Rings, Rings
Sun., May 22, 01:44 PM
Current headlines: Saddam’s underwear and the wedding of the forty-something ex-conette and her twenty-something former student. (Two weeks of promos on that one.) That’s not news; it’s just malicious snickering. No wonder I’d rather write about something that interests me.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I like jewelry. When I worked in midtown Manhattan, I often spent lunch hours window shopping the jewelry stores or visiting the earring stores. I suspect that one attraction of jewelry is that you don’t have to worry that it won’t fit just because you gained or lost a few pounds! (Except when I was pregnant, but that was in another life…) I still have a lot of inexpensive costume jewery I bought then.
However, one drawback to jewelry is that, when you’re actually wearing it, other people get to enjoy it more than you do. Well, you don’t see it unless you look in the mirror. Unless you wear that jewelry on your hands.
Bracelets are nice – unless you move your hands a lot in the course of a day. I own very few snug bracelets because my wrists have always been thin, and I don’t even wear a watch any more. On the other hand (ha!), I really love rings.
In the past I have written about my wedding ring, which is very special. And I enjoy wearing my engagement diamond for reasons that don’t even have anything to do with its value. Now that it’s warm enough to go without gloves, I’ve been wearing it a lot.
Many people born in June like pearls – their birthstone – and forty years ago my dad gave me a delicate little pearl ring. Imagine a “nest” of gold leaves like a flower, surrounding a single pearl. Dad kept saying “it’s from both of us,” and my mother kept saying “it’s from your father.” For some reason she was mad at me that month, and she wasn’t going to admit to buying me a gift. Years later she told me that, of course, she had picked it out; he wouldn’t have known how to choose it. “Yes,” I told her, “but you kept saying it was from him, and that’s how I think of it now.” I don’t know whether that taught her to watch her words a little, but it was worth a shot.
And then there’s the “Gloria ring.” When I met my friend Gloria – right around the time that I got that little ring – one of her interests was designing jewelry. And she had a pearl ring – she’s a June birthday too – that I really loved. It’s a heavy gold serpentine ring, with a fairly large pearl at each end so they line up on top. I admired it every time she wore it, and she used to say, “I’ll leave it to you in my will,” and we’d both laugh.
Since I mention her from time to time, you know she’s still around, but about fifteen years ago she sent me The Ring for my birthday. “I don’t wear it any more,” she said, “why should it just sit in the vault?” With the ring she enclosed a handwritten description of how she came to have it. “Oh, good,” said M.D., “you have a provenance.” Well, maybe.
It was a story she had told me before. She was engaged to a fellow in the military. He had bought her some loose pearls when he was on leave in Japan. They were good quality pearls, and he sent her some each time he wrote. Then he was killed in Korea. The pearls were the only thing she had to remember him by, because she had returned the expensive engagement ring to his mother.
There weren’t enough pearls to make a necklace, and for a long time she just kept them and wondered what to do with them. Then she had the idea for a ring, sketched it out, and brought it to a friend who made jewelry. (Eventually she just had the remaining pearls put into a bracelet.) Thus this perfectly lovely ring.
I had heard the story several times, and parts of it just don’t fit. I didn’t question the details; she is my friend, and I choose to believe her when I can. Then she started getting older than we thought she was, and suddenly it began to fit – slightly different.
I remembered Gloria’s telling me about the hiring atmosphere when she went to work for the company where I joined her several years later. At the time she applied, they were not accepting women older than some given age. (It was probably thirty, which she would have been around that time.) I believe she submitted a later birth date; if she had to document it, she probably altered her baptism certificate. So she spent forty years or so telling people she was younger than she was and eventually believed it herself. One day when she was getting something out of the vault, she noticed her birth certificate and, as she says – “holy shit” – realized that she’s older than she thought. I think that’s what happened.
Make her a little older, put the fiancé in post-World War II Japan – losing his life there – and the darned story hangs together. It’s one of those things that, in the long run, don’t really matter. I never wanted the ring for its value; I just thought it was beautiful. I had the jeweler put a guard on it because my fingers are smaller, and M.D. can take the guard off when she’s ready to wear it. (All pearls will go to M.D. because U.D. is a vegetarian and that extends to leather, silk – and pearls.)
I like rings.
