Proposals

Proposals:

The WSJ would have you believe that people don't propose marriage anymore.

In 1972, on a park bench in Birmingham, Ala., Garner Lee Green's father proposed to her mother. The proposal came out of the blue. She said yes.

"That doesn't happen to people anymore," says Ms. Green, who is 30. And it certainly wasn't the way her husband asked her to marry him several years ago. The two of them talked for a long time about how and when the proposal would happen. "I was ready before he was, so we had to come to a meeting of the minds about a time frame. The negotiations lasted about six months," Ms. Green says.

I don't know about "Ms." Green, who is 30; but since she's talking about something that happened "several years ago," we're planning to celebrate our 11th anniversary this summer. I proposed in just this way:

It was the day before Christmas eve. My girlfriend -- how odd it seems to say that, instead of "my wife"! -- had booked a flight to take her home for Christmas. She was down in Savannah, working on a Master of Fine Arts in painting; she wanted to be with her family over the holidays. They're dead now, both her parents; younger readers, take note. That can happen fast, and her deep wish to be home was wise.

I hadn't been around Atlanta much in several years, but my father was still trekking downtown regularly. I asked him for advice on how to get her to the airport that morning. The advice he gave me sent me into the worst traffic I'd seen in years. We missed her flight by half an hour, easy.

As we were in the traffic, before we reached the airport far too late, she began to panic. I told her, to calm her down, that if we missed the flight I'd just drive her to Indiana. Well, we missed the flight; so I drove her to Indiana.

Her father put me up on the floor of his house, downstairs by the door.



Watch him: he says, "Bei." That means: "Drink."

After he went to bed, she crept downstairs and slept on the floor next to me. That was the night I asked her if she would mind my asking her father's permission to seek her hand. She agreed; and the next morning, he agreed, saying that he'd raised her to make her own decisions.

That was eleven years ago. We were married the next June. I might love another, in the course of my life; but I will never fail to love this one, as long as I live.

The movie Rob Roy says that 'honor is a gift a man gives himself.' That's a lie; honor is something quite different, and it takes a community to give it. Yet romance is a gift that a man gives himself; and he gives it, at the same time, to another. It makes life worth living. Love is not a small thing. It may be the most important thing.