Lighting 200 tea lights takes longer than you’d think. First, you have to dig out the wick from the paraffin wax with your fingernail, which is a laborious, time-consuming task. Then, if you’re me, you have to arrange the 200 tea lights on your living room floor, on your coffee table, across your mantel, and on your dining room table as randomly as possible—and then rearrange them because they don’t look random enough. And getting all those candles lit isn’t easy, either. You have to hold a flame there long enough to burn some of the wax off each wick, and there’s no efficient way to do that, believe me. I went through two fire sticks and a box of matches. In all, it took almost an hour.
To make matters worse, my beloved was running late. In her defense, she didn’t know she was running late. As far as she knew, we were spending the evening with some friends down the street, something we do about once a week and something that typically has no pre-determined start time. She had no idea to what lengths I had gone to plan such a romantic, lavish, unexpected, story-we’ll-tell-our-grandkids proposal, the kind of proposal she had hinted strongly that she wanted.
So as I waited for her to show up at my house “any minute now,” I paced. I paced, and I worried. I worried that the fake rose petals I had sprinkled over my hardwood floors looked fake, but it was too late to do anything about them, just as a Friday afternoon is too late to go rose-petal shopping if you plan to use real rose petals that Friday night. I also worried that the 200 tea lights were either going to burn out or burn down my house before my beloved got there. I had to replace a few of them, and I had to reposition others because they still didn’t look random enough.
I also had some concerns about the soundtrack for the event. What song should be playing when I popped the question, making it unavoidably and forevermore Our Song? And assuming I could pick one song, would I really want to listen to it over and over again until she got there, not to mention have it continually play during the afterglow of our engagement? Instead, I made a proposal mix on my computer, found a suitable volume (audible, but not overbearing), and clicked “random” to throw the question of Our Song to the gods.
Back to pacing. I decided it was time to give some thought to what I was going to say once she got there. I came up with something about love and laughter and our future together and the happiness she brought me. That’s when I heard her car pull up to my house.
I panicked. Where should I sit? Or maybe I should stand. Because if I sit, the first thing I’m going to have to do is stand, so I might as well stand and get that whole standing up thing out of the way. But I didn’t want to stand right by the entry, because then I might block her view of the perfectly random arrangement of 200 mostly lit tea lights and strewn-about rose petals (albeit synthetic). So when she opened the door, I was standing in a far corner, “creepily,” as she would later say.
My sweetheart stood in the doorway, mute. Despite my proposal mix (Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” if you’re curious), my house seemed utterly quiet. Then I remembered I was supposed to say something, and immediately after I remembered I was supposed to say something, I forgot what I was going to say. I muttered about love and loving her forever and wanting to get married. And even though the ring box—the most important prop in the proposal process—was in my hand, I forgot that I had it. She had to ask to see it, and when I opened the box, she said, “Can I put it on?” I also forgot to get down on one knee.
Did I mention the number of sleepless nights that led up to the proposal? At 4 that morning, wide awake on my living room couch, I considered alternative, less-painstaking, not-as-time-sensitive plans. I considered proposing right then so I could put my mind at ease and get some sleep. But that wouldn’t have been very special.
Despite my faults and my faulty proposal, my beloved said yes. We would eventually blow out all of the candles and go down to my friends’ house, where our engagement party was already under way. Our friends and family would congratulate us and ask her to show them the ring and ask me to tell the story of our engagement again and again. But that was later.
We spent those first moments of being engaged at my dining room table. We looked at each other and sipped our tallboy Miller High Lifes, the only thing I had to drink. It’s not champagne, but it’s the champagne of beers, which has to count for something.
