Lost ring is a symbol of what can’t be seen
Last week, I lost something invaluable.
It was a plain, unmarked gold ring that except for brief periods had not left my hand for more than 39 years. I always remove it before I play golf because it pinches when I grip the club. Normally, I take it off at home and leave it on the dresser, but this time I forgot, so when I put my golf bag on the cart, I put the ring in a zippered pocket where I put my wallet, cell phone, keys, etc.
When I finished the round and began retrieving things from that pocket, the ring wasn’t there. You know that feeling when you think something awful can’t really be possible. It had to be there. I remembered putting it in. Emptied everything out and looked through it all again. It wasn’t there.
I remembered pulling my wallet out at the turn so I could buy a drink. Did I accidentally pull the ring out, too, and it landed on the pavement? Or could it have slipped through a tiny hole in that pocket? Surely not. Yet it was nowhere. I inquired at the pro shop. No, no one had turned in a ring.
I had no choice but to drive home without my wedding ring.
Evelyn and I had actually bought matching gold bands about six months before we were married. She had spent two years in Brazil and suggested we follow a custom common there, in which engaged couples wear their wedding rings on their right hands. At the wedding ceremony, you take the ring from your spouse’s right hand and place it on her left.
I thought it was a charming idea, so just after New Year’s Day in 1983, we went to one of those big franchise jewelry stores at a mall in Richmond, Va., and found a pair of gold bands whose only marking was a finely knurled texture. They were hardly 24K. I think we paid about $100 apiece, but we were happy at their simplicity. We didn’t need anything more. I wore my ring on my right hand until June 11, when Evelyn took it off and placed it on my left. It had been there ever since.
Until last week.
I can’t explain how depressed I felt. It was as if I had lost a finger along with the ring. No, it was like I had lost a piece of my heart. It wasn’t just the ring, which after all is only an object, a pretty piece of hammered metal. It was everything that it symbolized for almost 40 years.
The giddiness of being actually married to another, part of something in which one plus one equals much, much more than two. The struggles over money. Agonies over vocations and jobs, in which one of us – usually Evelyn – supported and rooted for the other. Successes. Illnesses. Children. Slowly maturing and finding satisfaction in how we have grown together and not apart. Retirement and leisure. The prospect of a grandchild.
In my mind, all those things were somehow fused into that gold ring. But of course, that’s rather silly. The experiences were not in the ring but in my memory. The ring was simply a visible reminder of the memories, and the love.
We are creatures bound by our senses, by what is finite, visible, tangible, and yet we have what the poet Wordsworth called “intimations of immortality,” of what is beyond what we can see and touch. Love cannot be seen with the eyes, heard with the ears or touched with a hand, but the evidence of love – the actions, the words, the gestures produced by love – surely can be. We need the visible and the tangible to remind us of what is invisible and transcends our poor creaturely senses.
Evelyn and I have decided we will not only replace my lost ring but buy a new one for her as well, so that as before, our rings will match. The thought makes me feel better.
In Wordsworth’s poem that I mentioned earlier, he writes:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind…”
Cary McMullen is a retired journalist and the former religion editor of The Ledger
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Lost ring is a symbol of what can’t be seen
