// May 3rd, 2006 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
Around Christmas of last year, Meg mentioned that she would like to be engaged sometime around her birthday, which is May 8th. I mentioned that a number of things would probably have to happen in my life in order for that to happen.
While I was making a decent salary at Macrovision, it was tight with rent, car, student loan and credit card payments. Even with a nice ESPP plan at work, I was finding it difficult to determine when and how I would go about getting engaged.
Spring rolled around and rather than sinking my stock and bonus check into bills or something else, I stowed it away and decided to use that money towards a ring. I had the how figured out, now I just needed to figured out the where and the when.
Since we are both big Cubs fans, Meg had mentioned in passing how great it would be to get married or engaged at Wrigley Field. Since we already had tickets to a number of games for this year, the where had been also been taken care of. However, the when was initially a problem.
We had tickets to opening day. However, with Dan tagging along, I didn’t think that would be the most opportune or romantic time in which to propose. Plus, the frigid weather didn’t help matters.
On a whim, I signed up for a lottery that the Cubs were running for their premium seating (with seats open behind home plate, seats in the new bleacher box section and seats in the bullpen box section up for sale). I was selected and initially thought against trying to get seats due to the prohibitive cost of most of these tickets on the games I would have wanted to go to. For the heck of it, I then checked May 2nd — one of the ‘Value’ dates — for seats and found that they had front-row bullpen box seats for $40 each. On a prime day, these seats ran for $250 a piece!
So I bought the tickets and told Meg to get the day off, May 2nd. With the transaction completed, I finally had the when.
Before Meg’s birthday, she asked me outright if she was going to get engaged by her birthday. Since I knew when I was going to ask her, I didn’t want to give things away so I told her that she wouldn’t be engaged by then but that I was planning it soon afterward.
Fast-forward to this past Sunday: I had already bought the ring and had intended to ask Meg’s parents for permission to marry their daughter. However, Meg was with me at the time and I had little time to do so. I briefly mentioned that I had bought a ring for her when I had sent her out to my car to get something for me. So Monday, while Meg was tutoring, I took another trip out and received their blessing on the engagement.
So yesterday, I asked her to marry me.
I brought a ball with me to the park that I was intending on using as a decoy. My initial plan was to get there early enough so that I could have the ball ’signed’ by one of the players and I would then give the ball to Meg later in the game. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented that from happening. I ducked away to get Meg some cotton candy, and used the opportunity to write ‘Meg, will you marry me?’ on the ball. I then stuck it back in my camera bag for later.
Around the bottom of the 6th inning, I started fumbling around in my camera bag again and asked Meg to hold on to said ball while I was ‘looking for something’. It took a minute or so but she finally looked at the ball and was shocked by what she read on the ball. I then pulled out a ring from the bag and stated that she was my everything and that I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life and asked if she would marry me. She said yes.
About this time, the Pirates had gone 1-2-3 in the top of the 7th and the stretch was about to begin. I opened my tripod bag and unrolled a banner I had created the night before reading “SHE SAID YES!” and held it high for all in our section to see.
In the end the Cubs had been shut out 8-0. But I had won the heart of the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.
After the game, we walked a sort-of victory lap around Wrigley and then walked down Clark street, eventually stopping at Slugger’s to celebrate and kick back with the dueling pianos. We then went to dinner at an Irish Pub further down the street and then headed home after a long, rewarding day; a day, I’ll never forget.
