On Being Engaged

It’s taken me a relatively long time to discuss this, evidenced by the lack of postings lately. I’m engaged. I should know this. After all, I bought the ring, I connived her into going hiking with me on a moment’s notice, I brought the conversation around to marriage, and I got down on one knee. Apparently, I even kissed the ring, which act I do not remember doing.

Nobody cried. It wasn’t particularly exciting. There was no moment of intense wondering whether she’d go with it or not. She said ‘yes’ before I got around to asking. It rained on the walk back to the car. All in all, it was rather anticlimactic for me. Rather like getting saved.

But the aftershocks have been phenomenal. It’s very difficult to explain, and I still don’t know if I can. At one point I thought I was going to have to go through my entire life’s career of romantic inclinations… my kindergarten friend who broke up with me after being laughed at for shouting “You stay away from my boyfriend!” at a crowd of older bullies…the embarrassing moment my mom informed me that we would not be buying $200 gold-enameled figurines for any persons that I had a crush on and whose names I had marked in catalogues…and the months of numbness after another fiancée had terminated another life. I may yet recite for you all the gory details, but perhaps not today.

Suffice it to say that, since my official engagement, have opened whole other worlds of dreams inside of me. It’s… more difficult than I thought. What is this? Repression I’ve been harboring inside of me? I can’t tell you. What I can say is…

In Peter S. Beagle’s classic fantasy The Last Unicorn, there is a secret door that our heroes must find to confront their enemy. Their only clue is the riddle “When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time. Only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.” In the evil king’s main hall, they find a broken clock that never strikes the right time and the remains of the king’s former commander, but no wine.

The bungling magician manages to get the skull to speak (though first he only cackles) and conjures up some cheap wine, which happens to taste awful. Schmendrick (the aforementioned magician) is about to pour the stuff out when the skull cries out,
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“No, wait, hey, don’t! Don’t do that! Give it to me if you don’t want it, but don’t throw it away!”

Says Schmendrick: “But you’re dead! You can’t smell wine, can’t taste it!”

“But,” cries the skull, “I remember…”

The skull drinks the wine and tells them that the way is through the clock. Of course, the skull cries the alarm as they’re climbing through into the cave at the foundation of the castle.

A ring given is the beginning of a promise. And, as much as cynics may deny it, a promise is a sure foundation to build upon. And suddenly, something dead in me cries out, “But I remember!” And what was dead begins to act as though it was living. The Spirit of God (which often is represented as wine in scripture) begins to drink itself through me. Honestly, it’s rather frightening. I can’t begin to tell you of the hidden worlds that I have found in me. So many dreams that I had given up and totally forgotten. But suddenly, they seem possible.

What, because there is now a woman standing with me who believes in me? In a word, yes. Well, no. Not just any woman. That woman. Over there. The amazing one. No no… There! That one. The one who doesn’t think she dances, though she is made of light. Let me tell you about her:

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Six or seven years ago, when I was someone else, I was head over heels over someone else. Honestly, I was rather embarrassed about it, kind of like when I was a kid and my mom would read Tom Sawyer to me and I would hide my head under the pillows whenever mention of Becky Thatcher came up. It was hard to be so vulnerable then, not to the girl I was in love with, but to all the people around me saying “’Let him commit himself unto the Lord! Let Him rescue him; let Him deliver him, since He delights in him!”

Ok. So I had a perception problem. But anyway, somewhere in there I got a vision: I saw a sword made up of two people standing back-to-back. One was a man, and one was a woman. The man was lifting his hands up to ministry to God, and the woman was reaching out in ministry to the people. The hilt of the sword was an open book, the word of God, and reaching up and around it were tongues of fire, the Spirit of God. I wrote the description down and showed it to my mom, who immediately said, “Hm, thinking of getting married?” Heh. Heh heh. Wrong girl.

So that whole thing went up in smoke, but I remembered the vision. Do you know that crazy typical thing Christian couples say to each other when they’re breaking up? “It’s okay. If God doesn’t want this to happen, it only means he has something (i.e. someone) much better prepared for each of us.” That sentiment seems really trite when you wake up in the morning and realize you’ve got blood in your mouth from gnawing through your cheek. But the truth is… it’s true. Ain’t no woman like the one I got.

