Last night's Twitter was full of engagement-ring discourse, which led me to contemplate my own engagement ring. Now, let me preface these contemplations by saying that I got married in 1990. Ethical purchasing was still very much an outlier sort of concern, at least in my neck of the woods. We were not talking about where things came from, nearly to the degree that we talk about such things now (albeit selectively, since most of us are talking about them on, for example, Apple laptops and cellular telephones). Many of us who gave up chocolate for Halloween ten years ago, because child slavery, have fallen off that particular wagon. It is all too easy to make gestures, and all too easy to forget to make them. Anyway, I was young and dumb in 1990, self-absorbed and blissful in my ignorance, which was so great that I didn't even know I was ignorant. Only that I know nothing: boy howdy, I didn't know that. There are a lot of things 2022 me would love to be able to say to 1990 me. Let's just leave it at that. Anyway, 1990 me wasn't thinking about where diamonds come from, just that normally they occurred in engagement rings.
I didn't actually want an engagement ring. 1990 me was very full of being low-key HIPPAY and not high-society, which was kind of unfortunate since the wedding my mother was extremely set on my having was of the latter variety, not the former. I did obdurately refuse to get a manicure, but otherwise I was compliance itself, including acquiescing to my husband's quite natural desire to do things in the correct, traditional way. I should also probably add that what I've only come to realize fully over much time is the extent of my husband's desire to be generous. He is an extravagantly generous person, especially to me. He doesn't spend extravagant amounts of money, ordinarily, but one of his great delights is to shower me with gifts. If I'm at all generous –– my own natural inclination is to frugality and scarcity, which is to say stinginess, maybe –– it's because I've lived with this man for nearly thirty-two years.
Anyway, my engagement ring. He wanted to give me one, so I said all right, but let's decide together what it's going to look like. Don't surprise me. I mainly said this because I don't wear gold, and I'm not sure he can really see the difference between gold and silver, even now. I knew I wanted something simple, but maybe a little less simple than your basic solitaire. If I'd known we could do such a thing –– like that this was allowed in the social code, because really I was a lot less HIPPAY than I pretended to be, and would not have chosen a nudist wedding on a mountaintop, even though I went around saying I would –– I would have insisted that we go shopping for an antique ring (which is what my daughter and her husband did do). I didn't know, in 1990, being a lot more conventional than I wanted to give myself credit for being, that that was a thing people were allowed to do.
Instead, we went to the husband of my mother-in-law's lifelong best friend, who was a jeweler, and we told him what we wanted in a ring: a small diamond, with blue stones either side. I didn't want anything as bright or dark as a sapphire, though sapphire rings were popular at the time, thanks largely to Princess Diana. If I'd known that blue topaz existed (the extent of the ignorance of 1990 me . . .), I might have had that, as topaz is my birthstone. Instead, I'd seen somebody with an aquamarine ring and decided that aquamarines were what I wanted. Aquamarine is the birthstone for March, and we were getting married in March, so that made a certain kind of sense, I thought: a birthstone for the birth of our marriage.
My mother's wedding set is platinum and very much like mine, minus the aquamarines: completely simple, with the plainest of thin wedding bands. That's what I have, too, because I've always liked hers: platinum is very durable and doesn't tarnish or even scratch much, though my bands have certainly developed a patina of wear over thirty-two years. Her diamond is bigger than mine, a whole carat, whereas mine's a half, I think. It probably says something about us that we think one carat is big. Being high-society in some ways doesn't preclude having simple tastes; in fact, simplicity can be one form of ostentation, if the simplicity is expensive enough, or has some aristocratic provenance. In fact, if I were going to change one thing about the ring I have, without changing any of the actual elements involved, I would have a diamond the same size as the aquamarines, mostly because I have managed to scratch people with my ring, but also because I'd be inclined to err on the side of modesty, which again, can be its own form of ostentation, so this is nothing to brag about.
My favorite of the rings I wear on that finger, actually, is the silver orange-blossom band, which my husband found in a box of his dad's things in his mother's attic and gave to me for our fifth anniversary. It's a little looser than the other rings, enough so that when I was pregnant I could wear it by itself as a wedding band when the others got too tight. I have gone through other phases of wearing it by itself, but mostly, for the last three decades and change, I have worn the whole set and virtually never taken them off. If I take rings off, I lose them, so I just keep them on. Having given me this wedding set, my husband likes to see it on my hand, and in this I am certainly happy to please and honor him. I have given thought to what to do when I die: I suppose I'll be buried in my wedding band, though as in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, maybe I'll just pass the whole set along to somebody. This presumes that I'm still able to wear these rings at the end of my life –– my mother has had to stop wearing hers, because her knuckles have swelled. I suppose she'll leave them to somebody: me, I imagine, in which case I'll save them . . . again, for somebody. We are a family that values keepsakes. I know I designed my own rings with that in mind.
