I was living up here in another neighborhood with people I really couldn’t stand – a man and his younger sister – and working for the Cinemark closest to our apartment complex. (for some reason, there were two within two miles of each other; they may have even been closer, but the smallest one recently closed and became The Movie Tavern It still looks like a Cinemark; all they did was paint over building’s exterior. Where I lived, I could walk to either and often did – the one further away was across the street from where I did my grocery shopping)
I moved up here in March and started working at Cinemark soon after. I was 27 and had never worked in a movie theater before; they hired me for the concession stand, and I opted for daytime work. Weekends were required, given the business, but it wasn’t too bad. Honestly, the springtime weekends were saner than the summertime weekdays the buses full of kids would come to watch either The Hunchback of Notre Dame or James and the Giant Peach; I had nightmares about movie meals. :lmao:
Memorial Day weekend, we had Twister, Mission Impossible I, and something else big, all three on two screens, and a handful of other movies – that Cinemark is a ten screen theatre. We were beyond busy.
And somewhere in there, in all that ‘excitement’, I had even bigger more personal excitement. Preston and his parents came up for a quick visit – and it was quick; that’s all any of us had time for. And it had to be all of us and it had to be just then. So Art and Jan dropped Preston off at my apartment and drove out to Fayette Mall to give us some time alone together before they came back and we all went to dinner – we walked next door to Uno’s (gods how I miss that place!). They didn’t even come up with him; they literally dropped him at the curb, and he ran up – well, insofar as anyone can run up to the floor floor of any building. :D
But Preston and I talked and somehow we ended up in the kitchen, and I remember I was standing with my back to the pass-through to the dining room. And he asked me to marry him and put a ring on my finger. That ring is one of the most precious things I have, the most beautiful ring I own. It’s just a plain, 4mm sterling silver circle. But to me, it’s more beautiful than the most ‘perfect’ of diamonds or anything else.
That was twelve years ago, but I can close my eyes and remember as if it were yesterday. :D
