Our Real Life Fairy Tale

Mindy: It’s snowing heavily in St. Louis on a cold, Thursday morning. I have an eye doctor’s appointment in Timbuktu, Missouri. I had a feeling that my appointment would be cancelled so at noon I go to check my phone for messages. There are two 1-888 calls I missed….. Curiously, I check the messages and its Orbitz informing me of ‘my’ flight status and recent gate changes. Hmmm…interesting. Eric isn’t due to arrive til Friday… maybe he’s going to surprise me… with you know, that surprise.

I tell Kara about the phone messages and leave a message for Eric… Predictably, my eye doctor’s appointment is cancelled. I’m not supposed to be home until later so he can ‘surprise’ me.. crap.. good job, Mindy…. or rather, good job Orbitz. I, of course, can’t focus for the rest of the day at work and am all nervous, anxious and all teary and just being a freaking girl. Then the boss tells us to go home early because of the snow… Crap!!! I’m not supposed to be home til after 6 and I’ve totally ruined the surprise with my smart skills and phone message checking talents. My friend Shanon e-mails me and suggests that I go over to work on her wedding invites together that evening…umm, sorry I can’t, I tell her. My silly boyfriend is going to ‘surprise’ me, I thought to myself.

Oh well, I gotta go home. I stop by Walgreens for an errand and come home and Kara, my roomie, is heading out the door. She tells me that she’s spending the night at chez Kathy’s. We both know what’s going on and she and our friend Kathy have known about the surprise for a while (they were in on it, those buttheads). So to kill time I go and play in the snow with the dogs. I start building snow piles, because a snowman wasn’t happening and then I wrote in the snow I ‘heart’ Eric. Then Simon destroyed it by walking through it…

I wanted to be romantic and felt so bad so I took gardening tools and the pooper scooper (nothing spells romance like turd on a metal stick) and a snow pile and wrote ‘I heart Eric’ out and added some red dye to the heart (no I don’t have a photo, it has all been lost under inches of snow. It also apparently looked like a murder scene and creeped him out a little). I then get the brilliant idea of making a trail from the front of the house to the backyard for him (thinking he would be coming from that direction). I start with something I have a lot of, disposable chopsticks… it then escalates to things we love, a mini converse shoe from my friend Roni, a cat toy, a stuffed iguana that was Coconut’s (my iguana) all lined up from the front of the driveway to the backyard. I go to make a fire out back and wait for Eric, admiring my handiwork when … my back gate creaks open and Eric walks through … sigh …

Eric: I got off the plane in Detroit and checked my voicemail. One of the messages was from Mindy, telling me that she knew I was coming in a day early. It was then that I realized I had not changed the phone number for updates from Orbitz from hers to mine. Awesome. My cover is blown and my element of surprise has gone down the drain. My only consolation was that Mindy did not know for sure that I had a marriage proposal up my sleeve. Then again, I had a feeling I had practically given it away.

For the rest of my trip back to St. Louis I was trying to come up with ideas for a backup plan (aside from feeling rather stupid), because frankly, I did not expect to need a plan B. I thought I would have time to prepare before Mindy returned from her doctor’s appointment but then Kara (my undercover agent) informs me (I was in a cab on the way home) that the appointment was canceled… In the end, I decided to wing it.

I had the taxi driver drop me off in the back so I could sneak in and surprise Mindy. Well, ‘surprise’ is a bit of an overstatement at this point. But anyway… when I went through the back door, she was crouched over the chimnea trying to start a fire. She looked up and gave me this look and I knew I was in trouble. She had wanted me to come through the front and follow a trail leading me to the back. True to this day of comedic errors, I came in through the back gate. After I greeted her with a kiss and a big hug we went inside and I was thinking to myself how I would go about proposing to her now that this day seemed to be beyond repair. I decided to throw her off the track. I even considered putting off proposing for a day or two, but then I knew I would be in deep doo doo in the meantime.

While she was sitting on the couch I walked in the living with my hands behind my back. I had gifts in both hands but neither were the ring. One was a dvd she asked me to bring home and one was coffee for her Keurig machine I had gotten her for Hanukah. After I presented her with both gifts, I could see that she was rather crestfallen and disappointed (and my spidey sense told me I was in mortal danger too). I knew at that point it was the perfect time to pop the question. But of course I forgot to put the ring in my pocket. After making the lame excuse to go shower I quickly placed the ring inside my sweat jacket pouch and went back to her. I went down on one knee and took out the box. In the mean time I saw shock (or was it relief?) and elation on her face…. I took the opportunity to ask her to marry me. She was smiling and teary and blushing. And she said yes. I slip the ring on her finger and (Surprise!) the ring was too big. She took some plastic-knitting-needle-holder-thingy (I don’t speak the jargon) and made a temporary fix so that it fit. It was kind of a MacGyver moment and all is well.

We decided to take some pictures and send them to Mindy’s mom. We had some computer problems and decided to wait on sending the pictures and go out instead. We ended up at a Japanese restaurant and talked about our plans and future. The End.

or not…

Mindy: So we got home and couldn’t get the pictures to upload onto the computer. We planned to email them and have my mom see them when I called her. While messing with the computer we heard a knock at the door. I figured it was someone wanting to shovel our driveway for a quick buck at nine at night and I was definitely not interested. We ignored the knocking at first but then I heard a faint voice calling, “Mindy, it’s Lindsay” That would be my co-worker who lived nearby. Turns out she had locked her keys and phone in her running car. She needed help finding a number for the locksmith as well as borrowing a phone. I wasn’t ready to break the news to her but we wanted to call my mom before she went to bed. So we told Lindsay. Then we called my Mom, told her the good news, and then later my Dad (who was playing chess somewhere). We called a few other people as well. The dude (yes, the preppy one) wanted to talk about our keen preppy clothes and blog layouts… well, that was after he had squealed like a little girl from hearing the news… that was awesome.

It was the end of a crazy day and I needed to get some sleep before work the next day. Meanwhile, as we slept the snow came down. I got up the next day, showered and got ready for work. I felt bad that I was leaving Eric but what is a gal to do… I wanted to tell my co-workers and also I gotta, well, work.

So I get ready while Eric scrapes off the ice and snow from my windshield. I try to back my car up but end up get stuck in the snow. Forget it! The powers that be want me to stay home with my fiancé and I did just that. I called work, told them I was staying home and then I emailed them pictures of my reason of staying.

For all the hilarity of this past day and a half it really was so ‘us’. This is my real life fairy tale. I don’t get a unicorn to ride on; I get a donkey with a peg leg and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We went out this evening and shared the news with some of our friends and had a great time retelling the story. This story is damn long but well, these things happen. We don’t know our plans and that’s just fine. We are going to simply enjoy the moment and I look forward to Eric’s return to St. Louis in May.

Eric, Justin and Brent

Shanon, Kathy, Mindy and Kara