About Me
Elle is wife to her best friend, Lukus, and mommy three feisty kids. An adventurer and wander-luster at heart, hailing from her beloved San Diego, she never expected to be a stay-at-home mom and home-school teacher residing in Oklahoma City, but is learning to embrace those roles with joy, creativity and frequent mental vacations to the beach. Elle met Jesus in her tree-house when she was four years old, where her heart remains to this day. When she grows up, she wants to design cities and win an Oscar for Best Comedy. In the meantime, she finds her Bliss in writing about how her underwear caught on fire. Twice.Search
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Author Archives: gypsymemoirs
Help! There’s a Foreigner in My House! – Awkward Moments with Our Students
I mentioned around Christmas time that we’ve had some students living with us while they attend classes to learn English so they can enter American universities. It’s been such a rewarding experience in so many aspects: our family gets to learn about another culture; we get to share our faith along with our home; it’s a decent financial help; it makes our house feel more like a home in sharing it with others…..I could go on.
However….
Fairly often, there are those awkward moments that arise from 1) Living with college-age boys; 2) Dealing with another culture, their beliefs & customs; 3) Dealing with another culture’s standard of hygiene and manners; and 4) Having a talkative little girl who doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.
Since last July, we have had 3 students live with us, usually 2 at a time. Two of them have been from Saudi Arabia, and the other from South Korea; all young men in their early twenties. And since then, we’ve had our share of awkward moments.
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“You tell him.” “No, YOU tell him. YOU’RE the GUY.” “But you’re better at confronting people than I am.” “Still, on matters of hygiene, I think it’s best that he hears it from you.” “Fine.” Lukus lumbers up the stairs, dreading to tell our first Saudi student that he absolutely MUST take a shower. The odor from his room is creeping down the stairs in an almost visible form, his presence at the dinner table makes me nauseas, and in two weeks’ time, we haven’t heard the shower run once. And yet, Lukus goes for the subtle approach.
“Hey Houssen! Uh, do you have any deodorant? Like this? I’ve got some extra if you need some. Have you figured out how to work the shower knobs? Oh, okay, good. Alright, see ya.”
Two hours pass and the shower hasn’t run, and Houssen comes downstairs, walks out the kitchen door to take a smoke in the backyard. I’m painting our pantry. Houssen comes back inside, adding the smell of cigarettes to his personal odor, and I stop him.
“Hi Houssen. You need to go take a shower. Right now. You stink. You need to take a shower at least 3 times a week, okay?”
Houssen smiles his charming boyish smile and says, “Okay Mom. Thank you.”
The next month, he moves out, saying that he’s moving to Houston to be near friends, but we see him a few weeks later at the school. At least when he accepts our invitation to spend Christmas with us, it’s obvious when he shows up that he showered that morning by his huge, fuzzy Afro.
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“Taytem! Stop that smacking right now. You’ve got better manners than that, but you sound like a dog slurping up his food.”
“Mom, I’m not eating.”
I turn around from doing the dishes to realize that that dreadful slurping is coming from Kun, our Korean student. I choose to believe that his noisy eating habits must be his cultural way of saying that the food is delicious – since he’s never actually verbally complimented my cooking, even after his fourth helping.
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We’re at a Cajun buffet. I’ve looked over Rusul’s plate and only noticed chicken. I go back for a second helping of jambalaya, and he follows me, getting his own helping of jambalaya.
“Oh Rusul, you don’t want to eat that. It has pork in it.” Rusul is a devout Muslim who prays 5 times a day in his room and absolutely does NOT eat pork.
“Really? Really?!”
“Yes, see? There’s pork right there.”
“But I’ve had two helpings!”
He tries to be polite, but he immediately rushes to the bathroom and we spend the next 15 minutes at the table trying not to think about what he’s doing in there.
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In a discussion about politics, the troubles in the Middle East and Jews:
“But Hitler was an evil, evil man,” says Lukus.
Rusul shrugs. He’s not a fan of Jews and doesn’t necessarily agree. We have no idea what to say after this.
