The Tale of 4 Rings

No, I don’t have one for each finger on my left hand (thumb excluded — is it really a finger anyway?), but this story is about 4 rings and what they meant/mean to me. In order to give the story its full due, I must start at the very beginning. You see, my parents met one snowy day in North Philadelphia, in 1972… Okay, okay. Not at the very beginning, but a little bit later. Let’s skip forward to 1998 when I got married for the first time on a rainy day in October. I was 21 at the time, and I had known the girl for two months (mostly over the internet), but I jumped right in with both feet. You know, they really shouldn’t allow you to get a marriage license if you haven’t known the person for longer than two months, or if you’re below the age of 23, or whichever applies. But yes, that’s where the story begins, with the first ring.

The rings were $300 dollars apiece. You know you wanted me to tell you the price. And, considering I had no job, I was about to go through a major move, and she had no job, the price was pretty hefty. They had a lovely Celtic design, however, which somewhat made up for the price tag. Somewhat. I was able to hang on to that ring for a year and a half, but all that changed when we went to Florida. Now, to truly tell the story you’ll have to know what happens to me in the summer. I sweat a lot, and I generally tend to lose weight for that reason. Well, my fingers get a wee bit thinner during those times, too, and the heat in Florida was pretty stifling. So, we were strolling on the beach when the tide came in, not full force, but enough to get my legs wet, and my hands were down by my legs. You can see where this is going, right? One minute my ring was there, the next the tide was going back out and I couldn’t find my ring. I knew it had been loose on my finger, but I had no idea it was that loose. I was horrified, particularly because that was around the same time I realized that my marriage had been a major mistake. It was almost like by getting lost, the ring was telling me something very deep, very profound, about my relationship and about my life in general.

Enter ring #2. You see, even though I was starting to finally realize that the relationship was doomed, I was still married, and I needed to get another ring. Once back in Tennessee, I coughed up nearly twice the amount of money as before to get a replacement ring because the company didn’t make them anymore. Special order is not fun. And I had to wait for it, too, because even though I had a job by then, I was working for tips, and we still had to somehow live. It took nearly four months to save up enough to purchase the ring, and another two weeks before it arrived. And, get this, when it arrived it was slightly large for my finger (deja vu, anyone?) so I tried to get the company to re-size it for me. They wanted to charge me another $100 to do so, and no local jeweler would touch it because I didn’t get it through them. I refused to pay the extra money, instead taking time every day twirling the ring around my finger, and it was even looser that next summer. Luckily for me, it didn’t fall off like its predecessor. Instead, it outlived the marriage, which ended at the beginning of its fourth year. And the ring, it resides in a box upstairs only because I keep forgetting to take it to a gold seller.

Ring #3 was a beautiful specimen in and of itself, but it took me another year and a half before I procured it. It was a lovey thing in both yellow and white gold. And it symbolized so much more than either of the two rings that preceded it, because it was truly a symbol of love and appreciation between two people who actually knew each other. Sadly, though, the fate of ring #3 was not a happy one, although it outlasted ring #1 in that I wore it for nearly five years before it disappeared. Unlike ring #1, though, it was not the ocean that was responsible for its demise. In fact, I can almost assure you that someone made some money off of it. My fingers had thinned again during early summer, and I was worried I would lose the ring because it was so loose. So, I took it off and put it in my shirt pocket. Ironically, it was because I was trying to protect it that it inevitably got lost. I must have bent over and it slipped out, and I didn’t realize it until much later when I went to retrieve the ring from my shirt pocket and it was gone. I did everything I could to find it, and asked everyone if they had seen it, but it was hopeless. Ring #3 was history.

Fast forward three years. Ring #4 almost never made its appearance. After ring #3 fell down the rabbit hole, my wife and I decided that I didn’t need a ring to speak for me and the fact that I was in a committed marriage. And we were right, of course. She still wore her ring, but once again the ring design was history, and I couldn’t order a duplicate. So we came to our decision, but by the end of that third year without it my ring finger was beginning to feel naked. I wanted that symbol again, so I went shopping. Ring #4 is by far the most inexpensive ring of the bunch, and it’s so very plain, but it fits snugly on the ring finger on my left hand, and that’s all that matters. This one won’t be falling off, and I think it will be the last one I ever wear.

My precious.

Sam