I picked up the wifely friend's wedding ring a few days ago from our dubious jeweler. I'll call him Mo (because that's his real name). He's a giant Persian guy who is clearly on a large variety of drugs. We are trusting him for reasons that are unclear even to us to recast a significant amount of platinum into the right size for the wifely friend's dainty finger. The ring has never fit just right in our three years of marriage.

The last time I saw him, he was putting tiny slivers of sapphire into a water-fountain night-light. As he tried to pick up the little jewels, his hand was shaking like it was possessed by Pzuzu and engaged in a little ecstatic dancing. He glanced up at me and his eyes looked like the Man From Atlantis, or at least The Man Who Has Either Been Swimming in a Hyperchlorinated Pool or Has Smoked Large Amount of Pot.

Also, putting sapphires into an intrinsically worthless piece of plastic like a night-light is something that would only occur to somebody who's really, really high.

"Oh wow, man. I just thought of something. What if we took the goo out of a Renuzit air freshener and filled it with 12 year old Scotch?"

That sort of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking it might be fun to ask my wife to marry me several times throughout the course of the day, in really inappropriate places. Like waiting in line at the Subway, at the bus stop or at Hot Dog on a Stick. Maybe stroll into her work with a big bunch of those crappy tinfoil balloons you see at the grocery store checkout stand and a silk rose and loudly proclaim that I want to make an honest woman of her.

As it turned out, I decided not embarrass her in this fashion, as I am embarrassing enough to her in your garden variety ways. I just got down on one knee on our patio and said "You know I love you, right?", causing just the right amount of panic in her eyes as she thought "Oh no, you've killed someone/slept with an animal/broken my precious cat with wings sculpture," and then slipped the ring on her finger.

In the moment of doing that I realized a couple of things.

One, I will never again get that heartsickeningly worried moment of "Will she say yes?"

Two, that it is important to ask her to marry me every couple of years, just to keep her on her toes.

It's so romantic, it might make her forget that I did, in fact, break her "cat with wings" sculpture.