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She Said Yes
It’s true — June and I are engaged! How did that come to be, you ask?
The Setup
Due diligence  noun)
Research; analysis; your homework. Recently I learned that all
women have fantasy proposal scenarios. (This was news to me, as
men have totally different fantasies.) So I polled her close
friends and learned hers:
- to walk down a path lit by paper-bag luminarias,
- to stop at a gazebo with music playing,
- to dance with the man of her dreams,
- and then have him propose.
I googled like crazy and found a
gazebo in a remote park between Chicago and my hometown of South Bend,
Indiana. Since we were flying out to meet with my parents this
weekend already, I planned to have us stop by the park on the way to
the Windy City. The go-to guy was my brother Rich,
who recruited a friend and drove out from Chicago to set everything up
just before our arrival. This, after weeks of long emails,
phone calls, supplies procurement, PowerPoint diagrams, and satellite
imagery:
The Proposal
On Friday night we flew into Chicago
and drove two hours to my parents. On Saturday (my
birthday!), we had a pretty chill day and then left
right after dinner. I had told June I wanted to see this
park, so she wouldn’t be suspicious that we were leaving our planned
route. As we pulled off the highway to enter Valparaiso, Indiana,
June asked, “Where are we? Where is this place?” It didn’t
help that we saw signs like “BAIT SHOP” and “BROASTED CHICKEN” along
the way. I said I had just found this place on the internet, and
they had a cool Japanese garden (true), and I hoped it wasn’t a bunch
of shirtless fat guys sitting outside their mobile homes.
Meanwhile, I was just praying and trusting that Rich had delivered the
goods. We got to the park site just after sunset, and I took her
hand and walked towards this scene:
June said, “Wow, it looks like someone
set up something really nice here.” She didn’t realize until we
were entering the gazebo that it was set up for her. Then we
danced (swayed), I took out the ring and did the one-knee proposal, put
the ring on her, and then took pictures.
My personal touch: handcrafting and customizing the luminarias with pictures of our dating life (with crafting help from Jen and Bryan)
God’s personal touch: fireflies started lighting up immediately after the proposal (June’s first time seeing them)
The Ring (warning: not a lighthearted feel-good section)
June and I had long discussions about the social justice issue of conflict diamonds, which basically goes:
- Although the world has plentiful supplies of gem-grade diamonds,
the DeBeers monopoly hoards them and keeps prices artificially
inflated.
- These high diamond prices entice African warlords to mine diamonds as a source of income.
- To conscript labor for mining diamonds, warlords use intimidation tactics (rape and torture) to enslave entire villages.
- Slave laborers strip-mine the land, polluting water sources
and promoting an increased population of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
- This results in the bitter irony that a symbol of love and
commitment may have been crafted under brutal and ugly circumstances.
Why hasn’t this resulted in more of a
public outcry and boycott? The answer is that the major
humanitarian and Christian organizations (Amnesty, OxFam, and
WorldVision) have decided that the threat of a boycott rather
than an outright embargo can be effectively used to pressure DeBeers
into better regulation of diamond sources. DeBeers certainly
doesn’t want diamonds to take on the stigma of fur. In addition,
legitimate diamond mining provides a needed source of export income for
some of these poor countries.
My personal belief is that the diamond
industry should fall. We have the technology to create gem-grade
clear stones indistinguishable from diamonds. Diamond miners
working in poor countries should be given a system that promotes a
healthier and more fulfilling form of employment. Since June
herself spent time serving the poor in Sierra Leone (one of the
countries involved in conflict diamonds), I couldn’t give her a diamond
that could have originated from slave labor there.
With that in mind, and knowing that
blue was her favorite color, I went shopping for sapphires. I
soon found that I didn’t like the look of most blue sapphires.
Then I remembered a stone from my early gemstone-collecting days; it
was a black star diopside which gives off a 4-point star under point-source illumination. I had recently been exposed to star rubies again, using them to make Goblin Jumper Cables XL
and other engineering items in World of Warcraft. Since rubies
and sapphires are both made of corundum, I figured that star sapphires
must also exist. Indeed they did, but most jewelers did not stock
such an unusual stone — they were special-order only. I designed
the ring and took the blueprint to a jeweler that carried Moissanite (a man-made clear stone). Yes, they could order the star sapphire. And finally, the design and finished product:
 
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