the stone on my engagement ring is lime green, which happens to be my favorite color. it's a peridot, probably from afghanistan, on a vintage setting, probably from the sixties. panzón and i bought it online and it came one november morning on a big brown truck, as we were leaving for disneyland with my parents. my dad, who has a sixth sense for delivery trucks, caught a glimpse of it and tracked it down, first by car, then by foot. we watched as he persuaded the man in the brown uniform, with matching socks, to give him the parcel by showing him the address on his drivers license. my dad got back in the car and triumphantly handed the cardboard box over to panzón, who opened it and, after rummaging through the packaging popcorn, extracted a small ring box. i covered my eyes as the three of them oohed and aahed.once the ring was safely in its box in panzón's pocket, we stopped talking about it and it became the elephant in the room, or rather, the car. panzón smuggled the lime green elephant into disneyland, where it almost made its debut on the dumbo ride, which would have been so fitting, except that i made the mistake of saying that i thought that movie was sad. as the day went on, my initial excitement turned into anxiousness, then irritation, and finally into indifference.
later that afternoon, when i had already forgotten about the whole thing, i felt a nervous hand searching for my finger in the quiet, pitch dark of the pirates of the caribbean ride, between the blue bayou restaurant and the first drop, before all of the yo-ho-ho-ing. the ring felt heavy on my finger, but heavier still was the frustration of not being able to see it. i was so preoccupied with this that i completely forgot about the drop and suddenly felt the rush of weightlessness. the elephant fell off the boat and was replaced by laughing and hugging and kissing.
here's a lime green elephant that you can actually ride from danish company, bObles: http://tr.im/DmrH
this holiday, a small christmas miracle happened at our home. the bucket that we "lost" at the park last summer came back to us. it appeared underneath our tree on christmas morning, bearing a delightful book, our california, in spanish. apparently during its half year absence, it developed eyes and tentacles and morphed into an octopus (flex, the octopus, to be exact). i wonder if santa, realizing that we don't have a chimney, squeezed the octopod through our door's mail slot and instructed it to wriggle its way to the tree and take a bite out of the dreidel-shaped sugar cookie coco decorated and left out with a cup of milk.
