Atomic mushrooms

Why aren’t you here yet!?" my mom howled into the cell phone, "You’re going to miss the sunset!"

"Mom, don’t stress me anymore!" I howled back while I stood against the coconut tree, feigning a bladder break. "I’ve had 32 years of this stress! First, you tell me to delay and then now you’re telling me to rush!" I fumbled with my pants zipper, hoping the carabaos grazing nearby would not take any prurient interest in me.

"And stop calling my phone! This is the third time I’ve gone to the banyo just so that I can talk to you! She’s starting to think I have a urinary tract infection!" I darted back towards the car before a bolo-wielding farmer came after me for illegally irrigating his tree.

"Who was that again?" she asked while dabbing some face powder on her nose.

"That was," I coughed, "the wedding coordinator. She was asking if we were near Tagaytay already. The reception might start and we might not get there on time."

"Well, we would be there by now if you hadn’t gone to the banyo three times." She folded her arms and smiled to one side of their face. "And why does she need you to be there on time? Do you have to do anything for the reception?"

I sighed, slumped back into my seat and wiped the clamminess from my hands onto my shirt. "Don’t worry love, we’re almost there." I said. I took her hand and gently squeezed it. "I hope she doesn’t get suspicious." I thought.

This day had to be perfect. No military blockades would stop me from getting to my destination. No heart-stopping revelations on The Buzz would keep my friends from joining us for the occasion. Not even an exploding Taal Volcano spewing magma across the Tagaytay mountainside would prevent me from making this day anything less than sublime.

After all, this was going to be our engagement day. And she had absolutely no clue.

On our way from a party the night before, she even cautioned me, "Love, when you talk to my dad about getting married, remember that you are not asking his permission, OK? You are only asking for his blessing! Please don’t give him a chance to say no!"

"Yes, love." I meekly replied, trying to suppress a smile.

"Don’t mock me!" she raised her index finger and waved it at me. "Remember what happened to my sister? He made her husband wait for three years until he finally gave her permission to marry! And that’s only because my sister had him gagged and bound until he said yes! Do you want that to happen to you?" she pursed her lips while waving her finger perilously close to my face. Whenever she recounts this story to me, I always feel my testicles gradually retract to the pit of my stomach.

"And, love, when you ask him," she cooed, "Don’t forget to wear bullet-proof clothing."

Unknown to her, I had already spoken to her father three days earlier. Initially, I thought that this encounter with her dad would be as close as getting a heart attack in one’s early 30s. "Be a man, dammit!" I said to myself while dragging my feet towards the gate of their house. Before I rang their doorbell, I crossed myself and looked back one last time at the passenger in my car. "Don’t come down anymore, yaya. I think I can do this by myself."

However, unlike my imagined scenario that would have involved sharp objects and medieval torture devices, my encounter with her father was rather pleasant and relatively pain-free. Despite her stories, I have always known her dad to be a quiet man, a gentle man, a strong man, a man who would not hesitate to lift me up gently from the floor by my windpipe and mumble in his raspy Darth Vader voice, "How dare you take away my only unmarried daughter!?"

But it didn’t happen that way at all. His voice hardly sounded like Darth Vader’s. After several urine and lie detector tests, her dad finally un-cuffed me and let me leave their house. While driving home, I breathed a sigh of relief as my testicles dislodged from my throat and returned to their rightful place.



But after her dad’s NBI-sanctioned approval process came a task more daunting than credible elections: the one-of-a-kind marriage proposal.

I recall a telephone conversation with one of my best friends to whom I first confided my marriage plans. Although I confess that I couldn’t really understand him clearly because his voice sounded muffled. I think it was because he was hiding in the closet while his wife was screaming his name to give her a pedicure.

"RJ," he whispered, "Marriage has its ups and downs. And the best way to deal with the downs is with anti-inflammatory medication. But when you’ve screwed up really bad, the best thing that you can give her is the memory of a great engagement."

That was easy for him to say. After all, this was the guy who whisked away his then-girlfriend of one month to an all-expense-paid Parisian rendezvous and proposed to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Damn him. And if that wasn’t enough, he had the gall to show off the video of his proposal during his wedding reception. By this act of treachery, he raised the bar for the rest of us insipid single male Pinoys. Sigh, men like my best friends should be hunted down and executed. And then killed.

I tried brainstorming ideas for an original marriage proposal with my best friend, but I never heard from him again after his wife found him in the closet. Nonetheless, even without his help, I thought of a fairly novel proposal: Under the guise of a faux wedding reception, I would propose to her during sunset in a cozy private garden nestled along the Tagaytay hillside.

Once I had decided on the venue, I inadvertently unleashed my pent-up cheesiness, which had been building after years of covertly listening to WRock (96.3 for the uninitiated). Heeding the dictates of my inner cheese, I decided that I would serenade her for my proposal.

