Pursuit of happiness.

My elder daughter, when in high school band, was very tight with her section members. She and several other horn players would literally have parties, exclusive to their section. As such, my wife and I got to know all of them. These were great boys and girls. I was professionally aware that NONE of these kids had ever gotten in any kind of trouble, and thus I approved highly of the friendship. One boy, whom we will here call Larry, graduated a year before my daughter, He went to college, and got a job. Lately he's been also helping out a lot with the youth group at the local church, as a youth leader. He had interviewed me about my work for a Criminal Justice class, and I just recently found out that he's majoring in that field. He's been dating a sweet young lady whom we will here refer to as Eva, who joins him in assisting with the church youth.

So, yesterday afternoon, while I was at work, I got a text from him:

"Hey Officer G, I have a favor to ask you. I want to ask Eva to marry me and I was wondering if I could get your assistance to help me." 

I asked what he had in mind, and ran it by the chief. I prefaced my ask with my personal perceptions of Larry to the chief. He consented. I told Larry that the gig was a Go.

After my shift, I picked him up at his house in my patrol car. I had him sit in the back seat of my patrol car. He was dressed nicely. We drove to a street corner near her house, and parked in a subtle location. He texted her mother to have her come over to his house. When she drove by, I fell in behind her, and pulled her over at a parking lot. I got out, unlatched Larry's back door, and stepped up to speak to Eva: "Miss, would you mind stepping out of the car?" She got out. I pointed at the rear of her car, and babbled for a few seconds while giving Larry the sign (I pointed at her). I told her that this was important, and then asked her to turn around. Larry was there behind her, on his knee, with a very large diamond ring held out. He had told me before that they had talked generally about marriage, but he had never gone through the formality of asking her before. She said "yes", and they wept as they hugged each other. I took a couple of pictures, and asked her to drive her fiancé home safely.

I went home, and informed my daughter of the role that I had just played in her good friend's engagement. I went back out to my patrol car, to make sure that the camera system saved the event in the highest resolution. Our new digital camera systems assign different storage resolutions for different types of patrol events, pulled from a pre-selected list of headings. There wasn't a listing for Marriage Proposal. I selected "Pursuit," which I knew saved at high-level. This pursuit had gone pretty well.