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By Root 202 0

hall into my office and showed me that first discovery. Yes, it was somewhat small—larger things had been stumbled upon in the Kuiper belt already—but we now knew for certain that if we could find this relatively small chunk of ice so quickly, any planets hiding out there were going to be within our grasp. I should have felt quite vindicated after all those years of searching. Perhaps I even did. The only problem is, I don’t remember any of it. When would it have happened? Probably November or December of 2001. Or was it January? Did Chad really come in and tell me? Did I then go across the hall and look at the pictures on his computer? It astounds me that I don’t remember any of it. I could go back and look up the records of that first discovery and perhaps refresh my memory. Instead, I went and looked back at my calendar for that time period to try to remember what else was going on that fall and winter.

My calendar is filled with Diane: trips with her to Hawaii, to the San Juan Islands, to the Sierra Nevada, trips on which I didn’t even check the phase of the moon before going. And when there weren’t trips, there were dinners and coffees and lunches. A year earlier I had worked from 10:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. most days of the week; but in 2001–02, for the first time since I had become an astronomer, I was actually leaving work at an almost normal time. I wasn’t even coming into work most weekends. I wonder if that first discovery came on a weekend when I wasn’t there, or when Diane and I were off for a week snowbound in the mountains. I like to think so. I was confident in the future Chad was working on; I was confident in the future I was working on, too.

The distraction of the winter continued into the distractions of the spring. By now Chad was discovering new objects beyond Neptune at a steady rate. One or two were big and bright enough that despite my distracted state at the time, I can still remember their discoveries—though, admittedly, a little vaguely. By the beginning of the summer, Diane and I had planned a long-weekend escape to a small beach town in the Yucatán. Before leaving, I had had a long conversation with one of my Ph.D. students. For some of my students I play multiple roles, including scientific adviser, speaking coach, writing instructor, tool provider, caffeine enabler, and, sometimes, relationship counselor. This student was complaining about the fact that her boyfriend, to whom she was engaged, thought that buying an engagement ring when they were not to be married for several years made no sense. On the airplane ride down to the Yucatán, I told Diane the story, and added the opinion that not only did I agree with the boyfriend, but that I thought engagement rings were a silly waste of money anyway and wouldn’t it be wiser to buy useful things? Like kayaks? Or bicycles? Didn’t she agree? No, she didn’t, actually.

I brought up the subject again at dinner our first night on the beach, and even once the next morning. Secretly, though, I had spent the previous month seeking out and buying the perfect engagement ring, and I had brought it with me. I had a plan. First, I would convince Diane that an engagement ring was the farthest thing from my mind; then I would plan a perfect seaside evening with dinner and a bottle of wine and spring it on her.

As I have since learned, I’m not very good at keeping burning secrets. Rather than waiting until the evening, sometime in the middle of our second day there, while sitting in a little hammock overlooking the water, relaxed and happy and talking about nothing in particular, I quickly went back to our room and came back out with the ring hidden in my pocket. I knelt. I proposed. I then went on for several verbal paragraphs about the symbolic importance of a ring as a combination of a public statement, something akin to earnest money, and a down payment on life. I then produced the ring. Diane was stunned silent. You could almost hear the machinery in her head reprocessing the last few days. Her first words, after a considerable pause, were: “You are such