Just a summer ago, over a couple glasses, and then a couple more glasses, of white something-or-other wine, I asked my mom — quite brashly, almost accusatory in a "why don't I know this story?" way — how my dad proposed.
They'd long been divorced, in a middle class white family way, where he bitched about child support and she cried on the top of the staircase. Still, all these years later, their marriage is still a touchy subject.
Turns out he didn't propose.
They were young, maybe 21 years old, just babies compared to my idea of a reasonable, marry-able age now, which inches up and up with every birthday.
Instead of a bended knee or a candlelit dinner or a thousand — literally a thousand — other ways that he could have asked this woman he supposed loved to spend the rest of their damn lives together, his proposal went something like this:
The two people who eventually married and procreated three (!) different (!) times (!) before things all went sour (or maybe things were always sour, I don't know) went to a jewelry store together to replace a dead battery in my dad's watch. That's when he shrugged a shoulder and popped the big q: "What do you think of these rings?"
I can't believe she married him.
