There's a café/restaurant in Montpelier where I spend time now and then (it's also the space where my first showing of photography hung). Has a big salad bar featuring food both hot and cold, including a sizeable spread of disgustingly wholesome chow, a bunch of sushi, and a few desserts made on premises, including slices of a world-class chocolate cake made with maple syrup and dark, dark chocolate -- killer fare, at its best unbelievably smooth and packed with the kind of flavor that gets my fork flailing faster and faster until I find myself with an empty plate, searching despairingly for crumbs and microscopic traces of thick frosting. Intensely addictive.
I meet at that joint every couple of weeks with one or two or three other weirdos to spend an hour speaking in Spanish, and generally show up early to shovel down a piece of chocolate cake so that I'm buzzing blissfully by the time conversation in Spanish gets underway.
This past Tuesday was the last such occasion, I found myself there buying a snack, pre-Spanish-jabber-session. The person at the register is the 20-something daughter of the café's owner, in the course of blather while I'm paying up I learned that she is the person responsible for my drug of choice the chocolate cake, a disclosure that took me completely by surprise. (The place has a chef, complete with funny white hat -- I'd assumed the cake was his doing.) Amazed and overcome by excessive emotion, my mouth opened, I heard myself asking her to marry me, taking me as much by surprise as it took her. She could hear by my tone that I was at least partly serious -- and why the hell not? she's nice, she's pretty, she's intelligent, she can produce baked goods of the highest order -- her face shone bright pink with sudden, embarrassed self-consciousness. She's married, it turns out (I didn't know), despite which she was clearly flattered by the proposal. Wistfully, she asked if we'd live in Madrid in the theoretical case that we got hitched (my answer: we could if we wanted to). We both smiled, I returned to my table, feeling insufferably pleased with myself.
Only the second time I'd popped that particular question in this life of mine.
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This morning at the farmers market -- Montpelier, Vermont: