My parents, who will use anything as an excuse to see and feed me [huh? - editor/parent], offered to take us out to dinner in honor of Justin’s birthday on that very Friday.  So, we agreed to come to Stamford after work on Friday, go out to dinner with the fam, and leave for the Berkshires early on Saturday morning.  I came to Stamford a bit early to pick up my much anticipated convertible and was on my way to pick up Justin from the train station in time for dinner.  He was pleasantly surprised, although very confused at first, to see his date (me) arrive in style in my black sporty convertible with the top down.  He was feeling very studly in front of all the other losers waiting to get picked-up from the train station as he was getting into the car. 

We drove over to the restaurant, arriving a half hour early, and settled at the bar for a drink.  Life is good, I thought.  We had a lovely chat, in which Justin dropped several hints of things to come (unintentionally) which went right over my head.  I was too caught up in my own satisfaction of planning this awesome birthday weekend to notice anything peculiar.  Shortly, my parents and sister arrived for dinner and that’s where the evening went sour.  Everybody except for my sister and I seemed tense, tired, and for some reason totally uninterested in having a nice dinner conversation.  After a few superficial questions in all directions, there was an awkward silence, which I happily filled by bringing up some current event.  And then another awkward pause, which I filled again, this time with a conversation about the latest movie I saw. And again.  After a while, the dinner turned into a dialogue between my sister and I with 3 mute onlookers.  Having run out of stupid topics to bring up, I was getting really frustrated.  My parents were being so generous in offering to take Justin out for his birthday and he couldn’t bring himself to say a few things to them over dinner.  All I was looking for were a few questions about how they’re doing, nothing difficult.  I’ve never had to work so hard on keeping a conversation flowing between 5 people.  Little did I know… I should’ve known that something strange was going on, but being self-engrossed and eager to jump to conclusions, I put the blame on Justin (naturally).

We woke up early on Saturday. Driving a convertible instantly cheered me up and made all the bad thoughts from the previous night disappear.  We had a nice conversation in the car…improvement from the night before dinner, but still a bit slow and forced.  But who needs to talk while driving a convertible when you can just blast music and CRUISE!  And that’s what I did.

We had a wonderful drive up, and finally found our hotel, The Porches Inn, a very cute and quaint little place.  The accommodations were impeccable and after checking out the room, we were on our way to do some hiking.  Mount Greylock was our first destination before moving on to Jeminy Peak, a bigger and more serious park/hike.  The weather was perfect and Greylock turned out to be sort of our ‘private’ little mountain – we encountered very few people as we began our hike (God was clearly smiling on us that day).  Hiking is a big word which people like me shouldn’t even be allowed to use.  For those of us that forget to work out regularly and are therefore really out of shape, it’s hard to call what we do ‘hiking’.  It’s more like a slow walk up the mountain while moaning, breathing heavily, and complaining about how everything hurts and how out of shape we are, stopping every few minutes to catch a breath and wishing there was a gondola that could take us up to the top and we could just hike down.  So, naturally about half way up, I ran out of steam. I expressed my wishes to start walking down, but Justin insisted on us getting all the way to the top. This happened a few times – he just kept convincing me to keep going and since it was his birthday, I had to abide.  So almost at the very top, I noticed this tree trunk and my butt has never landed on anything more comfortable in my life.  I was really tired, really out of breath, and really sweaty. 

As I was sitting on this thing trying to catch my breath, Justin pointed out the beautiful scenery around us and all of a sudden became really mushy.  Not having a clue where he was going with it, I wondered what has possessed him since this was neither the place nor the time to be mushy.  But before I could even react to this mushiness, I felt something blind me completely and send me into a state of total shock.  At first, when he got down on his knee, I thought he was just tired from the hike and that was his way of resting his legs.  But all of a sudden he had a ring in his hand and I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do.  I think in those situations you’re supposed to say "YES" and get all giggly and girly, but I believe the first words out of my mouth were “are you serious?”, which I repeated a few times as the reality was slowly sinking in.  I guess I hadn’t thought about us getting engaged in concrete terms (it was always a very theoretical notion) and I certainly didn’t expect it to happen on this birthday weekend that I planned or on this particular hike.  Of course as I came to my senses a few moments later (as Justin began to lose color in his face from my weird reaction), I said ‘yes’.  I had always envisioned us being together forever but never thought about how or when we’d get engaged or married. 

Somehow the whole engagement episode gave me a boost of energy because the walk down seemed really fast and easy.  As I began to get used to the idea, I got more and more excited about it.  Basically, Justin hijacked my perfectly planned birthday weekend and turned it into his perfectly planned engagement weekend.  But, as I said earlier, god was smiling on us that weekend because everything just worked out perfectly and we had a wonderful rest of the time there.  Parting with the convertible was difficult upon our return, but the overwhelming feeling of having to share our big news with the rest of the world distracted me from it.