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It’s Monday. Lukus is at work and has taken Kun and Rusul to school as usual. So I’m walking around downstairs in my underwear to get some water, singing my tribute to Whitney Houston in my silliest American Idol audition style. I go upstairs to put on some pajama pants and get the girls up. I come downstairs, and almost pee my pants because a shadowy figure is standing in the kitchen and I’m trying to estimate how quickly I can get to the shotgun upstairs. A moment later, I realize it’s Rusul, who stayed home that day. He’s probably heard my Whitney Houston impression, and fortunately, barely missed seeing me in my underwear.
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“Kun! We’re ready to go to the restaurant!” Taytem yells through Kun’s door.
“Okay. I’ll be five minutes,” says Kun.
“Taytem Bjorn!” I whisper/yell frantically. “We were just going as a family! That’s why we ordered pizza for the guys!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Rusul and Kun are ready to go. The pizza arrives, goes straight into the fridge and we have to shell out an extra $30 at the restaurant.
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This is the wonderfully, awkward life of living with foreign college-age guys who don’t speak English very well. And every day, I’m thankful that this is my life. Well, almost every day.
Posted in Blissful Families, Uncategorized
Proof of My Warrior-ness…
…Scary proof. Yup, that’s me, sporting some of my most flattering headgear, if you ask me.
This weekend, my husband and I and a few of our friends, competed in The Warrior Dash, a 3.24 mile trail run with 12 or so obstacles, the slogan of which is “The Craziest Frickin’ Day of Your Life.” Well, I’m not so sure about that part – I am a stay-at-home mom after all, and things get puh-ret-y crazy around here. Maybe if some of the obstacles had included running up some stairs with a two-year-old on your hip while a 5-year-old kept trying to trip you, or a dark tunnel (reminiscent of 3 a.m. in a baby’s room) where you are trying to avoid stepping on open poopy diapers…but all in all, it was definitely a super-fun, challenging, memorable day.
See, I’ve never done anything like this before. Never went to youth camp and done a ropes course. Never been to boot camp. Never participated in a presidential fitness competition. Even rope climbing in my high school P.E. class had been banned. But I do love an adventure, and I figure everyone needs to crawl under barbed wire and hop over some walls every now and then.
So when Lukus told me about The Warrior Dash, I was thrilled. I started training right away, and by “training”, I mean working out so hard on Monday mornings that I was too wiped out to work-out again until the following Monday. But in between work-outs, I made sure to eat a lot of protein – I highly recommend chocolate-peanut butter pretzels. And over all, I completely avoided learning anything about what the obstacles would be, knowing that I function better going into challenges totally blind (child-birthing for example: we quit going to labor classes after one visit and I decided that what would happen would happen and I’d just follow directions. It just works for me.) I was prepared to be unprepared.
Except there was one thing I wasn’t prepared to be unprepared for – my good friend Hannah running with me. See, Hannah’s tough as nails. She’s in great shape and she’s very competitive (in a fun sort of way, not a jerk sort of way). But she was signed up for a later heat than I was. So I was very surprised and kinda nervous when all of a sudden, Hannah ran up to the starting line right next to me, and said she was going to run with me. Oh dear, I knew I could never keep up with her, and I really didn’t want to kill myself trying, so I warned her that she might have to run without me.
When the flames burst to signal “Go!” Hannah shot ahead, and I started at what I like to call a “Zen warm-up pace”. In other words, I’m slow. Oh Lord, I was a hundred yards into the trail and I thought I might keel over. People were passing me at disturbing rates. I was sure they’d all have heart attacks and it would turn out to be a “tortoise versus the hare” victory. Unfortunately, none of them did, and I dispelled the myth that “slow and steady wins the race.” But that’s okay, because all I really cared about was finishing (hopefully NOT last).
I found Hannah cheerfully waiting for me at the first obstacle: 4-foot walls to hop over, intermittent with barbed wire to duck under. Huh, not bad. Next were a bunch of hanging tires to squeeze through. Simple enough. Then came a carpet of tires to knee-high through, followed by wrecked cars covered in mud to climb over. I was still truckin’. A smooth wood wall sloped against the hillside awaited us with a rope to climb up. Fortunately, it wasn’t a very steep incline, so getting up the wall wasn’t a problem. I was starting to feel like this was a little too easy.