Anyway, all this conversation last night was sparked by some guy's ring-shopping recommendations for the prospective fiancé, based on the ring with which he had "successfully proposed" last year. We could unpack that a lot, I guess . . . anyway, I hope his fiancée/wife is happy with her ring. He obviously put a lot of thought and love and care into designing it, though whether he asked for her input or not I don't know. Of course I wonder whether he had noticed what kind of jewelry she actually wore, whether she liked gold or silver, and all that, because as much as I'd like those things not to matter, they sure did, and do, matter to me, the person wearing the ring for the rest of my life. If she's gonna wear it, she oughta like it, and part of love, care, and all that, it seems to me, is taking her tastes and preferences into account (and assuming as a matter of course that there are probably things she thinks about with regard to these things that would never in a million years occur to him unless she told him –– which means talking to her about it).
Again, I would have been happy with no engagement ring. We had already decided to get married. There really hadn't been a proposal, as such, just an agreement that that was what we wanted to do. I didn't see any point in flashing a ring around, and again, I refused rather pointedly to get a manicure just because people are going to be looking at your hand. Gah, maybe they shouldn't be looking at my hand! That was what I thought. I also just really didn't like being engaged, though getting presents was nice enough. I wanted to be married and left alone to live the rest of my life with this person I'd decided to join up with. We really didn't have any coherent theology about any of this. That came later. Clearly grace operates on you whether you are thinking about it or not, because here we are. And here I am wearing these rings. I didn't particularly want the extravagant generosity, but I got it anyway, and the only sensible, decent response, it seems to me, is gratitude.
Didn't really mean to write all that, but now I have. I've gotten my new poem draft to a place where I think I'm reasonably happy with it –– that was the work of the earlier morning. I've learned not to trust this happy with it stage, because it's nearly always deceptive. I have to let it sit, then revisit it and see, in a few weeks or months, whether I'm still happy with it. THEN send it out. It's so tempting to want to crank out poems to send, especially when friends seem to be publishing right and left, all the time. But I remember Flannery O'Connor's own resolution not to send anything out before its time, even if it meant not sending anything at all, and I think she was right about that.
For the rest of the day I plan to
*eat something (once again it's 11:30 and I've forgotten about eating)
*work on what I'm reading for this translation reading on Saturday, including my remarks about Pearl
*read and respond to a poem a friend sent me for review
*get my hair cut if I can possibly get in at the Great Clips.
Wearing today:
My good old thrifted Izod jeans. I do love boot-cut jeans. They're more reliably flattering on the shorter and stumpier among us than any other cut. Wearing with my secondhand Ibex merino grape tee, my ancient thrifted rayon/silk velour big shirt, wool hiking socks and, at the moment at any rate, Birk Floridas.
Posing with a spray bottle of water because Dora was being overenthusiastic in her affection, jumping all over me. If I were another dog I would have bitten her. As it was, all I had to do was show her the spray bottle.
Haven't done anything with my hair but comb it.
The weather's rainy and moist again, which helps, but overall, it's holding up okay after co-washing the other day. Again, though, it's really overlong and needs a good hard trim.
I pulled these clothes out very randomly today, but I'm happy with the way they go together.
Now to figure out some brunch.
ADDENDUM: Looking at the date, I realize that it's my paternal grandmother's birthday. She'd have been 124. It's a little wild to think, twenty-two years into the twenty-first century, than one of the people I have loved most in my life was born in the nineteenth century. 1898, the year of San Juan Hill. She died in 1991, a year and six months after I got married. At the end of her life she was telling everybody who came to see her that she was three hundred years old. Though in general, as I remember her from my own childhood, she was a childlike person, I'm sure she thought she felt every minute of it then. I must remember to offer my rosary today for the joyful repose of her soul.
ALSO: the part of me that truly unambiguously looks every minute of 57: my hands.
AND: A poem for today, when it's damp and warm and green, and I've finally started my spring seeds.