I wrote up a song list that I thought would capture the spirit of a twilight marriage proposal — but Afternoon Delight or Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me didn’t seem quite right. I even contemplated belting out songs by Christopher Cross or Barry Manilow, but I was worried how bad these songs would be for my cholesterol. After much soul-searching and weaning myself off WRock, I decided on a medley of three songs that were a cross section of boy band pop, drippy romance and classic Frank Sinatra (because you can never go wrong with Frank): Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around, Julia Fordham by way of Nina’s Love Moves in Mysterious Ways and Frank Sinatra’s Someday. I was tempted to sneak in Sting’s Every Breath You Take and Adam Sandler’s comical I Wanna Grow Old With You, but after a good smacking in the head by my best friend, he reminded me "This is a harana, you fool, not a night at the karaoke club."

Of course, my ASAP-worthy major production number would require a captive audience, so my inner cheese nudged me to invite our family and close friends to witness the event. I drafted a notoriously kilometric e-mail (if it wasn’t kilometric, it just wouldn’t be me) telling them in my best purple prose how they were all handpicked to join us for the proposal because they bore witness to the blossoming of our relationship. But more importantly, I stressed, was that with all of them there to support me, I would immediately have some friends to help me consume copious amounts of alcohol in the event that she said no.



Some of you might think that I was running after the award for the best marriage proposal of 2007, but you must understand that the very idea that I was dating this fantastic woman is almost as unbelievable as a man kidnapping a busload of children in exchange for their higher education.

We knew of each other in college, but during those days our paths never crossed. One of us was a cheerleader-slash-model, the other was a debate team captain-slash-geek. And to this day, I still don’t know what she saw in a cheerleader like me.

After systematically paying off school officials and college acquaintances to bury my dubious cheerleader reputation, we met many years later in a church retreat for single young adults (no, really). And she had not lost one bit of that debate team captain charisma that had enthralled me during our college years. After much prodding and experimenting with various gayuma, I was finally able to convince her to go out with me. And we still went out even after the gayuma wore off.

It was twilight on a Black Saturday as we strode across the ebbing tides of the Bantayan Island shoreline when I asked her to be my girlfriend. I cunningly took her hand into mine as I helped her straddle across knee-high pools strewn with seaweed and corals. When I finally mustered up the courage, I sunk down on my left knee and uttered, "I love you and I would like to do yoga with you for the rest of my life." She nodded slightly as tears welled up in her eyes.

When we finally arrived at the garden, we were welcomed by an empty wedding reception. "Where is everybody?" she wondered. "I thought we were going to be late."

"Let me check." I scampered away to let her savor her last few unwitting minutes of single unofficial committed-ness and returned shortly with my brother (I couldn’t find my yaya). Right on cue, my brother strummed the first few notes of the song. I cunningly took her hand into mine and started crooning, "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes…"

"Why are you singing again?" she giggled. "You’ve been singing that song all of last week."

I squeezed her hand tightly. She pulled her head away from me slightly and smirked. Then she looked out into the garden.

"Hey isn’t that," she choked. "Oh, oh no." She looked down and shook her head. She lifted her head again and her eyes pooled as she saw our family and friends trickling out of their hiding places and overflowing the garden.



I tried to belt out the rest of my well-crafted medley, but the lyrics had melted away from my head once she hid her tears behind her hand. So I just hummed out the tunes to the songs, which I had so agonizingly memorized and inconveniently forgotten, and drew her close to me as we swayed to the beat of our hearts.

"Why are you crying?" I asked.

"Because this is not the dress I wanted to wear for my engagement." We both laughed.

After several minutes of continuous humming, she gently lifted her head from my chest, looked up at me and said, "When are you going to get down on your knees?"

We laughed again. I sunk down on my left knee.

"My love for you has grown like a mustard seed." I proclaimed. She crumpled her nose and raised an eyebrow. Later I found out that she thought I had said, "My love for you has grown like an atomic mushroom." Up to now, I am still unsure what sort of hard drugs she had taken before our trip to Tagaytay.

But after the initial confusion, she finally recognized the next line. "I love you and I would like to do yoga with you for the rest of my life."

I pulled out a small red box from my coat pocket and slowly coaxed it open.

"Will you marry me?"

She peered down to take a look and make sure that what was staring back at her wasn’t cubic zirconia.

And so here we were in a torch-lit garden along the windswept mountain ridges of Tagaytay overlooking Taal Volcano, with the sun lazily descending over the lake, and blessed by the presence of those nearest and dearest to us. What would be her answer?

"Yes," She cooed.

I didn’t have to sorrowfully consume copious amounts of alcohol that night.

I excitedly stood up, kissed her deeply, and took her into my arms. And right then and there, my love for her grew from a mustard seed to an atomic mushroom.

After all, this was our engagement day.

* * *

For comments, suggestions or to help me pay for my engagement ring, please e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com.