But later that night I remembered the one I had at home – my
mother’s diamond engagement ring that she left to me after her death more than
seven years ago. It was still in my
jewelry box, in the small plastic box in the small Ziploc bag with my name printed in her familiar hand. I took
the ring out of its plastic bag and box to have a look at it – a humble,
WWII-era kind of ring. It has a very
tiny diamond and it is propped on a large amount of “setting” material (to make
the diamond appear larger, I suppose), and the gold band is kind of thin. It beckoned me to try it on for size, and it
fit perfectly on the pinky finger of my right hand. After looking at it under a lamplight, I saw
it sparkle at me, and so I decided to keep it there on the pinky finger, which had never occurred to me before.
There is a woman my age who comes to my neighborhood's puppy playgroup about 7 AM every day, and one morning a few weeks ago, I noticed how the sun was hitting her hand in such
a way as to cause brilliant shards of light to leap forth – and so I commented
on the ring she wore, its brilliance in the springtime sun – and she proceeded to tell me
the story of her grandmother from England who had two identical rings made out
of the diamond earrings she wore as a young girl, and how she had given one ring
to each daughter – and one daughter stayed in England but the other daughter
came to America, and so the diamonds were separated for many, many years, but
then the daughter in England died as an old woman with no children and so the
ring came to her sister in America who is the mother of this woman I am talking
about – and the mother is alive but in a nursing home and has no use for the
rings, and so the rings are under guardianship of this woman I am talking
about. They are very large diamonds, by the way. She proceeded to tell me that
someday the rings would be given to her own two grown daughters – however, one
daughter has just moved to England and therefore the rings may suffer the
repeated fate of separation. It's the kind of story you might hear in Virginia at 7 in the morning on an open field before anyone has showered or had breakfast.
But my own story is simpler and far more humble. My father must have given everything he had
to buy the ring when he was a soldier in WWII and had no income other than
what the war provided young men. I was impressed by the thought of his commitment and intention. I wish I knew the story of how he bought it,
and when and how he gave it to her, and of what he was thinking – the story. I don’t know it.
When my mother would knead dough for bread or pizza, or mix
raw meat with her hands for a meatloaf, she would stand at the kitchen sink
afterward with a toothpick to coax out the dough or meat that had gotten stuck
beneath the diamond. Because it is
propped high on the setting, there is enough empty space beneath it to almost fit a
coriander seed or even a bit of chopped garlic. She would poke and scrape at that space till
the diamond showed clear again. And she
would occasionally voice the fear that she might someday poke the diamond out
of its setting, but I don’t think that ever happened.
My mother would say on occasion that she thought the band
had thinned or worn thin over the years – those were the words she used.
I was a teenager then, the last of five children, and she would have
already put in 25 or 30 years of marriage and housework by then. And I would perfunctorily
agree with her – a teenager’s way of not looking or listening but agreeing
nevertheless. But now that I am older
than the age she was back then, and I am wearing the ring and listening for its story, and I have put in my own 30 years of cleaning and
cooking and kneading . . . I can see all that she meant by thinning.
The band is still rounded at the top beside the small
diamond and its large setting – but then, turning bout the sides it shows a
gradual wearing down, until by the time it reaches the underside the band has
become a thin wafer of gold, almost sharp, as though it could cut something,
like a miniature rotary saw. She would
comment that someday the ring might fall off her finger because of all the
thinness it had become, from all the work she had done in those 30 years and
hence. I don’t know if this wearing down
is a testament to all the work my mother actually did or if it speaks more to
the sub-par quality of gold during WWII, a composite maybe – or one that my
father could afford. I don’t know.
It did not fall off her finger – and maybe only because my
father had died by the time she was 60-ish, and the children had grown, and the
work had become less. I wasn’t paying attention as to when she took off the ring and put it in the plastic box in the Ziploc bag – and I don’t know when she
placed my name on it.