But on the other side of that wall came the hills of Turkey Mountain. Steep, rocky climbs that kept climbing and climbing and climbing. Finally, we reached the half-way point which was commemorated with a horizontal cargo net crawl. Then more hills. I’m pretty good at just keeping on putting one foot in front of the other, but even these hills were making my legs feel like they were no longer attached to my body and I was simply dragging them behind me. I began an internal chant of “My legs have to do, what I tell them to do. My legs have to do, what I tell them to do” – part of my zen-ness (so long as you ignore the hyperventilating).
When the trail leveled out, there was a big, dirty pond waiting for us with several logs to somehow get over. Hannah and I got into the chilly water together and discovered that it was quite refreshing after those sweaty climbs. We fumbled around with the slippery, rolling logs, but we did get over them, and my big contribution to Hannah was yelling at her to keep her mouth shut when I noticed her spitting muddy water out of her mouth. It’s all about the teamwork, folks. When we pulled ourselves out, the mud in our tennis shoes felt like cement, and the cold water had tightened my muscles. Immediately, there was a cargo net to climb over and down, and then IT was there: the big rope climb.
The first rope climb wall had been at only a slight slope. But this sheer wall was at about a 45 degree angle with only a rope to pull yourself up with. Anyone who knows me knows that I have the upper body strength of Raggedy Ann, but my legs could probably snap the neck of a horse. Okay, that second part is an exaggeration, but not the first. I managed to get myself up the rope in spite of my slippery, muddy shoes, but the way I was holding the rope, I could not pull myself over the wall. Hannah was already on the other side yelling “You can do it!”, but my hands were slipping. She made it over to me and a very dramatic movie moment ensued: I was gripping the rope with all my might, but my hands were slipping by the inch. Hannah slammed her hand on the wooden beam to show me that I just needed to get my hand there. I got my fingers to that spot, but it wasn’t enough to pull me up. By now, Hannah was yelling, “Take my hand! Take my hand!” and I was shaking my head saying, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” I think I remember people looking at us thinking we were auditioning for some adventure film. But I couldn’t hold on any longer, and I told Hannah I was going down to try again. I held on to the rope and slid the 18 or so feet back down. I got a good running start, made it high enough that Hannah grabbed my hand and flung me to the top of the wall. Oh sweet victory! That’s teamwork for ya: one person flings you over the wall when your strength is out and spares you the humiliation of not completing the race, and you tell the other person to keep their mouth shut so they don’t swallow mud – it was like Band of Brothers out there, I’m tellin’ ya.
Then it was on to a couple more climbs, some barbed wire crawling, and mud pool wading. At last, there were two small fire jumps and the finish line, where Hannah linked her arm with mine and we crossed the line just under 57 minutes. I had finished, I had finished under an hour, I had finished as not the last person, and I had managed to keep my viking helmet on the whole time too. Sweet, muddy victory never tasted so good. Especially since there were bananas at the end.
I must say, I highly recommend attempting something you’ve never done before without preparing for it whatsoever. You might amaze yourself. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it helps to have a friend who can fling you over walls and remind you to keep your mouth shut (even if mud isn’t involved).
Posted in Healthy Bodies
The Instinct
I have a favorite saying that I like to use at home. It can be said in that compassionate mom tone, or it can be said with a bit of self-congratulation, and every now and then, it can be said threateningly.
And I got to say it last night at 4 a.m., “Mama knows. Mama always knows.”
At approximately 4 a.m., Lukus and I awoke to a strange sound Eisley was making in her room. Lukus jumped up, looked at her from the doorway and saw that she was fast asleep, and came back to bed. This was an unsatisfactory investigation to me.
I got up, went into the girl’s room, didn’t see, hear or smell anything unusual. But I went over to Eisley anyway, and though she was sound asleep on her tummy and breathing normally, I risked waking a sleeping baby, and rolled her over.
She was laying in a pool of her own vomit – and lots of it.
