A Different Perspective

As a housemate of my friend David, I've had the joy of seeing his grand plan unfold. Now the stage is set, every piece is in place, and in just a few days he will take to one knee to propose to Chrissa.

Having come so far toward making his dream a reality, with many thanks to you, I wanted to offer you a glance from my perspective on David's "perfect proposal."

It was only a few weeks ago that David sat in the kitchen of our house pondering what seemed like the great divide between his dream and financial reality. I'm sure all too many of us have been in the same situation. Yet one look at the wicked smile on David's face told you everything; this was a challenge. What he needed were ideas.

To be precise, what he needed were good ideas. After all, a house full of guys rarely lacks harebrained schemes. And so it was that idea after idea was tossed out, and one after the other fell under a hail of withering laughter. Until one came up that, well, seemed just crazy enough to work.

That idea, as you may have guessed, was to actually ask all of you for your help in making his perfect proposal a reality. There was a simple brilliance to the notion of just standing in front of a Metro stop to ask for help to make the proposal possible, or to put David's bicycle knowledge to work by offering simple tune-ups at our house. In fact, it wasn't just brilliant; it was quite apt. I've never been in the situation of asking a girl to marry me, but I would imagine it's one of the most humbling and exciting time's of your life. You're putting yourself out there, almost falling forward into the arms of someone that you trust will catch you right then with a "yes." In much the same way, David would be opening himself up to either acceptance or rejection, except now to hundreds of strangers!

It wasn't but a few days later that David came home with a pan, a camera, $50 and the widest grin I've ever seen. After three hours of asking Metro riders for their spare change or simply a glance in his direction, he was one step closer to being a happily engaged man. Without a doubt, it had been hard. For every twenty passers-by, one stopped to help. But that one, oh, that's the one he lived for. One man came up, heartily shook his hand, and regaled him with stories of his own recent engagement. Another wagged his finger in David's direction, telling him that wedding bells bore ill omens. David took that one in stride.

Next up were the tune-ups. In no time at all, our living room was transformed into a bike repair shop. From all over the neighborhood, people brought their bikes to David. And every night I came home, there was David, arms-deep in bike grease. Through it all I saw shirtless David, shirtless with an apron David, lumberjack David, mechanic David; the looks changed, but the grease remained.

Every night there was someone new hanging at our house to get their bike fixed. So many new faces to meet, and most of them worn by neighbors we had never met. This too was apt in its own way. David was preparing himself for a life lived in community after all, with a wife, a family, a neighborhood. What better way to live that out than to make those around him a part of his engagement? And really, it was the people that he met that gave him the greatest joy. I would ask him most nights what had gone on in his day, and without fail he would tell the story of the latest person to drop by the house for a tune-up.

And so it is that the last bike has come through the house and David is packing his bags for what is shaping up to be one of the biggest weekends of his life. Of course, the story doesn't end here. The best one is yet to come...