Prologue to Happy Story

As a bit of a prologue:

The proposal worked out great, but my original idea was a bit different. Who would’ve thought that an ice storm in Memphis would change how I proposed to my girlfriend?

The ring was designed and ordered weeks ago, with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve.

Naturally, I had it shipped to my office. Naturally, they waited until the last possible day to ship it. And naturally, this turned out to be one day too late.

My tentative plan was to propose Christmas Eve in front of my family—that way she would have the good news (and the ring, of course) when we visited her family shortly thereafter.

On December 24th, we were told to go home from work at 2pm. The shipment hadn’t arrived by that time. I undocked my laptop and moved to the front desk, hitting ‘refresh’ on the tracking window I had open about every 4 seconds or so. I was the only one left in the office. At 2:30pm, the package was still said to be in Memphis. They had gotten a pretty brutal dose of ice the night before…but up pulled a FedEx truck! At last the holidays could begin!

No dice.

He was there for pickups only, and after a call to a FedEx representative, I found I may as well go home. It wasn’t coming. It was stuck in Memphis.

I’ve never been so disappointed to leave work, much less to leave work with 11 days off ahead of me.

Christmas Eve with my immediate family and Christmas Day with my extended family came and went. On the 26th we headed north to Minnesota to see her family; plenty more calls to FedEx were made. Finally, on Monday the 29th the ring was delivered to the office.

Finally, I had a plan. We were driving home on the 30th. I would get up on the 31st, go to the office, get the ring, and surprise her at Michael’s New Year’s Eve party!

Yeah. We woke up on the 30th to nearly a foot of snow, which meant our friend’s house was completely snowed in. You literally could not see where the road was supposed to be. We shoveled the driveway, but we were out in the country on a street with 4 occupied houses…no way would the plow get there until late that night, we were told.

By mid-afternoon, we resigned ourselves to staying another night. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with another plan, taking our belongings from the car to the house, when lo and behold, the largest plow truck I’ve ever seen moved the masses of powder to the curb. Game on.

After slow going through all of Minnesota (and stops at Ikea and Trader Joe’s) we got home at 3:30am. But we got here, and that’s what counts.

On New Year’s Eve, I retrieved the ring, chewed the hell out of my nails all day, and got down on my knee in front of friends.

I wouldn’t change a thing.