanted to give Chuck the benefit of the doubt, and Hannah was clearly excited about this turn of events. “And I’ve been looking at venues and think we can find some great places to get married with this kind of budget,” she said. I don’t even remember saying anything in response, but I think my silence spoke for itself.  It’s not that I didn’t want to plan the wedding, but I really liked the idea of playing by the traditional rules and not doing anything until after we were engaged.  I was just concerned that that not-so-insignificant moment might get lost in the shuffle if we had too much planned before I got around to proposing. Plus, I was getting ready to head back to my parents’ place for a long weekend to buy the ring, and I was going to pop the question at the end of the month while Hannah and I were on a little excursion she had planned for my birthday.  I was really loving the fact that I knew all of this and she didn’t.  So she put the brakes on the wedding talk and moved on to another topic of discussion before she arrived at her office and had to end the conversation. The excursion happened to be to an island in the Great Lakes that Hannah remembered visiting with her family when she was younger.  In her mind—and mine since the only knowledge I had of the locale was what she had shared with me—it was a quaint island with lots of caves, eateries, shops, mini golf and golf carts since no cars were allowed.  Not knowing much about the island, I had planned on taking Friday night and Saturday to survey the scene before finding the right place to propose on Saturday evening after we had dinner at what I presumed to be the nicest restaurant on the island.  Hannah, however, was very eager on the ferry to the island to eat at this restaurant on Friday night and was even more so when she saw the deck of the restaurant hanging out over the lake.  I hadn’t anticipated this and really couldn’t come up with a good reason to give her not to honor her request without divulging my ulterior motives.  It was on to Plan B . . . Which didn’t actually exist.  My Plan A was nothing short of perfection, I thought, and perfection doesn’t need a fall-back plan.  One finally came to me after we checked into our room at the bed and breakfast and readied ourselves to head to the community bathrooms down the hall to freshen up before our night out.  I figured I was a guy and should be able to shower quickly and get back to the room before Hannah did and surprise her with the ring when she returned.  Of course, I hadn’t realized just how easily achievable this feat would be until I hopped into the shower a little too eagerly, failing to account for the temperature of the water that was about to come directly from the late summer depths of Lake Erie and out the spigot above my head.             I should have been more aware of this, to be honest.  Some five years earlier during my early college days, I had stripped down to my boxers and jumped into another one of the Great Lakes with the intent of leaving my boxers on the lake bed and continuing a tradition started by my brethren before me.  I wasn’t the best of swimmers, but I figured nothing more was required of me than to jump in the water, disrobe and deposit my boxers under a rock, grabbing any that remained from the year before. My dive was more like a drunken stumble, and the water was more like an ice bath in an athletic training room.  Only I didn’t have the luxury of putting my hands on the sides of the stainless steel tub and easing myself into the waters.  Instead, I came bobbing right back up, coughing and sputtering on water and what I assumed had to be my manhood as I felt it retreating violently inside my body in desperate self-preservation.  Failing to find a handhold on the steel face of the dock to steady myself for a few deep breaths, I shimmied/shivered out of my boxers and let them sink to the lake's depths of their own accord before reaching up to let my buddies pull my naked, blue ass out of the water before I hyperventilated.  I was still shaking—and nude—five minutes later when a park ranger started to approach to check on the commotion caused by this scene.  Fortunately, someone had shorts and a sweatshirt to spare, and the ranger didn’t see anything but a dozen fully clothed guys looking out over the lake by the time she arrived. Having forgotten all of that, I stepped into the shower stall and turned the water on full-bore, yelping, jumping and nearly taking down the full corral of shower stalls with my 200+ pound frame.  I fumbled with the “hot” fixture as I tried to sidestep the freezing shower only to find it did nothing more than increase the pressure of the water, making it feel like shooting--and not just dripping--icicles.  I knew I had to be smelling a little ripe from our four hour drive and 45 minute ferry ride, so I quickly grabbed what I assumed would be enough soap to wash away as much stink as I could in a 60 second shower. I lumbered back to our room fearing that I would bite it at any minute since my legs had yet to regain any feeling.  Fortunately, as I suspected, Hannah was not back in the room yet, so I was able to begin putting my plan into action once logical thought returned to my mind after the severe shock to my system.  The only problem was that my fine motor skills hadn’t caught up yet, and I was having trouble opening the ring box.  I finally got it open after it had fallen on the edge of one of the beds and decided I wouldn’t even attempt to take the ring out for fear my not-so-nimble fingers would inadvertently flick my four-figure investment down a floor vent.  I had managed to get myself dressed by the time Hannah strolled back to the room from what I hoped was a much warmer shower, but I was still shivering mightily and rubbing my arms and shoulders with my hands in a fruitless effort to increase my core body temperature.  Hannah noticed strange things were afoot right away, but her attention was drawn to me and not the ring as I had planned. “What’s wrong?” she asked drying out her hair. “The shower was a little cold,” I responded, attempting with furtive sideways glances to redirect Hannah’s attention to the corner of the bed a foot-and-a-half away. “Really?  Mine was great,” she said, continuing to dry her hair with her towel.  “I almost didn’t want to get out.” I wasn’t even listening to what she had to say since I had started adding vigorous head nods to my sideways glances to get her to notice the ring.  She still wasn’t so much catching my drift. “Do you need me to grab a sweatshirt for you?” she offered, now completely turning her back to the bed and reaching into the closet to grab a jacket for herself. “No, no, that’s okay,” I said started to grow more agitated at the fact that my Plan B, too, was falling miserably on its face.  Hannah could sense the frustration in my voice.  “Is everything okay?” she asked suspiciously and turning around . . . and finally seeing the open box on the bed.  I made my move as the towel fell from her hand, and she stood in front of me with her mouth agape. The moment was imperfect, no doubt.  But, to the extent that I had concocted a plan for the moment, I’m confident I had surpassed the efforts of both my father and grandfather in preserving the sentimentality of the event.

The story my grandfather tells of his engagement to my grandmother was that he just told her to let him know when she was ready for him to get her a ring.  As for my dad, both he and Mom attest to the fact that he did little more than ask her during the fall after he had graduated from college what her plans were for the future. “Is that a proposal?” Helen asked, taking a different approach to the process of popping the question. “I guess it is,” Max responded. And that was that.

Hannah was fully aware of my engagement heritage and, I think, was prepared to grant me a fair amount of leeway.  And up until the time proposing to Hannah became a very real prospect, I hadn’t necessarily devoted much time to plotting out this scenario.  Still, I had two elements that had been noticeably absent from each of my forebear's marriage proffers, namely a ring and a plan.   The funny thing is that every time I took a pair of boxers out of my drawer over the course of the weeks leading up to that moment and looked at the little blue box holding the engagement ring I had selected on my own (and shown to each of my parents and sister for approval), I thought of the different ways this would play out and how perfect my speech would be.  It certainly didn’t play out perfectly, and my speech was less of a speech and more of a couple run-on sentences than any oratorical masterpiece.  Still, I was able to spit out coherently the only statement that really mattered anyway.

And Hannah gave me the answer I had only hoped to hear.