The Ring Cycle

It's coming.  Actually, it's coming next summer, but the way the San Francisco Opera is carrying on, you would think the whole cast of horn-helmeted, spear-carrying Norsemen was already claiming their bags at the airport.  They're not.  And the prospect of shelling out hundreds of dollars to endure something interminable, humorless and German...a redundancy, I know...well it seems downright silly.  

The problem is, I am actually an ignoramus here.  I have never attended a Wagner opera, dismissing the genre along the lines of Woody Allen's quip about invading Poland.  When in truth, what do I know?  I have heard a bit of Wagner on the radio, and it does surge.  In fact, it seems to surge on and on, the way the Magic Fingers do at Motel 6.  Again, I should shut up.  In fact, I really should shut up, because so many friends of mine, people of depth, insist that Wagner is an utter delight.  I need to shut my mouth, grit my teeth and buy a ticket or two.

Besides, even an anti-Semitic asshole like Wagner can know a good thematic thing when he sees it.  Rings do hold their power.  After my divorce, mercifully almost 20 years ago, I did not know what to do with the former wedding ring.  It seemed wrong to throw away.  Being gold, after all.  Hang on to it, some said.  You can make something else from it, some other sort of jewelry.  This seemed extraordinarily unlikely.  Besides, I didn't want the silly thing forged into something new.  I really wanted to get rid of it.  Funny thing about rings.  You can't.  So the erstwhile wedding ring sat in a compartment in my desk drawer, right there next to the paperclips and gummed three-ring punch hole protectors.  Both being rings.  Showing that I am not devoid of logic.

Marlou's thing with rings...well, it was an overwhelming fact of our marriage.  Strangely, this much fiercer saga began with a divorce.  Hers.  Marlou's mother gave her soon-to-be-divorced daughter the gift of a family heirloom.  It came, I believe, from Marlou's great-grandmother, a native of Sweden, and a woman before her time.  She immigrated to this country, itself a bold move.  And she came alone.  She married at some point, lived somewhere around Chicago, and when things domestic did not pan out, got divorced.  This, in an era when people just didn't do that sort of thing.  Particularly women.  I may have a detail or two wrong here, but as in all things with rings, it's the spirit that counts.

It was rather a magnificent antique ring, the one that Marlou wore.  Full of family history.  And pulsing with some burden of family psychology that eluded both of us.  Marlou began dreaming about the ring.  At times, she dreamt that she had lost it.  At other times, an intruder broke into our bedroom and stole it away.  Frequently, she simply rose in the middle of the night, walked to the wardrobe and made sure it was still there, where she put it, always put it, when retiring.

The problem with powerful dreams is that they scream for consciousness.  They impel us toward some sort of knowledge, and if they get in our way, we begin screaming ourselves.  Which soon began to happen.  The dreams turned into nightmares, content the same...ring loss, ring theft...but cranked up in volume and terror.  Marlou began waking and screaming in the night.  I'd had just enough psychoanalysis myself to feel frustrated, anxious and concerned as the nightmares took over.  But Marlou wasn't one for too much inner delving.  She accepted the nightmares.  Life went on, despite the occasional violent interruption at night.  Now and then on holiday, we would find ourselves returning to a hotel room in search of the ring.  Which miraculously was never actually lost.  Whatever its meaning, the centrality and mythic power of Marlou's ring seemed beyond doubt.

As for our wedding rings, Marlou had custom ones made.  Somehow this fell to her.  In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why.  Perhaps I was feeling a bit ring-shy.  Marlou went to a local jeweler, a Chinese-American man, purchased what she wanted and returned with something more.  Stories.  The man was full of tales of marriage, generally instructive, supportive.  She was a shy woman, Marlou, intensely private, yet she could open her heart in extraordinary ways.  Perhaps she needed a baseline of formality, some sort of politesse that established trust, even credibility, a foundation for a personal exchange within an impersonal container.  I probably know something about this myself.

So what to do with this, the next ring?  Ring #2.  Something about this, the loss of two relationships counted in jewelry, bothered me.  I was quite certain that the first wedding ring was still in my desk drawer.  In fact, in the left divider, adjacent to keys or something with an equally infinite shelf life.  Whenever I finally removed my wedding ring, the good marriage's symbolic remnant...the thing would get plunked down next to its predecessor.  Both gold.  No sense in throwing them away.  Waste not, want not.

I asked the young rabbi I see occasionally, my grief guide.  What does one do with wedding rings after death of a spouse?  Nothing, he said.  No need to deal with that now.  I was enormously relieved.  He's an intuitive guy, this rabbi.  Enough stress already.  The ring would sort itself out.

Every few months I would stare at the ring and wonder.  Why am I still wearing this?  Does it mean I cannot let go?  Does it mean I am living in the past?  Is this ring retention in honor of Marlou?  All that sort of thing, not to mention the social impact.  Did people think I was still married?  Why not?  What would be wrong with that?  And then I would forget the whole thing.  The ring did not get in the way.  Literally or symbolically.  Who knew what people thought?  And who cared?

Jane cared about me, that was increasingly clear.  And I cared about her.  The ring?  I must have mentioned it a time or two.  She understood.  It would sort itself out.  I did not want to be pushed.  That much I knew.  The whole death experience had been pushing me for over a year, for several years, in fact, as soon as the diagnosis.  Fuck the ring.  Or so it seemed.  But that's the thing about rings, the ring thing.  Their power, in one form or another, never wanes.  One has to give Wagner credit for forging an enduring franchise.  No pun intended.

It would be time to take off the ring, when it was time to take off the ring.  And on one recent day when the topic arose, I knew what to do.  I asked Jane to slip it off my finger.  Was I being pushed?  I am highly sensitive in this arena, and a full body scan revealed no such pressure.  It was time.  And it was time to get some help.  One doesn't have to do everything alone, and one shouldn't.  After a year together, Jane and I, and not always an easy one, overshadowed as it has been by grief, it was time to move the ring cycle to its next stage.

My desk drawer, of course.  Right next to the divorced ring.  Except that time, bad memory and fate had already moved things along.  I couldn't find the divorced ring.  All I could find was Marlou's.  Someone had removed it from her finger.  And I had placed it, wisely and carefully, in a small plastic bag.  Where the next one went.  The two together, memorial to a marriage, honoring the past.  Not forgotten, just no longer used.  Nevermind the ring.  For now there's just a finger with a white tan line.  All it needs is a few days in the sun.