The Best Day Of My Life (So Far)

I'm almost always up in the morning before Rachel. I muddle around trying to be quiet and trying to predict when Rachel will get up so I can have coffee hot and ready to go. It's a small ritual but it's important to me. It's part of our history. Before we lived together, Rachel would stay over on the weekends (she lived in San Mateo and I lived in Berkeley) and I'd get up and lumber out for a short walk in the mornings, returning with a couple of low fat lattes and some kind of delicious pastry or fruit or both. When we first moved in to our new place, our neighbors' orange tree was in full bloom and in our yard. The oranges were hard and dry and didn't have a lot of juice so I'd go out and pick as many as I could and then try to juice as many as I could before Rachel would wake. Getting up first and doing small things for her is one of the main ways I feel like I am able to do something special for my sweetheart.

Sunday, I was up first. I thought about making some coffee and scrambling some eggs and seeing if I couldn't 'salad' the odd assortment of fruit on top of the (eye-melting, DNA-unraveling, atomic-polarity-reversing) microwave. Too sleepy. Our extremely modest alcohol intake the night before had left my no-longer-young body feeling extra no longer young. "Sigh." I thought. I decided that the only reasonable solution would be to walk over to Fellini to get a couple of LOLs (that's what they write on the cup for a low fat latte) and some pastries. But then I thought another thought "I bet I could do this on my bike."

This was, ultimately, a misguided thought. I had assumed, perhaps unreasonably, that gravity on the surface of the Earth, as we perceive it, is basically constant. I did not realize there was caveat to this law, 'except in the interior of a bicycle basket'. I rode over to Fellini's and ordered two coffees and three pastries, a cinnamon breakfast bun, a chocolate croissant, and an apple turnover. I placed the two coffees into laterally opposite corners of the bike basket and bolstered their upright integrity with the placement of the pastries surrounding them. I then walked the bike out of the rough parking lot the street, mounted it, and began to pedal. I learned a lot about the physics of objects inside of a zero-G bike basket during those first few pedal strokes.

One coffee, after ushering up a small geyser of latte foam, flopped over onto its back and began burbling it's coffee contents all over the pastries. I continued riding and reached into the basket to grab this coffee so I could ride with it in my hand. "Problem solved", thought I, and it was for almost the entire ride home. Upon reaching the slight downhill to get to my house, the second coffee, I kid you not, leaped into the air, did a complete end-over-end revolution, landed, flopped over and started to pour coffee onto the bike wheel which in turn sprayed it all over the place. "Sigh." I thought again.

I got the coffee safely home, the pastry cut into easily shared slices and laid out on a cutting board, I began the wait for Rachel to get up game. I knew the day was special. I knew why. She didn't know. This made time seem to move very, very slowly. I watched some news. KRON 4 Weekend News is the funniest thing on television, I'm convinced. I ate most of the pastries and drank all of my coffee. Rachel's was getting cold so I risked revealing the specialness of the day by doing something I had never done before, breakfast in bed. I opened the door tentatively to find Rachel fully awake and jabbing away contentedly at her iPhone. She was surprised but my hand had not been tipped. She decided the idea of flaky pastries in bed was not so great and came downstairs.

I expected I'd get more and more anxious as the day went on. After all, I kind of have, you know, anxiety issues. But I didn't. I wasn't. At all. I expected to be freaking out all day and to have trouble sleeping the night before. Nope and nope. Whenever I thought about what I was going to be doing in just a couple of hours, calm and peace and ethereal joy flowed through my self. I was loving letting the day just unfold all on its own.

Cool as a penguin

As the morning warmed and the clouds burned off, it looked like it was going to be an absolutely perfect day... in Berkeley. But what would it be like in SF? Foggy? Raining? No. Also perfect. The only moment of panic came as I drove out towards the city and Rachel checked the traffic. Traffic all around the park was starting to be yellow and red and that's when I remembered that Hardly Strictly Bluegrass would be going for its final day. I panicked a little and started making back up plans in my head in case we could not get anywhere near the Academy of Sciences. Twin Peaks! I'd never been to Twin Peaks but it's a thing. A bay area thing. Battery Spencer! Couldn't ask for a better view than the view from Battery Spencer! As we got closer it became obvious that it was just normal traffic and as soon as we hit the park we were fine and cruised right into the garage.

We arrived right at 11am, when the Academy opens to the general public. We got in line and reminisced about our second date, commenting on how much the prices have gone up in two short years. We laughed at how they try to take a picture of you in front of a green screen and how awkward that was for us on our second date there. This time I knew we'd be stopping and posing and I knew I'd be buying the cheesy picture.

