Well, I finally have my ring! And I found it at the first place we looked--Silverscape Design in Northampton.
It was kind of a strange day at first. We met our friend and Scott's co-worker, Wendy, at the Lauren Greenfield "Thin" and "Girl Culture" exhibit at the Smith museum. If you have never seen it and you have tendencies toward melancholia, don't. God, it was depressing--row after row of dead-eyed, prematurely old teenage girls and women with protruding bones staring out at you. There were a few examples of women who binged were obese as a result, but the focus was on the emaciated. Don't get me wrong, I support what Greenfield is doing, but there's not really much to say or debate after you see this exhibit. Reading the comments from the public was interesting, though--some truly boneheaded statements: "If they're stupid enough to do this to themselves, they deserve it," and "They just need to eat and stop doing this to their families!" I just do not understand how anyone viewing this exhibit could ever see an eating disorder as a choice.
After we saw the exhibit and some of the other pieces at the museum ( I love the top floor with all of the really old portrait paintings) we were faced with a dilemma. We were meeting up with Wendy's wife, Erin, for drinks and dinner, but we also had to shop for rings. I had found out that day that Scott had not told anyone at his work about the engagement, so we had to tell Erin and Wendy as we stood on the sidewalk across the street from the jewelry store. Then Scott took off for the record store (I can't blame him for that--there are great record stores in Noho) and Wendy and Erin went with me.
I actually wanted a ring kind of like Wendy's (white gold, simple but elegant, with a line of tiny diamonds) but those rings didn't look that great on my hand, and I tried on this one ring that looked like vines and loved it. Then I tried on a bunch more, and kept going back to the vine ring, so that's what I went with. I particularly liked that it was designed by a local artist from Amherst, Constance Gildea. By that time Scott had arrived and we bought the ring, and the saleslady was sort of taken aback that I gave her my credit/debit card to pay for it. I explained that it was a shared account (looking back, did I really owe her an explanation?) and Wendy's response was : "We never got asked that," and "What? This is Northampton!!"
Scott tried on a bunch of men's rings that were all around $2000, but he is determined to find one he likes for $200. He just might--with all that access to antique stores and such. As long as it fits and doesn't cut off circulation or turn his finger green, he's fine. But it sometimes takes as much as 6 weeks to size a ring, so he needs to get on it. We're going to try this place in Brattleboro (also next to a record store) that has tungsten rings for $125.
Afterward we went to a bar in an underground tunnel that has a martini that costs $26 (I realize that this is commonplace in cities, but come on!) and I had to endure the indignity of getting a martini off of the "easy does it" candy-flavored martini menu while everyone else ordered things like 12 year old scotch and "dirty" martinis with extra olives.
Speaking of scotch and martinis, we are now thinking about renting a function room on land for two hours after the ceremony/reception (so from 10:30-12:30) maybe at Patricks' Pub in Gilford, only a couple of miles from the boat and a straight drive along the water. I am also seriously considering wearing the pink dress to the Duluth reception and getting an ivory dress for the one in NH. I'll still go with tea length in both cases. I'm not even going to get started on shoes.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The Ring
Today is Easter, which means we drive two hours each way to Dracut, Massachusetts for a one and a half hour brunch at my Aunt Joanne's. It is worth it, though, because I get to see relatives I only see a few times a year, and Scott gets to eat real bacon.
I got to talk to my cousin Erin, who is something of a wedding expert. She got married nine years ago, in an extravaganza unlike anything my extended family has ever known, something so well-planned it was like a Broadway musical. She knows so much about weddings that I actually don't want to talk to her about the wedding, for fear there is something important I have neglected to arrange or consider. She knows all about place cards, the proper arrangement of centerpieces, bridal hosiery, and receiving line etiquette and placement. But she didn't select her ring, Jeff did, so she can't really help in that area.
