In that, I found my moms wedding ring...
I remember thinking I had found an answer.
Neither my father nor my mother ever wore their wedding rings, and at that early age, somehow in my child's mind, I thought I discovered the reason that they always argued; why they fought and went weeks, it seemed, without talking...
Why they never held hands or said "I love you" to each other, or even pretended to act like that thought was true. Happily, expectantly, I brought my find upstairs to my mom, hoping that she would put it on her finger and by some crazy magic, all that was, would change into what i thought they should already have been...
Soon I returned down into that cellar, putting everything back into place, the tiny gold ring still covered by flaking tie tacks and loose, old buttons...
I thought to myself that when I got married, I would always wear my wedding ring, and that would guarantee love and happiness...
Like I said, I was very young...
Almost twenty five years later, I did get married.
I wore my ring for years, happily, having been hired by a company that paid enough to financially support our growing family, while my Wonderful Wife worked in our home, doing a much harder job of loving and shaping our children...
A few years in, corporate policy demanded we remove all jewelry at work.
To stay employed I would have to take off my wedding ring...
The child's promise made a quarter of a century before continued to haunt me, as I tried to hide how the thought of that act was churning my insides and terrifying the still naive boy within. My brain, my " philosophies" badgered and bullied him into acquiescence...
And not a day has went by since, that I haven't looked at the empty space on my left finger without a smidgen of sadness that I couldn't intelligently explain.
And that is why now, after having put it back on my hand a few months ago,something deep inside of my heart or soul or psyche- maybe all three of them, are in unison, calmly saying no...
Having finally held my wife's hand again across a dinner table, seeing her dark eyes illuminated by a flickering candle flame, her fingers entwined in mine, and the gentle glint from the stones in both our rings; hands so intricately meshed that we could hardly tell where hers began and mine ended...
I cannot fathom how to let that all go...
My Wife will love me whether i wear a ring or not. I would love and adore her if no jewelry ever touched her skin again; Im not afraid that not wearing a ring will affect our covenant, because in truth it was fulfilled by a God immensely larger than any shaped metal and stone.
It is not fear I feel, of that child after all...
Just sadness...
I'm going back to work in a few days and by policy, must remove this ring again...
And the same choice I made when they instituted this rule, I'm going to have choose again. I can't not work; I need to provide for my Wonderful Wife and McMonkeys three...
In a world full of chaos and violence, in the perspective of a million real problems, in the life of people living , hungry and afraid, this doesn't even count as a shadow of an actual problem. In context, this should not matter at all...
But it does...
Where the ring has been all this summer has left a fleshy white band beneath the metal, faint enough to not immediately catch ones eye, but defined enough, if you look.
Maybe God Graced me with this gentle reminder, to soften my silly sentimentality...
Maybe even in the little things, He Loves us, lifting up these tiny personal sadnesses, using them as examples to show us that even our hurts imperceptible and trivial to the rest of the world, He feels worthy to lovingly touch...
I like to think that...
It gives me comfort.
Maybe that's the point...