We rushed over to the planetarium to get passes to a show but they were seating a show right then so we just rushed into the theater and grabbed a seat. The new show with Jodie Foster is a lot less motion-sickness-inducing than the old one with Whoopi Goldberg and I love that they update the shows frequently to try to keep up with the epic pace of discovery in this new age of telescope badassness.

The planetarium show exits on the third floor and walks you right by the stairway to go up to the living roof, where I was planning on proposing. It was kind of a joke that I was going to propose up there. I'd been super excited to see it on my first visit and when we got up there, well, there wasn't much to see. Obviously, I guess, it was just a lot of low plants on an oddly shaped roof. The living roof, on my initial visit, had been kind of a let down. This would not be true of our second visit. Now, I'd planned to do it later in our day, after lunch, right before we were going to leave. But we were right there. Too crowded. I didn't want to do it when it was so crowded. No problem, Rachel had to wait in the line for the ladies restroom. In the time that took, pretty much everyone had cleared off of the third floor except women still in the restroom line. "Hey" I said, "Want to check out the living roof real quick? We're right here, after all."

We walked up the stairs and this time didn't focus on the roof but on the incredible view. The day was breezy and cool and the sky was bright blue. Fog still scoured the hilly sections of the Richmond district near the beaches. We leaned against the railing looking out over the DeYoung and smiling at each other. "Hey" I said, "Want to hear a poem I wrote?". "Uhhh, okay." "Well, I guess I don't have to read it." "That's okay, I want to hear it." (Quotes may not be direct but they are pretty close.)

"It's called, A Modest Proposal but it's not about eating babies.

A Modest Proposal

I propose this to you now, my love
That I should have your hand
That you and I should marry
That I should be your man

As a man I kneel before you (here's where I got down on one knee, the left one)
As a man I give my heart
As a man I offer you forever
Or maybe just the start...

For we can not know forever
Can not fathom eternity
I need not ask that much from you
A lifetime's enough for me

So stand by me for a lifetime
And I promise this much is true
I'll show you for a lifetime
That my heart belongs to you

And let me stand by your side
For I could not bear to know
That I had felt a love like yours
And I had let it go

Rachel Louise Gold, will you marry me?"

"Yes!" She was crying a bit by this point but she definitely said yes and I'm pretty sure I said thank you. "I have something to go along with this" I said and pulled the ring box from my bag, took the ring from the box and put it on her finger; a perfect fit. The rooftop wasn't crowded. There were maybe 15 other people up there. I looked around to see reactions and no one was. No one had paid us any attention at all. I'd gotten down on one knee in public, read a poem and proposed to my future wife and no one batted an eye. Ahhhh the Bay Area, where studied ignorance of the unusual is part of the social contract. We hugged and kissed and declared our love for each other but then Rachel had to get down to the business of informing best friends and all of Facebook. It was tough. Thanks to Hardly Strictly, we were experiencing massive cell network lag.

Warming in the sun of the Indian Summer, listening to the squeals and congratulations coming through Rachel's phone, I felt good. I felt amazing. I felt different. The only anxiety or panic I'd felt had been right at the moment before I asked if she wanted to hear my poem. After that, it was all crystal clear and calm. It was so easy because it was so right. I knew exactly what I wanted and all I'd had to do was ask. We locked hands together and started back downstairs to see the aquarium exhibits. Walking down the stairs, I knew what was different. We were a unit now. Sure, we still have to get married to make it official official but we'd promised each other a preliminary vow of one lifetime and we were allied, bonded, complicit. It wasn't us against the world exactly. It was us and the rest of the world.

A lot of other stuff happened that day. We ate lunch. We saw a great play, Phaedra by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Playhouse (side note: A great play everyone should see but maybe not the best play to see on the day of your engagement, wedding, etc...). We made soup and watched Boardwalk Empire. Rachel made more calls and received more congratulations. I decided to make my calls the next day, my Mom was probably already asleep anyway. Writing it now, it seems like an anti-climactic end to a climactic day. It didn't feel that way, though. It just felt right.

Update: I'm told and now recall that the conversation before the proposal was more along the lines of this:
"Hey, want to hear a poem I wrote?"
"Sure!"
"Uhhh... you do?!"
"Yeah, why not? You don't have to read it."
"Oh no, I want to read it... okay, here goes..."
So, for the sake of correcting history and my admittedly poor memory making skills, Rachel was actually enthusiastic to hear my poem.