Lukus got up to help me clean things up, and we put her back to bed only to have her go through the routine twice more before settling down for the rest of the night. Lukus was surprised that it hadn’t smelled at all, and made a comment about my impressive intuitive skills.
To which I proudly replied while crawling back into bed, “Mama knows. Mama always knows.”
When I was a kid, I was consistently amazed by how my mom always seemed to know everything that concerned me. She knew what every physical ailment needed, whether upset stomach, fever or a sprained ankle. I never once went to the doctor with the exception of when I broke my arm.
She knew that I was faking being asleep to avoid getting a spanking for acting up at church when I was four. Despite my vigilant efforts to pretend to be asleep as they carried me to the car, laid me down in the backseat, and carried me inside, as she put me to bed, she looked right in my face at my stubbornly closed eyes, grinned and said, “I know you’re playing possum. Goodnight.”
Sometimes at night, I would hear my mom in the living room, sitting on the floor by our couch, praying. I never really knew what she was praying about, but I did know that if God was waking her up in the middle of the night to pray, then it wasn’t too far of a long-shot to think He might tell her that my teacher did give me homework that night, or that I had watched a rated-R movie at a friend’s house during a sleep-over. But regardless of how she knew, Mom knew. Mom always knew.
And somehow, she even knew the time when my best friend Rachel and I tried to run away when we were twelve. My parents and I had driven the 1,500 mile trek from California to Texas a dozen times, and I was pretty sure Rach and I could make it on our bikes. We were going to cut all our hair off so we’d look like boys so people wouldn’t mess with us. We had $48 in cash, and even better, a couple pieces of gold jewelry that we could trade for tacos for the journey. Man, we were stupid.
But we were careful to not let anything slip to our parents. So when midnight on Saturday night came, I got up, got dressed in my “boy clothes” (I really did look like a boy when I was twelve), grabbed my stash of food, pocket knives, can opener, cigarette lighter and of course the gold jewelry, and made my way downstairs. I made it out the front door. I got into the apartment complex’s storage room and unlocked my bike. I headed over to the complex’s laundry room where I’d meet up with Rachel. I waited.
And waited. And waited. And waited. Fortunately, I’d had the sense to leave the front door unlocked in case of Plan B. Rachel never showed up, so I simply returned to bed. The next day, there was a cop in our living room lecturing me and Rachel on the dangers of running away from home. He simply smiled as we adamantly denied our plans of running away. But I got the message loud and clear: Mom knew. Mom always knew.
Now that I’m a mom, I’m not as awestruck by my mom’s sixth sense as I used to be. After all, kids really aren’t that complicated. Their faces are pretty easy to read, their actions predictable, their intentions obvious. I’d almost be inclined to simply call it “wisdom” than call it “a gift”, except that moms always seem to know other things too, like when a doctor’s diagnosis is wrong, or when that 8th jump off the diving board just doesn’t feel right, or when a child doesn’t appear to be sick, but they’re lying in their own vomit.
And thankfully, my mom knew when I was ready to stay home alone the first time. I was eight and she needed to run some errands. She felt like I was ready that day. That day, as she was driving, she was hit by a car on the passenger side. My mom was injured, but had I been in the passenger seat like I normally would have been, I would have been crushed. Somehow, she knew I should stay home. So yeah, I guess it is a gift.
My hope is that my kids will grow up thinking what I thought when I was a kid. Not so that they are awestricken by my uncanny insight, but because as parents, we represent the heavenly Father to our children. If thinking that “Mama will find out,” stops them from making a bad choice (like it did for me), that’s great. But what it really did for me was help me to see how aware and how invested God is in me. He knows my thoughts of running away. He knows when I’m playing possum. He knows when I’m lying in my own vomit. And better than the best of moms, He knows how to make it alright – because Father knows. Father always knows.
Posted in Blissful Families
My Flaming Undies & Other Deep Thoughts
The other day, I came across one of my old manuscripts and just had to smile, my “blog” before blogs existed. I had planned since high school to write a book about the more random occurrences in life and what they teach us – like when your underwear catches on fire.
