So, Are You Going to Marry Me or What?

This August the HP and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. This June, like every June, has been filled with wedding specials on TV and in magazines and even the newspapers. The constant barrage of wedding crap has prompted me to think back to my own engagement evening, which is unlikely to inspire any TV producer to knock on our door to share the heartwarming tale with America. So, screw the TV producers, I’m going to tell you myself.

We got engaged eleven years ago on the first Sunday in June in Philadelphia, following the CoreStates Bike Race, which is a professional bike race that loops through the city 10 times (I don’t know what it’s called now that CoreStates bank is gone). The HP spent the entire day drinking with his friends in Philadelphia, while I spent the entire day trapped in a car with my brother and sister returning from my cousin’s wedding in Massachusetts (that was the day that my brother taught me the Dr. Seuss game, and when I recover from it, I will tell you about it). We stopped at my grandfather’s house in New Jersey to take a break, and I called the HP at his friend’s house. He was, shall I say, rather tipsy and after a few moments he thought we had been cut off, but he didn’t hang up the phone. I was reduced to yelling his name into the phone as I listened to him carry it around and tell his friends “I’d better keep this with me. She’ll probably call right back.” I finally gave up and headed home, hoping that by the time I got there he would have hung up the phone again.

When we met up in Philly the HP was, shall I say, rather hammered. We hung around with his friends for a while and then as they dozed off or wandered off one by one, we headed back to my part of town to have dinner. We went to an Irish bar down the street from my apartment and ordered dinner, and then the HP popped the question – I think. He did not have a ring on him, but he seemed serious enough, although he was, shall I say, blindly drunk. I said something terribly meaningful and profound like “Um, yes,” at which point he made his way over to the band, grabbed a microphone, and announced to the crowd “I just ashked Shannon to marry me, and she said yes!” Everyone applauded and that was that.

Later I learned that he had shared his plan to propose with one person, his best friend’s girlfriend that no one liked, including his best friend. Over the year’s I have tried to find out why he chose her to confide in (she, needless to say, is no longer within our circle of friends and unavailable for comment). He can’t tell me, but I’ll always cling to the fact that he told her first, so he must have meant to ask me when he did even though at the time he was, shall I say, slosho.

About a week later he came to my apartment with champagne and roses and a ring and proposed the regular way, but it doesn’t stick in my mind the way the first one does. He had gotten ring advice from a woman with gargantuan hands, so the ring was 3 sizes too big. If it had been the big moment, it might have seemed a little sad that the ring didn’t fit. But since the question had already been asked and answered, we were already moving on together, and at that point the ring didn’t matter. (Of course once I got that baby resized, I wore it constantly, until I started injuring the children with it and had to put it away for a while.) Our story is not likely to inspire many imitators, but the HP’s approach must have been an effective tact. Ten years later, you can’t argue with success.

In Search of a Perfect Snow Cone

As I have chronicled before, our little kiddies have become snow cone junkies. They spend a lot of their idle summer hours imagining the next snow cone they are going to have. If we will not be having snow cones at the beach, I have to make the announcement repeatedly well before we leave the house and numerous times on the beach for good measure. If we will be having snow cones at the beach, I have to designate the exact moment that we will be hitting the boardwalk or I will be getting constant inquiries (x 3) regarding when snow cone time will arrive. The snow cones are technically called “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” though I have never been to Hawaii and cannot swear that such things are actually served there. I will say that the shaved ice "snow cone" actually seems like a treat made out of snow, unlike the snow cones of my youth long ago.

In my neighborhood, the ice cream man was actually the “Good Humor” man, and he only sold treats made by the Good Humor company. The worst of these, and the one I ordered with more hope more often than any non-paste-eating child should, was the snow cone. The Good Humor snow cone was actually a hard, tri-colored ice cone that was not only impossible to eat, but not very enjoyable at all. Inevitably, I would slurp all of the flavor from the top of the snow cone, leaving a tasteless chunk of ice that could not be removed or chipped away - the only way to get rid of the ice was to eat it, and eat it I did, hating every non-flavored bite. At a certain point I would attempt to pull the whole block of ice out and hold it in one hand while I drank the flavored juice that had pooled in the bottom of the paper cone. Once I had performed that maneuver a couple times, alternating it with bouts of chomping away at the ice on top, I found myself with a freezing hand, a stained shirt, and a slowly dawning realization that there was simply no way to enjoy the ice cone. At that point I usually dumped it into the trash and vowed not to make the same mistake again. However, every summer, after a few popsicles or chocolate eclairs, I would inevitably return to the ice cone to repeat the same disappointing experience.

Why would I order this “treat” time and time again? I have no idea. My current theory is that the sugar concentration of the flavored part of the ice cone was so high that it worked on my brain like crack or heroin – nothing else in the ice cream truck was strong enough, so even though I would swear off the ice cone, cold turkey, I’d always find myself pining away for that rush again.

The only thing that compared to the ice cone was the slush puppy. Down the street from my poppop’s house was a five and ten that sold slush puppies during the summer, and next to the backyard pool it was the thing I envied most about my cousins who lived there. If I had had regular access to a slush puppy machine, I would likely be sitting here with my shiny new teeth fizzing away in a cup of Polident. And the best part of the slush puppy machine was that it introduced me to the most wonderful artificial flavor ever invented: blue raspberry. I am not sure who named it, but it seems that blue raspberry is available from every place that sells flavored ice. It definitely does not taste like raspberries, but I suppose it could taste like blue raspberries - who really knows? Once again, I think there are drug-like properties involved, because from the moment our kids got a taste of it, blue raspberry became one of their favorites too.

Ironically, I do not enjoy the snow cones that our kiddies love, because they are too sweet. The kiddies offer me a taste every now and then and I usually take it, and then I usually lunge for a bottle of water as I feel my teeth begin to dissolve and sense that my pancreas has thrown itself into overdrive. The HP and his sister swear by the Philly staple “water ice” but I’ve never really enjoyed one of those either (although in typical Philly style they both tell me I’ve never had a good one). For now I’ll have to stick with the one fruit flavored frozen treat that I always enjoy – un margarita, muy grande por favor.