Let’s see…

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We met:

I’m taking this poetry class. I have learned since that I hate poetry classes. They teach you form, but no function. So I get told to write a poem. Go! Write a poem! These people have never heard of inspiration. So I go out to the local park and I wait until some thought occurs to me and I go back to school, get my food, take an empty table and set about saying my cool thought in the most cryptic way possible. Queens is a friendly little community, so about 3 people asked me if I was lonely and if I wanted to sit with them. I think it helped that it was about the 2nd week of school, and they were looking out for disenfranchised freshmen.

So I get done writing my poem, and I look up and I pick somebody to sit with who had asked me before. I picked the table occupied by a girl I knew named Julie. I had met Julie about a week before when she peremptorily jumped into a group of friends of mine and turned us into a tightly bound fellowship in a matter of minutes. Mad social skills. I sit down at this table and right across from me is this girl. She don’t got a lot to say, but there’s something about her.

No. Seriously. There was something about her. After months of study I finally figured it out. Unbreakable eye contact. And the most beautiful eyes… But I digress. We had this conversation… I mean, I admit I’m a talker, but that was the longest one-sided conversation I have ever had.

It gets fuzzy after that. I don’t remember if it was that night or the next, or the next week or what, but I asked her to go for a walk. Nothing romantic. Really. No, really, it wasn’t. I’m serious. At other times after that, I asked other people to go to parks and coffee houses and those weren’t romantic either. I was just being friendly.

Heh. Some friend. We talked over dinner for 2 hours, and then we took this walk, and that lasted for 2 or 3 hours, and then we sat around the closed office buildings and that took a couple of hours. All I know is we went to our respective rooms around 2 am that night. Like I said, I don’t remember much of it, but no doubt most of the night was consumed by me talking a lot and her making unbreaking eye contact. The only part of the conversation I can really remember was how delighted I was when I discovered that she was the only girl to whom I could say “I have a new computer with a 900 MHz processor and 750 MB of RAM and 2 HDD totaling 60 MB” and all she would say was “Wow! I am so jealous!” And I thought, man, this girl is amazing.

We fell in love:

Life happened. I wasn’t in love. She wasn’t my type. There was some mystery girl I couldn’t locate who was my type. She was tall and flagrantly beautiful and had this amazing singing voice and these radicalized personality traits… and I couldn’t figure out who or where she was. And then I saw this movie. It was a little classic romance called Emma. It changed my life.

I don’t want to get bogged down with the details of somebody else’s romance, so I’ll just skim over the essentials. There are four main characters: Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Knightly, Mr. Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax. The two characters you see the most are Emma and Mr. Knightly. Knightly is the perfect man. He’s powerful, he’s polite, he’s the epitome of courtesy and forethought. A gentleman’s gentleman. He also happens to own pretty much the entire county. Knightly is in love with Emma, who is the only woman who could live through his intolerant lecturing. Emma is amazing. Emma makes coffee nervous. She’s witty; she’s talented; she’s capable and influential. She’s so used to everything falling together for her and being handed her on a silver platter that she never actually applies her self to become really good at something. Life is a series of games for her and she lurches headlong after it. For which, of course, Knightly berates her.

Emma had a thought to fall in love with Frank Churchill if she ever met him, and when she does, it turns out he’s everything she ever imagined. He’s more charming than Bill Clinton. He’s fun. He organizes parties, he plays games and practical jokes. He’s also a bit of a conniver, which is why he is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. Frank is due to inherit quite a bit of money from is aunt, and if his aunt knew who it was he wanted to marry, shed disinherit him on the spot. So Frank flirts constantly with Emma to throw the whole town off the track, and shows his affection to Jane privately. At one point he goes to London “to get his hair cut,” and it just so happens that “a secret admirer” sends Jane a grand piano that very same day. Frank tends to be a little extravagant. Jane you hardly see at all. She’s poor, but very well liked and very accomplished. She sings beautifully; she plays piano; she is perfectly capable at every womanly skill. She also has very strong opinions about the world, but generally keeps them to herself unless somebody tries to push her into something.

Jane is quiet and unassuming, and Emma isn’t half the woman Jane is. And Emma knows it, which is why you don’t see much of Jane in the novel. The book is about Emma, don’t you know. Mr. Knightly points out at one point that the reason Emma doesn’t care much for Jane is everything that Emma could be, if she would just apply herself.