I didn't find much by way of history, either. I did like the colonial American custom of giving a thimble as a symbol of an engagement and then cutting the top part off and using the bottom section as a wedding ring. It's thrifty, and cheap, even if the thimble does have a domestic connotation. I also liked how ancient Egyptians made their own rings out of plants, and the concept of the Middle Eastern "puzzle ring" that would collapse if the wearer took it off. On the whole, though, legends and stories about weddding rings and their origins repeat the same idea: that the ring finger was supposed to contain a vein in it that connected to the heart, and that the ring is a symbol of eternal love. The rings are even in the civil ceremony language, and on TV if a couple has no ring, they improvise--by borrowing someone else's, or using the tab top of a soda can. Is it even possible to be legally married if you don't have rings in the ceremony? Even the crazy weddings I found online had rings in the ceremony--the pirate wedding, the skydiver wedding, the Hello Kitty Wedding, and the Star Wars wedding, to name a few (see "Hello Kitty" men's ring, above. The poor guy blogs about his wife's total Hello Kitty obsession). I did enjoy the fact that one of the star wars weddings included a light saber fight between groom and best man, though.
Erin herself has a huge diamond engagement ring and wedding ring set. I have rarely in my life worn any rings at all, mostly because I have child-sized hands, sausage fingers, and bitten nails--I don't want to call attention to my hands by adorning them. Scott, who has really nice hands, used to wear a hipster-type ring back in grad school; one of us accidentally ran over it with the car and crushed it flat. He has not worn one since.
We have not purchased our rings yet, and we do not yet know what we want. Something simple, but something that we will want to wear every day. My mother offered me her original white gold engagement and wedding bands that she no longer wears, but I don't know how I feel about wearing a ring that was intended for her while she's around. For her tenth anniversary, my father bought her a brand new, engraved wedding ring that she loved, but that ring now rests in the murky deep of the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee after she lost it sailing, years ago. We may well glide right over it on the Mount Washington.
I got to talk to my cousin Erin, who is something of a wedding expert. She got married nine years ago, in an extravaganza unlike anything my extended family has ever known, something so well-planned it was like a Broadway musical. She knows so much about weddings that I actually don't want to talk to her about the wedding, for fear there is something important I have neglected to arrange or consider. She knows all about place cards, the proper arrangement of centerpieces, bridal hosiery, and receiving line etiquette and placement. But she didn't select her ring, Jeff did, so she can't really help in that area.
I didn't find much by way of history, either. I did like the colonial American custom of giving a thimble as a symbol of an engagement and then cutting the top part off and using the bottom section as a wedding ring. It's thrifty, and cheap, even if the thimble does have a domestic connotation. I also liked how ancient Egyptians made their own rings out of plants, and the concept of the Middle Eastern "puzzle ring" that would collapse if the wearer took it off. On the whole, though, legends and stories about weddding rings and their origins repeat the same idea: that the ring finger was supposed to contain a vein in it that connected to the heart, and that the ring is a symbol of eternal love. The rings are even in the civil ceremony language, and on TV if a couple has no ring, they improvise--by borrowing someone else's, or using the tab top of a soda can. Is it even possible to be legally married if you don't have rings in the ceremony? Even the crazy weddings I found online had rings in the ceremony--the pirate wedding, the skydiver wedding, the Hello Kitty Wedding, and the Star Wars wedding, to name a few (see "Hello Kitty" men's ring, above. The poor guy blogs about his wife's total Hello Kitty obsession). I did enjoy the fact that one of the star wars weddings included a light saber fight between groom and best man, though.
Erin herself has a huge diamond engagement ring and wedding ring set. I have rarely in my life worn any rings at all, mostly because I have child-sized hands, sausage fingers, and bitten nails--I don't want to call attention to my hands by adorning them. Scott, who has really nice hands, used to wear a hipster-type ring back in grad school; one of us accidentally ran over it with the car and crushed it flat. He has not worn one since.
We have not purchased our rings yet, and we do not yet know what we want. Something simple, but something that we will want to wear every day. My mother offered me her original white gold engagement and wedding bands that she no longer wears, but I don't know how I feel about wearing a ring that was intended for her while she's around. For her tenth anniversary, my father bought her a brand new, engraved wedding ring that she loved, but that ring now rests in the murky deep of the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee after she lost it sailing, years ago. We may well glide right over it on the Mount Washington.
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