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.