Chirky

Nine months ago, Roger and I attended one of those fancy charity benefit dinners – the kind that required long, dangly earrings and heels – and our first silent auction. We wandered the perimeter tables, totally uninterested in the Waterford crystal bowls and signed Dallas Cowboys jerseys and the artwork hanging on the walls. We bid on (and won) gift certificates to restaurants and theatre tickets, excited to bid on something. We bid on them even though we probably would have gone to those restaurants anyway and we chose to no longer hold season tickets to the theatre center. But there’s a new director there now, we reasoned, maybe it would be worth trying again. We still haven’t used those tickets.

As we continued to stroll throughout the ballroom, checking on our bids and ensuring we were the highest bidder (we’re nothing, if not competitive), we realized we hadn’t been to the center table. The center table. We should have known it would have held the gold, the one thing we love more than anything else - travel. We gazed at the images of different items up for auction: weeks in Taos in a mansion that sleeps 17 or weeks in Colorado in a private lodge that slept 14 (we could invite our family on vacation!), trips to wineries, 500,000 frequent flyer miles on either United or American Airlines, airfare and hotel vouchers to a number of international destinations. We circled the table like hawks searching for prey – certain there was something there for us. Something in our budget, I mean. And then we found it.

Hidden behind a few other auction items was a brochure for a weekend stay at an Omni hotel – any hotel in North America, any weekend we wanted. And no one had bid on it. We fixed our sticker on the page, pushed the item back a little further, then nonchalantly walked away. Nothing to see there. We became obsessive about it. Every few minutes one of us would walk by, checking to see whether someone had outbid us. No one had. By the time the dinner started, we decided to stop inspecting the auction – if someone was going to outbid us, we’d just have to deal with it. We made it fifteen minutes without checking.

Half an hour later, the auctioneer made an announcement that the travel table would be closing in three minutes. Roger and I looked at each other, silently questioning whether we should check it again or not. Two minutes remaining. Roger popped up and began briskly crossing the room. Thirty seconds remaining. Twenty. Ten. And then! Then! Someone put their sticker just below ours, outbidding us. At ten seconds! Roger watched. Waited for the smug man to step away. Edged closer to the auction page. Three. Two. One. He threw our sticker down and the chime rang through the air. The auction was over. Triumph!

That’s how it happened that last weekend Roger and I celebrated our fourth anniversary in Washington, D.C., staying at the Omni Shoreham. It was everything we hoped it would be.