Kallen visits NYC for the first time and they experience their first Mardi Gras

Spring rolls around. Of course, how could one forget our engagement. I was stressed for months because I couldn’t settle on a ring. Kallen’s taste is so excellent, of course, that it was hard to find a ring worthy of such refined craftsmanship. Eventually, I managed to find the perfect one (with a push to “just buy it!” from one of Kallen’s lovely bridesmaids) and began planning. Little did Kallen know, or too little faith did she have in both her friends and me, at keeping a good secret.

Here is the story. I had originally planned to propose on top of the first bar Kallen and I had gone to when we first traveled to Oxford together for Junior Preview day, which was the Coup. The problem was- I could control secrets, I could keep things under wraps, I could plan a good party. What I could not do, however, was control the weather (to my own dismay). It was disgusting outside. Our friend Xenia (who is also a wonderful professional photographer) and I were debating moving the proposal to the covered balcony of Boure, but it looked like the weather was going to clear. As a result, we moved it back to the original outdoor bar. The weather, however, had other plans.

The game plan was as follows: I convinced Kallen that all of her friends were going out of town and the two of them were going to get dinner with his parents that night. Kallen’s friends did a spectacular job of selling that they were gone, going as far as to make up entire elaborate stories to make it seem like it was impossible they were in Oxford. Nice. Ask Abby about that. I had previously set up a groupchat with ~70 people and would always send warning messages to tell people to hide their phones before sending any details and swore everyone to absolute secrecy. Check. Kallen’s parents and my parents worked to gather old pictures, get custom napkins and more for the party. The day of the proposal, they all snuck up to Oxford together. Perfect. Everything was perfectly set, and 70 people awaited Kallen and I’s arrival.

Remember now the weather. Kallen did not wait nearly 8 years to be proposed to in the near rain and gloomy skies to only then go to dinner with no friends and no family in town. And I knew that, but she didn’t seem to know that I knew that. Kallen and I sat inside the indoor area of the bar for nearly fifteen minutes while I struggled to convince Kallen to go outside. I tried classic lines such as “wow… I mean it looks kind of nice out there, right?” and “I don’t know, aren’t you kind of hot in here? We should go on the balcony” Needless to say, Kallen wasn’t born yesterday so she wasn’t buying it. She told me later that she had spent an hour doing her hair and thought I would be proposing at dinner, so she did not want the humidity to mess it up before then. She was wrong, though. Eventually I got her outside just as Xenia was peeking out her head to see what was going on. Kallen, apparently forgetting that Xenia is also a photographer, exclaimed “Xenia! What are you doing here?!” before realizing what was happening. It was a lovely moment, despite the prelude: I had finally done it.