Sorry for the long synopsis. So I absolutely love this book. I love everybody in it. And Emma is my dream girl. (Like Anne of Green Gables—another character I like and Valerie can’t stand.) This is very convenient because Mr. Knightly is everything that I want to be. Key word: Everything I want to be. So I’m watching a movie of it, and it occurs to me that I’m nothing like Mr. Knightly. He’s too dang reserved. He thought the piano was an obnoxious, overweening gift to give to a poor girl who then has to deal with the rumors about who gave it to her and why. It occurs to me that I’m not like Mr. Knightly at all. God help me, I’m like Mr. Churchill.

Have you ever watched that old musical South Pacific? There’s this amazing high-tech technique they use all the time in that move, where somebody starts singing (“Here am I, your special island… Bali-hi Bali-hi!”) and the whole sky turns orange and purple. Ooh. Or those scenes where the main character has this sudden shocking realization and the camera suddenly zooms in from a panoramic to a close up and all the background kind of twists around funny? That’s what happened to me. I am not, nor do I ever hope to be, a Mr. Knightly. I am a Frank Churchill. I like giving people secret pianos. My whole life I’ve been chasing Emmas.

Do you know what happens when Frank Churchill goes steady with Emma? Emma goes crazy. You think I’m joking, don’t you? Every single person I have ever dated prior to Valerie has become a good deal more unstable directly after going out with me. I think it’s because I’m a catalyst. Whenever you’re with me, you become so much more of whatever it is you already are. I was constantly going after women for whom “stability” was not a good characterization. Certain people need something calming in their lives. I was one of them. So was every woman I ever dated. Basic rule. Don’t put unstable people with unstable people. Duh.

Well, it was a no-brainer, but I have a lot in common with that scarecrow. But suddenly my whole world shifted. If I’m Frank Churchill, what I really need is a Jane. And I turned around and there was Jane, er… Valerie. And instantly I was in love.

Yes. That is how I work. This is why women who love me go crazy.

I wish I could detail how the next few steps progressed. I wrote it all out once and emailed it somebody or other, but then my computer ate my email. The plan was not to jump out at Valerie in the woods and say “Heya baby! How’s about you bein’ my Valentine?” In fact, I was going to keep my mouth shut about it. You see, over the years, I’ve developed this great technique for getting over being in love with someone—a good skill to have if you fall in love as easily and as completely as I do. I’m like this bad mix of Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio all in one. It’s an especially good skill if you have ever found yourself inclined to fall in love with someone who, upon cooler inspection, would be a very inappropriate person to fall in love with. The first thing you do is don’t bloody tell anybody. The second thing you do is investigate them for flaws. Make up flaws. Magnify the fact that their hair is the wrong color. Explain to yourself how your parents would kill their parents because they’re pastoring a megachurch. Anything.

Do you know that my fiancée has no flaws? I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. Oh, I mean, her GPA has dropped a little… down to a 3.9 or something. And she only came over and surprised me by cooking my dinner for me twice last week. But I’m talking about flaws here. I needed to know that she didn’t bathe properly, or that she had an obnoxious laugh. I needed to discover that she never wanted to have any children, or that she was a hard-core Republican who believed in abortion, but not the death penalty. I needed ammunition here. Do you know what I discovered? Valerie is the only woman I have ever met who can be accurately described by the 31st chapter of Proverbs.

I am so totally not exaggerating. I first heard somebody described as a Proverbs 31 woman when I was a freshman. We were taking this speech class, and at one point, every person who had to speak also had to have somebody introduce them. This one girl got up and was introduce by her girlfriend who seemed to come from an AME background. At least, during the introduction, I could hear the Hammond in the background. I can still hear her: “A woman of courage and truth, a Proverbs 31 woman!” And I thought, riiiight. Have you even read Proverbs 31? Nobody can do that. I’ve even heard and agreed that Proverbs 31 was actually a metaphor for “Wisdom” and it’s actually saying that a wise man is “married” to wisdom, and that it is wisdom that works so hard to keep him up. And then I met Valerie and tried to find fault in her.

