The Turtle Proposal

The saying goes “hindsight is 20/20”, but really hindsight is just a cruel reminder of the fact that we never quite understand that everything we do inevitably comes back to bite us in the ass.

Hey my name is Ted and this is the story of how I learned a pretty painful lesson about hindsight.  It was a normal Saturday, the breeze felt good against my skin, the coffee in my hand was more cream and sugar than anything else, and the neighbors were seemingly fighting with a race of aliens made entirely out of all the loudest items in the universe including an airhorn, what sounded like cymbals, and a small child that shrieked like a pterodactyl on helium pumped through a megaphone that was an inch from your ear.  So yeah normal Saturday, or was it?(Sadly all the stuff listed above was normal, especially the last one) No this Saturday was a special one, today I would propose to my girlfriend in the most romantic way I could possibly think of, spoiler alert it involves a turtle. But we’ll get to that in a minute. For now I had about an hour before she got home and a foolproof plan in my head. As I stood there on the balcony I saw my best bud Chuck pull into the parking lot waving like a maniac out his car window.  This was the moment I had been waiting all day for, the game was on the turtle was in play. Now I’m sure you have a hundred different ideas floating around in your brain for how I could be involving a turtle in a proposal and about 85 percent of them end in a no, another 10 percent don’t even get an answer because their too busy laughing and you nearly suffocate them with your accidental humor. I was attempting to avoid all of those scenarios.

It only took us about 30 minutes to set the whole thing up and then I kicked Chuck out so I could collect my thoughts, and calm my nerves before the big moment.  Then before I knew it, the time had come, she was pulling in and parking. Suddenly I realized how crazy everything I had set up was. The streamers, the sign, the gnome statue, the half eaten pear, and THE TURTLE.  I had overdone this one bad, there was only one course of action left, but I had to act fast. I had to grab everything and toss it out the window while she was coming up the stairs, then do the sensible thing and get down on one knee, propose, and never let her leave the apartment so she never saw a random assortment of objects littering the sidewalk outside.  With seconds to spare I grabbed the gnome, scooped up the pear, and ripped down the streamers and sign, flinging them all out the open window. I heard her key hit the lock on the door. As I scanned the room I realized I left the turtle there. I grabbed it and went for the window, but something stopped me, oh yeah it was empathy, don’t throw turtles out windows you could hit an unsuspecting pedestrian.  So I had seconds to hide this turtle and there was only one option, the toilet. I dove into the bathroom, plopped it in the pot, and slide back out onto the couch just as the front door swung open.

At this point I decided to push the proposal back a few hours and maybe try to be romantic rather than just sweaty.  So we did some normal Saturday things, then I suggested we head to the park, that might be romantic, probably. 

I bet you’re now yelling ha gotcha, this story is bullshit, how’d you get her around that stuff you threw out the window.  Well smarties that would have been easy I would have just blamed are loud alien fighting neighbors, but we never actually made it that far. See I had actually forgotten about those bad ideas strewn across the sidewalk, but that wasn’t the only thing I’d forgotten.  Before we left, I decided to use the porcelain throne, you see I don’t digest dairy well and that mostly cream coffee was really hitting me hard. So I went in and roosted upon the bowl, but as I got settled something very alarming happened. You see “hind sight” is something a certain turtle now had, and unfortunately that hind was mine.  Remember when I said hindsight tends to come back and bite you in the ass, well that’s exactly what hindsight did.  

Turns out I did end up proposing that day, but it turns out my turtle proposal ended up in the 0.01 percent of turtle proposals where the girl runs into the bathroom to find a man, pants down, screaming and holding a turtle with “Will You Marry Me?” painted on the shell.

The craziest part of this story is that I'm now married to that woman and there are two beautiful little baby people in our life, oh and a turtle.  So I guess the real morale of this story is as much as the decisions you make in your life may bite you in the ass, sometimes literally, they all make you the person you are and you should cherish everyone of them as you learn and grow. Oh, the other morale is don’t try to propose using a turtle, but if you do attempt a turtle proposal, when it all goes wrong the toilet should be the last place you put that turtle.