The Engagement Ring
It lived many lives. At the jewelry store, my grandfather picked it out for my grandmother (she was dating someone else when they met, but Pop-Pop stole her away). In 1943 they married. In Brooklyn the family flourished as four completely different children filled their adult lives along with law and teaching, alumni sports, and eventually grandchildren. Their love story slowed, but did not end, in 1984 when pancreatic cancer quickly claimed my grandmother. Claire. From 1984 to 2004, Pop-Pop stayed in the house alone, heartbroken, still dusting notes tucked in the sides of mirrors. “My Dear Claire,” they all began, and “XOXOXO” they all ended.
In 2001, my cousin Chris used the ring to promise a lifetime of love and family to his girlfriend. It was reborn in the personalization: “To Sarah, Love Chris 2001.” Their wedding was beautiful; their marriage was not. She reluctantly parted with the ring after the separation. Aunt Mary, Chris’s mother and Grandma and Pop-Pop’s only daughter, became the ring-guarder once again. Her notions of her sons using it in the distance, it was tucked away for years in a keepsake box.
Pop-Pop started to deteriorate mentally in 2003. A slow decline, I think his brain finally broke as his heart did so many years ago. Everyone knows that Pop-Pop ended all phone calls by saying, “Kisses!” and smooching the receiver. Towards the end, he would forget that he had already done this, so he would repeat the declaration and kissing sounds over and over again, and the caller would be showered with affection before hanging up.
When he died a little over a year ago, it was twenty minutes after I left the room. He was a consummate gentleman until the sad end. Returning the next day to support my father in managing the services and his grief, my aunt pulled me aside and placed the ring in my palm. I could not find words.
The ring is not modern in style. The center of the ring features a half-carat round-cut diamond. There is a chip in the diamond; only my grandmother had the strength to damage the hardest natural substance known to humankind. It is held in place by soft claws that reach over each of the four corners. When viewed from the side, it reminds me of the Chrysler Building. Extending out from the center are three diamond chips beaded into place on both sides. It is a modest ring, but it has more character than the popular rings today. That my grandfather chose this ring for her meant that he knew her. He knew what she liked and didn’t like, and he sought to please her with both the proposal and his acute ability to pick out a ring that suited her perfectly.
And it was perfect. Except it didn’t fit my finger. And it still had the engraving of the wedding past. I married my husband in 2004, so my ring finger was already adorned with a simple band and engagement ring. Should I wear this new treasure around my neck? Should I keep it in my jewelry box and save it for one of my children? Should I take the existing diamonds out and fit them onto my ring? None of these options seemed to honor the memory of the love that brought the ring into our family, so I brought it to the jeweler uptown with a new plan for an old ring.
My grandfather’s last words were “I love everyone.” He professed this before he went silent. His eyes were closed for days so he could not discern the depressed place he was living in, a pit stop before hospice. “I love everyone,” he said, and I believe him.
I had the ring resized to fit my ring finger. My wedding band is surrounded by promises of love, as I wear it between the ring my husband gave me and the ring my family gave me. The engraving now reads, “Kisses.” A bit ostentatious, I don’t mind the curious looks people give my now-heavier left hand. It gives me a chance to tell them about my Grandma and Pop-Pop, their lives together, and his legacy of absolute affection.
On Self-Torture
1986
“Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. It may be…absorbing…racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
–Edna Ferber
I was six years old when I got my first diary. It was from G Willikers, the ultimate gift store for a girl between six and twelve years old. My name was hand-written on the clear plastic bag, and purple and yellow tissue paper exploded out of the top, a visual promise of an incredible, life-changing present. My visions of filling it with daily musings dizzied me with glee and I carried it around during the rest of my birthday party, clutching it to my chest in a hopeful embrace.
That night I opened it, the plastic crackling as the blank pages fanned out before me. “Dear Diary,” I began. I wrote briefly about my birthday party and then stopped. What else was there to write about? Nothing good—there were things I could write about, but they weren’t things I wanted to remind myself of as I aged. They would not induce knee-slapping laughter or gentle smiles later in life. Still, there had to be something …
Mildly aware that my only audience was my future self, I struggled with who “Diary” was and the purpose of recording what I not uncynically perceived to be a relatively monotonous life. I was not connected to why I was writing or what difference it made. The whole process felt fake, and given how excited I was to write, I was crushed. After two days, I quit completely, unnerved by a self-imposed notion that to be a writer, I should at least be able to write in my diary every day without problem or complaint. My first of many failures. I hated writing.
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1986
“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.” –Sholem Asch
Something happened between the day I started hating writing and the day I decided to go back to it. I was in kindergarten and we were asked to write and draw about dinosaurs. I was hesitant to touch pencil to paper after my dramatic failure three months previous, but this time I had a decent catalog of facts and phrases from intense self-initiated study at home. I drafted the piece, writing from an excess of knowledge and images. We rewrote the pieces on special paper and our teacher, Ms. McElwin, mounted them on construction paper and bound them by hand in a book. She read them aloud as we sat, mouths agape and rapt with attention, on the meeting rug, and she placed them securely on her desk for our parents to peruse on conference night. It was official. I was a published author.
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2006
“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” –Joseph Heller
My students often assume that writing is easy for me, but I remind them to watch me while I write, reread, write another paragraph, reread, and so on. My face betrays what I am really feeling: when I don’t like a word I have chosen, I scrunch my nose as if it smells bad, and I bite at my cuticles or tug at my lips while I agonize over it, willing a better word to come out verbally, if not directly from my brain onto the paper. I squint as I imagine reorganizing my musings before committing to rewrite my entire piece.
Sometimes I catch people staring at me when I write in public, probably curious about the noxious odor that I seem to perceive. Sometimes after revising, the inside of my mouth is raw from my damaging deliberations. Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep at night, I regret that despite many revisions, I should have stuck with the third version of paragraph two or experimented draft three with the conclusion from draft four.
Writing is painful for me. This awareness started to percolate during my undergraduate career and it became particularly self-evident during my pursuit of a Master’s degree. From 2003-2006, I wrote many analytical essays on poetry—Victorians, Romantics, Moderns, I did not discriminate. The grade I received on my final essay in my final poetry class was the best I received all semester, and it was accompanied, as usual, by poignant and insightful feedback. My heart (and nose, and cheeks, and sleep schedule) cared little for the grade but for the single word the professor used to describe what she thought my writing process must be: “painstaking.” In that word, she summed up, acknowledged, and validated all of my cheek-biting, lip-tugging work I had done.
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2008
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” –Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith
My problem is simple. I am hard on myself when I write. When I was six, I made the mistake of having expectations for my diary writings that were unnecessary, and frankly boring. As an adult, I recognize the different stages of the writing process, so I allow myself freedom to think, plan, cross out and explore when I write. Still, as Mem Fox says, I “ache with caring” about each word and its placement. It is painful and annoying and frustrating. But I can’t get away from it.
The writing process is recursive in nature. I do few major revisions at the end of writing a piece because I have rewritten it eight times over by the time I have finished the first draft. I experienced disappointment when I was six, but I returned because something drew me to putting pen on paper. In every piece I write, the uncomfortable knotting of my stomach returns, but I go through it because at the end of the day, I need to cut off a piece of me and see it strewn across a page.
And as Dorothy Parker concisely quipped, “I hate writing. I love having written.”
Shirt Design / Slogan
Please comment on this entry with your ideas for our HVWP SI ‘08 shirts. I will compile the sugestions and we will consider them next week.
“Shut up and write!”