What more fitting of a title for such a book than “My Flaming Undies & Other Deep Thoughts”? I’m glad now that I’ve outgrown my underwear catching on fire and moved on to more sophisticated subjects like public urination in Home Depot by my four-year-old.
But it’s time. If you and I, Dear Reader, are to have any kind of relationship, it’s time you know the underwear story. It’s time you know why they called me “Hot Pants” in my youth group, and not in a sexy sort of way.
Like most 16-year-olds, I was incredibly eager to drive. I was a fiercely independent teenager who loved to drive lonely stretches of the highway with my parents before I was old enough to get my license. I worked three jobs saving up to buy my first love – my own car. The week that I turned 16, I left the California DMV with my license, all shiny and official, not at all feeling like I’d just enrolled in the State’s tracking system for the subservient cattle-masses. I was proud and exhilarated. And ready to go buy a car.
My parents called a family friend who was a used car salesman. He knew all I had was $800, and all my parents wanted was a tank to keep me safe. He obliged. He came to our apartment one afternoon with a beast of a station wagon – primer gray, no hub-caps and with smoke puffing out of the exhaust pipe. It was a minor let-down; all that work I’d been putting in – convincing a clothing store manager to hire me at the illegal working age of 15 instead of 16, riding my bike to my second job at the grocery store bagging groceries until 11 p.m. on school nights, and cleaning houses for several elderly people on social security budgets. I saved 80% of my money, and yet all it could get me was an old, curmudgeon-y elephant of a car.
But I wasn’t too full of pride to turn down the seeming only offer of being able to drive – drive myself to school, drive myself to work, drive myself to youth group and the beach and the mall and wherever else I could get to on my gas budget. And thus, the gray elephant was mine.
I was a safe and skillful driver, so it surprised me one day when a lady cop pulled me over. I was sweating profusely and terrified that my license was about to be revoked, my car impounded and myself put in jail for violating an unbeknownst-to-me law. But it was merely a fix-it ticket that she issued for having a broken brake-light. She said that it needed to be covered in something red – and she left it at that. As soon as I got home, I began rummaging around the house for something red with which to cover the light. I was an industrious girl after all, I didn’t need a mechanic.
Of course, the only red item I found in my entire apartment was a red pair of panties. With three rubber bands and that pair of red panties, I was able to fashion a perfectly acceptable brake-light on a car that wasn’t worth the investment of a real brake-light. I was quite proud of my ingenuity.
So far, I was the only driver amongst all of my friends, so naturally, I became the willing taxi driver for my friends who rightfully dreaded taking the bus. It was Jason on That Day who was riding with me. We went to school and youth group together and he lived nearby, so I often gave him rides home from school. I took Jefferson Avenue, which was a windy, downhill road with fairly heavy traffic – in other words, a street that required a lot of braking.
Jason was the first to notice flames shooting out the back of my car. He yelled and pointed and hollered for me to pull over. With our windows already down, smoke was filling the car and we were terrified that the whole car was going to blow. I swerved into the nearest parking lot and we jumped out of the fiery beast as fast as we could in action-hero style.
And then I heard Jason laughing. Laughing like I’d never seen anyone laugh before: tears streaming down his cheeks and rolling on the pavement – with a pair of red, flaming panties dangling from his fingers. He had immediately discerned my brake-light solution, but still couldn’t believe his eyes. “I thought you were cute, but clearly, you’re smokin’!” he said. All of that braking on Jefferson Avenue had left the brake light on long enough to ignite my underwear.
Even though I could barely stop laughing myself, it wasn’t exactly something I wanted everyone to know, but for the life of me, he wasn’t willing to be sworn to secrecy. For months afterwards, I was known as “Hot Pants” at youth group.
As if that weren’t enough. Apparently, the universe thought me much in need of humbling during my teen years. I was a good girl, I even served my church faithfully, but it wasn’t enough.
I was late for play rehearsal at my church and waiting for our laundry to dry so I could retrieve a clean bra. I grew impatient and grabbed a wet bra from the load, thinking it would dry in time. By the time I got to church, it was still quite damp, and of all the cheap costumes that churches rummage up, mine was a white T-shirt and jeans. I had to have a dry bra.
