So I get to Fayetteville in about an hour, with the ring and 500 yards of red ribbon. For those of you not familiar with the University of Arkansas, there is an outdoor amphitheatre on the campus that has become quite special to myself and my fiancee. They call it the "Greek theater," which is horribly inaccurate. Apperently the thing that makes it a "Greek Theater" is the fact that the inscriptions on the posts around the stage replace the letter 'U' with the letter 'V,' (ie, "CVLTVRE, EDVCATION" etc).
But it is pretty at night, and it's where we had our first kiss, and where we would go to be alone, and where she dumped me (another story for another time). So it's been about an hour since I told Ex-Roomate I wasn't going to be coming up on Tuesday night. I's around 9:00 Monday night at this point, and I take my red ribbon and tie one end to the railing to the stairs at the top of the Greek theater. I think begin tying the ribbon spools (most of them about 10 feet long) to each other, and stringing the ribbon out the back stairs and make my way down the street to where her dorm room is. I wrap the ribbon around parking meters, parkins signs, trees, and shrubbery while I walk down the sidewalk.
People are looking at me kind of odd, but this
is Fayetteville afterall, so nobody really gives it much of a thought. I string the ribbon down the sidewalk, then across the street to a bike rack, and then along the back of her building, an all-girls dormitory. Once I'm to the back door, I manage to get in the building behind some girls that are coming in, and they kind of look at me odd. Technically, guys aren't allowed in the girl's dorm without an escort, so one of the girls asked me, "Um, what are you doing in here." I hold my Hobby Lobby bag full of ribbon us as an acceptable explanation and say outloud for the first time, "I'm proposing to my girlfriend tonight."
Note to potential assaulters, muggers, robbers, and ne'er-do-wells: This is the perfect cover for gaining entry into all-girl dorms without having to be monitored. At the time I was relieved the girl and her friend simply squealed and then left me alone, but in retrospect, it kinda makes me nervous that that's all a guy has to do to get into my girlfriend's living quarters if he wants. But oh well...
So anyways, the girl and her friends squeal and giggle as I continue my way up the stairs with my ribbon, tying it to the next strand 10- feet at a time. Once I get to Girlfriend's floor, I tie on a 50-foot strand and rush as quickly to her door as possible. I then scribble "What's at the other end?" on the dry-erase notepad on her door,l knock loudly on her door, and duck back down the stairwell. I lean around the corner to watch her door, waiting for her to stick her head out and begin following the ribbon. I wait several minutes and nothing happens. I go up, knock loudly again, and then realize that she is probably still with Ex-Roomate at Wal-Mart. The 2 of them could conceivably be there for hours yet, so I start wondering if I should just stand here in the stairwell and wait for her, or what I should do. I decide to hide in the stairs at the other end of the hallway, which she most likely would not come up, and wait for her to return.
I only had to wait about another 10 minutes before she came back, but considering she left for Wal-Mart for I left Fort Smith, that gave her about an hour and a half at Wal-Mart with ER, and all she had to show for it was a single plastic bag. As she walked down the hallway, she glanced quizzically at the ribbon but shrugged it off, until she noticed it terminated at her door, and saw what was written on the dry-erase board. Figuring she would not take too much time in trying to figure out what it was all about, I RAN down the stairs and back to the greek theater. I tie another 50-footer to the railing and begin leading it across the rows of seats up to the stage, where we had kissed...
...now, at this point, I feel like I must explain something about Girlfriend. I love her to death; please understand that before misreading what I'm about to say. She is the most kind, loving, considerate woman God ever placed on this green earth, and she makes every morning worth getting out of bed, even on those days I won't get to see her. Now that being said, there is a rather prominent character flaw in Girlfriend that I am having to learn to adjust to. It is not a "character flaw" in the sense that it makes her a bad person, or overshadows her other qualities, but it does exhibit an extremely pervasive effect on her life and her lifestyle. It does not keep me from loving her, but it does cause me to have problems judging certain portions of our relationship now, and in the future. Now that I have given the prequalifiers for it, I feel and I reasonable reveal this imperfection marring an otherwise unblemished personality.
My girlfrience, fiancee, soone-to-be-wife, and friend is.....
slow. Now, I don't mean that in the colloqualism for unintelligent, because she is one of the brightest people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I mean she moves slow. And by slow, I mean
sloooooowwwww. I know what you're thinking, "Guys always complain about girls making them late." Every single friend we have, male and female both, remarks at the slowness of Girlfriend. She walks slow. She eats slow. She takes hour
s in the bathroom at times. She is regularly the last one to show up, and the last one to leave. I have been with the woman for over 3 years and I remember her actually running once in those three years, (please note the caveat that this is what I
remember), and that one time involved an extreme desire on her part to obtain some cheese enchiladas. But that's it. One time in three years. And I've been on
intramural sports teams with her. I do not mean to sound judgemental or condescending. I simply wish to accurately reflect this fact so that you, the reader, will understand what happened next.
I
ran down the stairs and back to the Greek Theater to finish putting the ribbon across to the stage. I got from the stairs at the top to the side-steps of the stage, when I looked and she started coming down the stairs. Had somebody called her and told her that the entire cast of Alias was riding around the Greek Theater on pink hippopotami and throwing $100 dollar bills to the onlookers, it would have taken her a
minimum of 15 minutes to get there. But there she was, mere seconds behind me, coming down the stairs trying to figure out what was going on. She was at the stage before I'd even been able to get the ring out, and as I fumbled with it to pull it out of my pocket I got down on one knee. Sticking the final end of the ribbon into the box haphazardly, I held it up to her and asked her if she would mind spending the rest of her life with my. She cried as I put the ring on, but didn't even look at it.
She just put her arms around me, and we stayed like for what seemed like hours, was probably more like minutes, but in either case wasn't near long enough, because right now I'm sitting at a computer desk typing these words onto a screen, and she's in class somewhere, and we won't get to see each other again for probably a couple of weeks. But for that moment she was the only woman on earth, I was the only man on earth, and the planet wasn't any bigger than an amphitheater stage.
People are looking at me kind of odd, but this is Fayetteville afterall, so nobody really gives it much of a thought. I string the ribbon down the sidewalk, then across the street to a bike rack, and then along the back of her building, an all-girls dormitory. Once I'm to the back door, I manage to get in the building behind some girls that are coming in, and they kind of look at me odd. Technically, guys aren't allowed in the girl's dorm without an escort, so one of the girls asked me, "Um, what are you doing in here." I hold my Hobby Lobby bag full of ribbon us as an acceptable explanation and say outloud for the first time, "I'm proposing to my girlfriend tonight."