I spent several days like this. On or around the 3rd day, when I found myself losing sleep and not eating properly and even moved to tears by considering her perfections, I decided I really ought to mention to her how I felt.

This actually proved to be a bit complicated.

The next morning was Sunday, and I resolved to skip my church and spend the morning finding hers. I knew the name of it, and I knew the general vicinity of it, so I just drove down there. I expected to find her car, park mine beside it, and step into the service where I would catch the tail end or so, and then we could go have lunch or something. It did not occur to me that there are approximately 13,000 members at her church. It took me half an hour to find a parking space. It took me 10 minutes to realize that finding her in that crowd would be pointless, and it took me another 15 minutes to find her car instead. Very shortly she came out.

We went to a place at the closest mall to eat, and had the most protracted conversation possible about our romance. Both of us were interested, and both of us were scared out of our minds. Since neither of us is as filled with guile as Frank Churchill, we had allowed the rumors to flourish at school about whether or not we were actually dating. When people asked us, we said no. End of story. But Valerie’s poor roommate (the one who introduced us) was constantly being buffeted by questions about us. Conversation slowly wound around to laughing about Julie’s poor consternation about what our relationship actually was. I tried to hint broadly that maybe we should redefine what exactly was going on between us. But what came out was something more along the lines of “are you confused about what we are?” “Of course not! We’re friends,” came the reply, brooking no discussion. So much for that tack. Clearly, she didn’t want anything more. But I really had to give her a straight question to get from her a straight answer. We went back to school and this kind of discussion went on for the next 6 hours or so. We’d exchange two sentences that were on-topic, recoil with half an hour’s diversion, and try again. It was awful. I think it was around 9 o’clock on Tuesday when we finally agreed that we were going to be “something more.”

It was another 3-4 months before we let it out that we were officially dating.

We got engaged:

I don’t really want to recount to you all the details of how I graduated and saved up for a ring and then immediately lost my job and had to live off my ring savings, how I got a new job and then borrowed from relatives in order to buy the ring. I do want to tell you that I am open to any and all contributions. But I don’t really want to re-describe how I managed to get her to pick her own venue in which to be proposed to, how she picked hiking over a garden walk, how she said yes before I even finished proposing. These are things you should already know. What fascinates me is the inward thing.

I had a relationship some years ago that ended very badly. Very badly. I did not know that it was even possible to end a relationship so badly. In one quake, everything which could be shaken was shaken. I had to re-evaluate everything, from my belief in the existence of God to my function and purpose in life. I did get a warning from God about it. He said that he was going to take me back down to powder and start from scratch. He’s taken a few years to accomplish the rebuilding process, a process which did not take the path I expected at all. The first thing he took away from me was also the last thing he restored to me: a wife.

It’s breathtaking when I really stop to think about it. No really. As in “it’s hard to breathe.” There she is. Over there. The other part of me. In English, the story goes that when God created woman and showed her to Adam, the first thing he said was Whoa, man! In Hebrew it reads better: The Hebrew word for “man” is “ish” (pronounced eesh). The word for woman is “ishah.” So when Adam first saw Eve (since he was obviously speaking Hebrew), he said “Ish! Ahh!” It’s that sigh of relief that I’m experiencing now. Tensions that I didn’t even know were in me are uncurling.

I called Valerie one day recently, when I had suddenly realized that all the old dreams in me hadn’t left me. It has come to my attention that I am an inbound radical. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth overdoing. And the plans I have for life, for family, for career, are all radical ones, diverging from the norm. They’re still there and if I’m really going to live my life, I’m probably going to intimidate and offend a lot of people. Maybe even people’s family. I hope not. But chasing the truth is more important than appeasement. With knot in stomach I related these thoughts to her. She told me, “It doesn’t matter. No matter what, I chose you. My job is to be a counter-weight to you. Every thing you’ve told me so far, I’ve agreed with you. And everything you dream up in the future, no matter what I think, I will pray about it before judging.” Well, those probably aren’t the exact words she said, but I’m sure I got the thoughts right.

The best image I ever heard for a marriage relationship was that each of us is a cog in a machine. Your spouse is the one God has placed to run next to you, and they have to fit you in every way. Well, I am a strange and uneven cog, but my darling—she who is my beloved—she fits me perfectly.