Everyone was in the sanctuary already, so I snuck through the small lobby with the bright idea that I’d dry my bra in the microwave while hiding out in the nearby bathroom. I set it on high for 2 minutes, sure that would be enough, and took my indecent self to the bathroom.
The cracking and the popping that ensued were shockingly loud. It took me a few moments to figure out what could possibly be making such a noise, and then, it dawned on me: my bra had metal underwire and metal hooks on it! I threw open the bathroom door, ran full-speed to my doom, only to see my bra, much like the panties, dangling from a boy’s fingers. Except it wasn’t any boy, or a friend boy: it was a boy that I’d had a big crush on, a boy that knew I had a crush on him, a boy that did not return crushes on clumsy, awkward girls like me. He grinned as I melted into a pool of shame, and said, “Is this yours?”
“No, of course not! Who would put a bra in the microwave? Ha ha. Ha ha ha,” (arms crossing awkwardly).
At the time, I was utterly humiliated. But I accepted solace in writing out the experience, submitting it to Seventeen magazine, and seeing it published amongst other true horror stories of embarrassment. By then, I was hooked on writing, and honored my Flaming Undies in the title of my primitive manuscripts.
Ever since, Life has been teaching me important lessons through random and embarrassing happenings. Lessons like: “Learn to laugh at yourself before anyone else does”, “Stories to tell later are worth what it took to get them” and “If you ever put your bra in the microwave, make sure and push “stop” at 47 seconds, because at 48 seconds, all hell breaks loose.”
Posted in Gypsy Souls
Ch. 21 – Season Finale: Always Shower Before You’re Proposed To
Tall, blonde and handsome and I just celebrated our nine year anniversary last week, and after nine years, I still don’t think I’ve ever heard a better proposal story. No offense. I’m sure your proposal was very romantic and had you weak in the knees, but mine is still my favorite (in spite of the fact that it has to be my favorite).
The only thing I would change about it is that I would have showered at least two days before hand. But live and learn right? If you and your boyfriend have been talking for over a year about getting married, it’s probably not a bad idea to make sure and shower every day, you know, just in case…
But junior year winter finals were brutal: I was taking 18.5 hours of my toughest classes, working 30 hours a week, and still writing and editing for the school paper. I’d had three all-nighters in a row, and was surviving entirely off of the ramen noodles that my amazing roommate Mandy would heat up for me in our coffee-maker. She and I had hardly gotten to spend any time together that whole semester, so we promised that as soon as our last final was over, and before we headed off for Christmas break, we’d have a roommate date.
My Spanish 4 final was intense, but thank God! it was the last one of the semester! I walked back to my room after the 7 am final, collapsed on my bed, and slept for twelve hours straight. I awoke to the first snowfall of the season fluttering down outside the window and Mandy rummaging frantically around in the room. I got up, ready for us to have our girl’s night roommate date. But she walked right out of the room! A few minutes later, she returned, and I began to playfully guilt her into having our roommate date. She was acting very strange and said she wasn’t going to be able to hang-out that night. Mandy was a popular girl and I knew she’d have a lot of friends bugging her to hang-out one last night before break. But she wasn’t one to squelch on a friend, so I feigned woundedness, knowing I could convince her to stay. But she was insistent.
Moments later, there was a knock on our door. It was Carrie, a dorm-mate from down the hall. She said she had a Christmas candle her dad had sent her (big whoop) and she really wanted to show it to us (candles in the dorms were against the rules as a fire hazard). I jokingly slammed the door on Carrie, telling her we were having a roommate date, but Mandy suddenly jumped up, ready to go see some silly candle. Now I was feeling a little more genuinely wounded. Mandy didn’t have time for our girl’s night, but she had time to go to Carrie’s room to look at a candle?! The nerve!
Mandy started out the door, but I grabbed her by the arm, playfully playing hostage as I commanded her to stay for girl’s night. Carrie began pulling both me and Mandy out the door with her. With silliness fueled by total exhaustion, we wrestled down the hall until Mandy finally got me under my arms and quite literally dragged me, kicking and screaming, down the hall as she laughed at me all the way to Carrie’s room.