After picking up the ring and emailing Polina and Vlad, Dina’s parents, I took the train from New York to Stamford to ask their permission to marry Dina.  Dina had planned a weekend trip for me in honor of my birthday, which was just two days before, and I knew she was coming to Stamford early to take care of some surprise for me before picking me up at the Stamford train station.  We were having dinner that night with Dina’s parents and sister in honor of my birthday.  

After a nervous train ride, I was picked by Polina at the train station and we drove to a restaurant she had chosen for us to have our chat.  I knew that Dina was going to be in Stamford and I was very nervous to run into her while with her parents.  Unfortunately, Dina’s parents picked a restaurant right on the main street of town and to make matters worse, Dina’s mom couldn’t find it right-a-way.  So we had to walk up and down the street looking for it as I was ducking behind trees every time I saw a green jeep go by. 

We finally found the restaurant and met Vlad there.  We ordered a little food and some wine and I fairly quickly got up the guts to ask the question (it was a point of no return so I figured I might as well). Her parents were really nice and obviously knew what I was going to ask (me calling them the day before to arrange a meeting sort of gave it away).  I am not sure who was more lost about what to do next once I was done asking for their blessing.  We had a bit of an awkward conversation for about an hour before it was time to go. 

Vlad drove me back to the train station where Dina was supposed to pick me up to take me to dinner.  When Dina picked me up at the train station she was in a convertible (the big surprise).  I guess all the stress about looking for the green jeep was useless since I should have been looking for a black convertible.

Dina and I went to the restaurant a little early and sat down for a drink at the bar.  During our conversation, I almost blew it.  I don’t remember what we were talking about, but then I said: “When I was talking to your mom…”  Dina looked at me and asked “What were you talking to my mom about?”  And I said, “YOUR mom, I meant to say MY mom.  I don’t know what I was thinking.”  Thankfully she fell for it and we moved on.  (Notice: by now I have had a few drinks with Dina’s parents and another drink with Dina.) 

When Dina’s parents showed up they did a good job of pretending they hadn’t seen me in a while and we sat down.  After another drink I came really close to saying something stupid, but no one realized, so I decided I should just say as little as possible.  The less I said, the less chance I had of screwing something up.  Dinner after that went OK, or so I thought.

When we got back to Dina’s place I realized she was mad at me so I asked if something was bothering her.  It turns out she was mad at me because she thought that I was rude to her parents by not chatting more at dinner when they took me out for my birthday.  “Great”, I thought, “our engagement is about to begin and I’m already in the dog house.” 

Saturday Morning:

The next morning we got up early to drive up to the Berkshires.  We loaded the car and I put the ring in my pocket so that I would have it when the time felt right and so that I wouldn’t stress about leaving the bags in the car.  We had a great drive in the convertible.  We stopped in Great Barrington and had brunch and then drove the rest of our way to the hotel.  I tried to stay relaxed, but I think Dina felt like I was being unusually quiet. 

The Hike:

After checking in at the hotel, we asked for some suggestions about where we could go for a hike and were told to head towards Mount Greylock (the tallest peak in Massachusetts).  We drove up there, found a place to park and started the hike. My goal was to reach the top and then I would propose.  That definitely seemed like a romantic place to do it.  But, like I said this was the tallest peak in Massachusetts and we were not exactly in great shape.  Dina started suggesting that we head back, but I made her keep going.  Finally, I realized we weren’t going to make it to the top.  So we stopped at a nice spot on the way and when she wasn’t looking I took the ring out of my pocket.  (I should mention that the ring was now just in my hand and not in the nice box that it came with). 

When I proposed (sorry it’s not my style to go into detail – but yes, I did get down on one knee), she was very, very, very surprised.  Her first response was not “Yes”, but “Are you serious?”  After repeating that phrase about 5 times, she was finally able to utter a “Yes”.  Thank god.  Boy, was that a long and nervous few seconds.  If I had had the ring in the nice little blue box it came in, maybe Dina would’ve realized quicker what was going on but I had to keep it in my pocket because the box would’ve been too obvious. 

As we walked back down the mountain, Dina began to realize what just happened.  The reality of it began to sink in as she became more excited and comfortable with the idea.

When we got down the mountain we went and found a quiet place to sit by a reservoir and asked a nice couple take our picture.  We spent the rest of the weekend without telling anyone; we just wanted to enjoy the weekend without having to make all the phone calls.