Today I opted out of the nap to make some serious headway on the bedraggled baby blanket I showed you yesterday. After watching my beloved Live! with Kelly, I realized I had an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta on DVR that I'd never seen. It's the one that chronicles Kim's love affair with Kroy. I don't have much faith in the future of that marriage, but seeing Kim's engagement ring got me thinking about my own, and about the day LB proposed.
It's funny when you look back at the catalyst in any big step, and how enormous changes can be brought about by a seemingly random event.
LB and I had been talking about marriage since before I moved out of Los Angeles, but decorum and a sense of too-soonness prevented us from making any steps in this direction before my divorce was final.
I had been living in my little apaprtment at that exact spot where Nob Hill meets the Tenderloin for about six months. By this time I had a long-term temp job at UCSF, which meant I took MUNI from Parnassus Heights to the Civic Center every day to get home from work. The walk to the Civic Center in the morning wasn't bad, but I didn't like the walk home -- especially since it was October and it was dusk by the time I'd arrive home. Each street I crossed on the walk up the hill that is Leavenworth Street took me into safer territory, and I would walk as fast as I could, carrying a lit cigarette: a feeble weapon that I'm sure intimidated no one.
If you've lived in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, then you are no stranger to walking past homeless people. But for reasons I don't know, the homeless in San Francisco are much more aggressive than the homeless in Los Angeles. In L.A., I was never actually touched by a person asking for money. It was an unwritten agreement: You are a small woman walking alone. You probably find me threatening, so I will ask you for cash from a slight distance and you'll hand me a few bills. But in San Francisco, the unspoken monologue ran thusly: You are a small woman walking alone. Therefore I will get right in your face and maybe even grab your shoulder, so that you'll fling bills at me in a rain of terror and guilt.
One evening as I was hustling my way up Leavenworth, a man approached me and demanded that I give him a light for his cigarette. I fumbled in my purse for a book of matches and he said, "No, I want to light my cigarette off yours." I handed him my cigarette and he said, "You've gotta puff on your end or it won't work." This, for starters, is not true, and I was not about to put myself head to head with a complete stranger. He began to shout obscenities at me, for thinking I was too good to help him light his cigarette.
Now he was in front of me, blocking my path up the hill.
"Just take my matches," I said. "Please, leave me alone." I'd taken enough self-defense in high school gym class to know that, "Please, leave me alone," wasn't really the most effective way of ridding oneself of unwanted attention, but that's what came out of my mouth.
Then a miracle happened. A guy on the other side of the street came running over and said, "There you are!" He put his arm around me loosely and said to the man, "You've got some sort of problem, Buddy?" My would-be accoster made a dramatic show of walking away then. Hey, I only wanted to share a cigarette! No harm no foul!
When I got home I was shaken, relieved, and inexplicably angry at LB: LB who lived where Cow Hollow meets Pacific Heights. Those familiar with the geography of San Francisco will know that's a much different kettle of fish than the corner of Pine and Leavenworth.
I made the decision right then that I was moving, and I called LB.
"I thought we were going to wait a few months, then get engaged, move in together..." he said.
I said, "Well, I'm moving now. You can come with me or not." My moving in with LB was not an option. Finding an apartment in San Francisco that allowed dogs was no easy accomplishment, and LB had signed his lease with no idea that a very small dachshund with a very loud bark was going to enter his life.
"What if you have to sign a year lease?" he asked.
"Then I sign a lease." I was more than a little impatient with what I interpreted as reticence on his part, and a reluctance to move up our plans by just a few months. After all, I'd been divorced for days by that point!
"What about what we said about not wanting to move in together until we were ready to get engaged?" LB and I had had many conversations about what it was like to live with someone, and how in our combined experience, it had never taught us anything about the other person that we didn't already know. It was an illusory step on the path to marriage that we planned on skipping, thankyouverymuch.
"That still applies," I said. But then, because I am after all a reasonable person and it wasn't LB's fault that my ex had kept me hanging for 6 years before proposing, I said, "I'd be willing to live with you unengaged for the first 30 days."
LB sighed deeply. I found out much later that after our conversation, LB called my mom in Milwaukee and asked her, Why does Jen want everything yesterday?
I don't know how she responded, but his asking her that was a bit like asking a Piccolo Pete why the tea kettle keeps emitting such a high-pitched screechy noise.
And so, we found an apartment in the Forest Hill area about a week and a half later. We were very excited. We bought sticky-backed paper and lined the shelves. LB submitted all our change of address cards to the post office -- something he would do for us many, many times over the years.
One day after we'd been living in our apartment (our apartment!) about two weeks, we brought Ruthie to the vet on MUNI for her well-dachshund check-up. Against my better judgment, she was given a rabies injection because the vet was convinced it was the combo rabies/coronavirus vaccine that triggered Ruthie's allergies when she got her first series of puppy shots and not the rabies vaccine.
After we got home from the vet, we sat on the living room futon couch and watched Alf while Ruthie pouted and nursed her bruised ego in her Pesty Nesty (a plastic litter-box lined with a well-worn Bucky Badger blanket).
LB said to me, "Do you want some juice?" I mutely held out my hand, engrossed in Alf, and LB handed me a glass of juice. It's noteworthy that the juice glass had a cow on it and was part of a set given to me by my ex's mother, in deference to my Wisonsin roots, at my first bridal shower.
Then LB said, "Do you want to get married?"
I knew we would be engaged by the end of the month, but he still managed to surprise me. I was even more surprised that he had a ring, purchased from a Jamaican street vendor on Market and Powell.
I was very proud of that ring. The following Monday, I went to one of the three hundred and forty seven nail salons on Irving Avenue and got fake nails, to better show it off.
Later that evening after we'd told our families about our engagement, Ruthie finally came out of her little nest, ran around the apartment a few times and broke out in huge, discoid welts. Apparently, the rabies vaccine had sat in a lump in her thigh until she moved around, dispersing it through her bloodstream and causing the delayed allergic reaction.
We called a cab to take her back to the vet, and told the driver it was an emergency. By the time we arrived at the all-night animal clinic, Ruthie was in shock and had lost consciousness. We made it just in time, and after a shot of epinephrine and some prednisone Ruthie was the same pesty little dog as always.
She did have to stay at the clinic overnight for observation, and I remember sitting in the back of the cab with LB, bound for home without the distraction of Ruthie. I was still a little worried, but calm enough to notice my hand in LB's, resting on his lap and sporting its new silver band.
Look at us! I thought. We're weathering storms already!










