There was no Christmas candle.
There were two rows of candles. And rose petals. From the doorway leading to Carrie’s third floor balcony to the outside. There was a song playing in the room, Love Songs, by Fleming and John. Carrie had her video camera poised on me as Mandy told me to follow the path of candles. I was completely disoriented, and had no comprehension for what they could possibly be up to.
That is…until I stepped out onto the balcony and down below…..was Lukus – guitar, amp and microphone next to him with a crowd of people standing behind him.
I was suddenly incredibly self-conscious about my messy hair and smudged up make-up from having just woken up from my nap-a-thon. I wanted to freeze everyone else in the moment, run and take a shower, put on my favorite brown sweater and skirt, and emerge fresh and prepared for what I hoped was coming. But Lukus started to play his guitar….
This was my shy Lukus, the same Lukus that wouldn’t look up at me to meet me two and a half years prior, the same Lukus who wouldn’t acknowledge me in any of his classes until the semester was half over, the same Lukus that had been afraid to ask me out, then to kiss me, was now, in front of a crowd of about 40 people right next to main entrance to the dorms, singing me a song he’d written for this moment.
I can’t help but love you, I was born this way I swear, True love burns with an intensity, too much for me alone to bear….
I stood in shock from the balcony as Mandy and Carrie simultaneously giggled and cried. Lukus sang from his heart the lyrics he’d written just for me, with snowflakes gently falling, and the whole world (or what seemed like it) watching our story unfold.
And then I screwed it up.
Lukus came to a pause in his song. It seemed like he’d forgotten the words, and I knew he was already really stretching his comfort zone. And I was so anxious and nervous and wanting him to hurry up and get to the point, that in my loud-mouthed stupidity, I yelled “YES!!!”
Lukus chuckled and said, “Wait, let me finish the song.” That was me, always trying to rush things, control things, have things go my way. And that was Lukus, always slowing me down and getting me to think first with my brain instead of with my mouth.
He tried to start again, but couldn’t find his place, and simply said, “Aw, forget it! Will you marry me?!” As if he didn’t already have his answer. But I gave my second, “YES!!!” The crowd cheered and Lukus smiled that beautiful dimpled smile, and I took off sprinting back down the halls.
With Carrie and Mandy in my wake and trying to keep up with the video camera, I flew down the stairwells without caution or a coherent thought in my head. Carrie and Mandy raced behind, attempting to get the exciting footage without throwing up from spinning down three of the longest flights of stairs I’ve ever known.
Once down the stairs, we raced down the hall full-speed, leaving student victims and their baskets of laundry strewn behind us. We reached “The Fish Bowl”, the converging foyer of the four dorms, where Lukus and the massive crowd stood waiting. I ran to him and jumped straight into his big, strong arms to kiss him while shouts, applause, cheers and “aw’s” reverberated throughout the room.
After an embarrassingly long kiss, he knelt down and slipped the ring onto my finger, and once again, we were surrounded with applause. Carrie stood by taking interviews from the crowd with her camera. We stood staring at each other when one of Lukus’ friends walked up and said, “Are you the guy that just proposed in front of the whole school? Dude!” and gave him a congratulatory hug. Within five minutes, we were the talk of the school, though we managed to slip away from the crowd to go celebrate over dinner. All night, we overheard fellow students recounting “some guy just proposed to his girlfriend in front of the whole school!” from the adjacent booths as we anonymously ate our cake and grinned knowingly.
Fast forward almost a year later, and we were married during our senior year of college. In spite of the horrible case of the flu and the worst rotten gas I’ve ever had that I got during our doomed honeymoon, in spite of the 749 fights we’ve had since over our ridiculous pride, in spite of all of our mistakes, inadequacies, stupid decisions and extra pounds we’ve put on, we enjoyed our nine year anniversary last week even more than the night of the best engagement ever.
It helps that I showered for our date this time.
Posted in The Rockstar and The Gypsy
