"We just got engaged!"

“Working hard. Thinking about u a lot.” Such was the thoughtful text I got from my boyfriend on a particularly mundane day at work two Thursdays ago. Mundane because we weren’t google-chatting every five seconds. This was unusual, but he had told me he had some stuff to get done, and he’d won my trust too well for me to think anything otherwise. Little did I know that what he was working hard on would affect my weekend and my future so drastically.

“Planning of my own. Think you could wait till 1130 for brunch? I'll make it for u.” That was his text to my “whatcha doin?” the following Saturday morning. He said he wanted to get a jump on my birthday and celebrate it with me before my friends and family did later that week. Make me brunch? What better bday gift could there be?? Of course I can wait, especially if you make it for me!

So he drove down from Columbia, paid his respects to the Giant in my basement, and brought up all the fixin’s for a mega-pointage brunch...and flowers, of course. Pink gerbera daisies. That was all too usual for thoughtful Steve.

After a yummy brunch and a couple games of Sequence (the only game I can regularly beat him in), we set out to go ice skating, as I’d been wanting to do all winter. The ice skating rink in the Sculpture Garden on the Mall is small and round, with white lights swooping from lamppost to lamppost all the way around, and they play love songs while you skate. Equals...romantic. The last time I had gone there I was very single, and vowed never to go back alone. Which made being there with Stevo even more special for me.

When we parked the car, he got his backpack out and was carrying it to the rink with us. “I need this for something.” It occurred to me after several blocks that this might be It. There could be a ring in there. Oh but wait, a ring is much to small for a backpack. He would just have it in his pocket. Nope, don’t be silly, Janel. There you go again. It’s only a birthday present.

He took the backpack out on the ice with us, but within minutes the ice nazis were on the loudspeaker reminding the blissfully ignorant crowd that no cameras, cell phones or backpacks were allowed on the ice. Back we went to stash the backpack with Steve’s shoes, out in the open with everyone else’s.

During the zamboni break, I suddenly realized the significance of the neighborhood we were in, as many of our first dates took place around there, and said, “This hood has been good to us.”

After skating, Steve wanted to walk around the Mall a bit. I’m always game for a walk, even in 40-degree weather, and the Mall is one of my favorite places. The sun was setting and we got a picture with the Capitol in the background because, horrors, we didn’t have one of those yet. As we kept walking, and walking, finally Steve said, “I’m looking for a place to give you something.” It’s a birthday present, Janel. Don’t get any ideas. Birthday.

So we ended up back in the Sculpture Garden, finally found “the right” spot, and Steve whips a 2-page poem out of his backpack and starts reading. It’s entitled “Thirty-two” and in true Stevo style details the past year and our story. It included allusions to our first dates in that “hood” and he pointed them out as he lyricized about them. It was poignant, and funny, and I was crying, and laughing, in turn. But, this could still be a birthday thing, so I still wasn’t sure where he was going. However, the poem climaxed with “Janel, I will never forget when you were a young thirty-two/For it will forever be the age when I first loved you.” And he said “I love you” for the first time. (And so did I!)

Now for the out-of-body moment, the “this can’t be happening to me”/“I’ve waited my whole life for this”/“he’s actually proposing” five seconds of surreality. He kept reading, a third page of prose where he said he believed “God has prepared us and brought us together to weather the storms of life and to know His love for us even more.” And then he was fumbling with a (very pretty) ring box and getting down on one knee (I somehow wondered if he would do this, in all my confusion of thoughts and emotions), asking me to marry him. I said yes, but not the way I wanted to. Not with profundity or all the excitement I felt or the grace that should attend such fateful answers. Such is life, right? We were both giggling uncontrollably, and I was crying alternately, and we were perfect in our mutual nervousness and joy and beside-ourselves-ness.

We called my parents, who were ecstatic and had been ready to burst all week. And that’s when Steve told me what he’d been “working so hard on” two days before. He had FLOWN down to Atlanta FOR THE DAY, to talk with my Dad, and I’d seen him that night and had no idea! In fact, he’d gotten back to the office to g-chat a “have a good trip home” before I left the office, as he always did, and I was clueless! My dad had given him some pictures of me growing up, along with an “intelligence test for those wishing to marry Janel Lynn Reid” which consisted of such conundrums as connect-the-dots...with two dots. This was all contained in the now-famous backpack, along with a letter to me from my dad. As if I weren’t crying already...

We got someone to take our picture in front of the ice skating rink at dusk. I hesitated after he took it and then blurted out, “we just got engaged!” He beamed and shook Stevo’s hand. My fiance...my fiance’s hand! (Whaaat???!!!)

We celebrated over hot chocolate in the café there in the garden, and compared stories that we couldn’t tell before. “I thought this...” “I was really doing that...” And I watched my ring sparkle as I tipped my cup.

I love stories with a redemptive theme, and ours is in so many ways. Even down to where we got engaged. Last May, I was supposed to meet Steve and Whitey and Kara for lunch in the Sculpture Garden, but I got randomly sick with a 24-hour bug and was stuck on the couch all day. Instead, almost ten months later, we got engaged in that very spot.