5 September 2008
And They Live Happily
I just got to meet my little nephew, Jeorgie Borgie. I was thinking about him today, and unrelatedly thinking about one of the guys he was named for, and something that guy said,
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
and it reminded me of a blurb I wrote six months ago about Roscivs’ proposal.
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My husband proposed in a library.
I love this story. If it’s true, as Daniel Gilbert asserts in Stumbling on Happiness, that when you tell a story it cements in your mind and you have a hard time remembering it in other ways, I think this story would be an exception; it’s non-cementable.
It was a Friday. I’d just finished a job interview, so I was all dolled up. He picked me up and was fond and affectionate and talkative; typical Roscivs behavior—I suspected nothing. I didn’t know he had a ring. I assumed we were driving back to his place, but I didn’t notice we’d passed it until I’d lost all sense of where we were. I asked him where we were going just a block before we pulled into the Orem library parking lot. Everything looked familiar then; in our early dates we spent lots of time there.
As we wound through the bookcases I was suddenly whisked up in a memory of three or four years before:
Two children had found us reading and asked us to read to them. After we’d read to them a while, they asked “are you guys married?” When we said “no” they thought a minute, then one of them asked, “are you best friends?” And we said yes. Both of them started telling us a story; the story of how we would get married someday.
I reached over to Roscivs, as we stood there in the stacks, and almost whispered the story to him. We’d made our way to the section where the walls are windows set with stained-glass storybook depictions, floor to ceiling. It felt unbreakably magic. He told me after he’d planned to introduce the proposal with that story, so he was all, hm, you’re taking my line!
I was going to tell him that I thought that whenever it was that we’d get engaged, the spot should be right here!—when he knelt down, pulled out a ring, and wove in words a paradisaical profession of love. I’d heard this story before; I knew how to begin it: Yes, yes, yes.
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