Family Ring

While at my wine tasting class last week, I told my tablemates about my son’s recent engagement and about the pretty diamond ring he had presented to his girlfriend – and one of the people there said to me, “Is it a family ring he gave her?  “Hell no,” I said without blinking, “Our families don’t have diamonds laying around!”  I thought that was a funny thing to say, but no one really laughed – and I suppose it is because, in Virginia, most people have family rings and family names and family properties which are passed on as in old English society – and so it is not a funny thing to admit we have no family rings to give.

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.     

I’ve kept the ring on my pinky finger since trying it on that night when someone asked me about family rings, and I continue to think about or imagine its stories, not big stories or big voices – not a flashy rock that sings or impresses anyone – but the one that was given me and the one that I remember.