Ah, Yes: The Ring and What It Symbolizes

  • By Mike Dewey
  • February 16, 2014
  • 406
                        
SUMMARY: Everyone's probably familiar with Gollum and his "My Precious" intonation from "The Hobbit," but Mike Dewey has a new take on the ring-toss game. OK, ladies. This one’s for you. Have you ever gotten so angry with the man you married or were engaged to or were dating or were going steady with or with whom you had shared a malted milkshake or a simple smile across a grade-school classroom that you simply couldn’t see straight and decided to quit the whole thing? Just leave it all behind and start fresh? Sure you have. That’s, after all, the genesis of all the great literature, movies and music the world has ever known. Not that we have a monopoly on broken hearts but, being a guy, I have to write what I know. That’s why my words appear here every week. I tell stories. Some of them are hideously bad and others or hilariously funny, but what they have in common is that every word I write is (mostly) true. So what we’re going to talk about this week is rings and how a token of love and affection can be turned into an instrument of hate and destruction in the time it says for a man to say, “Slow down a minute, honey.” That never works. When a woman wants to exercise her fury, nothing can stop her. That kind of tangible demonstration of her complex amalgam of being simultaneously let down and utterly disillusioned is a force of human nature and is best left to run its course. Which is, naturally, why I always ignore my own wisdom and veer off the main road of conventional thought and end up, usually, in the ditch: still, nothing ventured … I was listening to NPR the other morning, just driving around, and I heard a stat I found very interesting. It was a sex survey. On the average, men said they’d had 10 partners over a lifetime; women, on the other hand, admitted to 7. A LITTLE WHILE LATER, the “Car Talk” show came on a guy from Vermont, I think, said that he and his wife had bought a Toyota from another couple that had to relocate to Chicago or some such big city because of a job transfer. So far, so boring. But then, it got fascinating. Turns out, the woman in the selling half of the equation had gotten so PO’d at her fiancée – for reasons that weren’t spelled out – that she’d peeled off her engagement ring and flung it with extreme force against the windshield of the moving car. It then, following the rules of gravity, disappeared into a dashboard vent, never to be seen again. The woman, it seems, had a history of such displays of Nolan Ryan temper and that her fiancée was quite used to it, having pulled his token of affection from koi ponds and wishing wells and, once, a Port-a-John. “Who am I to judge?” I thought to myself as the story unspoiled. “After all, I had a girlfriend who drowned my high school class ring in the muddy Scioto River, never to be seen again.” Then the Vermont buyer asked the Clack-It Brothers the real question. “If I find it,” he said, “what should I do, since the guy asked me to send it back to him. They’d taken it to a garage and had mechanics search for it, but it never turned up.” “That engagement ring is gone,” said one the hosts. “It’s history. A mechanic pocketed it and probably got married six months later.” The caller seemed taken aback by that kind of mercenary behavior. “Maybe I should try to find it, anyway,” he said. “I mean, it could still be there.” “It’s not there,” said the other host. “Haven’t you ever been with a woman who threw away a ring you gave her?” A long pause ensued. “Good point,” he said, and ended the call. IF I’M BEING HONEST, I’ve lost track of the number of times that my wife has yanked off her engagement and/or wedding rings and fired them off into what she figured was symbolic oblivion. I’m used to it; in fact, I can anticipate it. Nothing’s more predictable than dealing with something that’s happened again and again. It must have been the way my mother felt when, as a nine-year-old punk, I kept thinking I could get away with using my brother’s head as a toilet plunger. Still, a young guy gets used to having his mouth washed out with soap, though to this day, I can’t deal with a bar of Ivory – even those micro samples in hotel bathrooms --without suffering severe hallucinogenic flashbacks. To quote Springsteen, “You end up like a dog who’s been beat so much, you spend half your life just covering up.” So I know the ring-toss game. My wife tore off both her engagement and wedding rings the other afternoon as we were driving into town but, being a former first baseman, I was able to deflect them enough so that they stayed inside the vehicle, having come to land in plain sight on the floor of her Honda CRV. What was it about, you might ask? What set her off? That’s a territory I’m not even going to trespass upon, but if I admit that it was all my fault, that should suffice. I’m far from perfect, though I have tried to be a good husband. I make more mistakes than I care to admit, but I do attempt to make my wife’s life better today that it was yesterday. And yet … As flawed and immature and careless and useless as I can be, there’s a small slice of my soul that’s not too ruined to share and that’s what I try to accomplish every day. At worst, I’m not worthy to share the same space with my wife. At best, I can replace those rings on her finger and say something wise like, “How about some butter pecan ice cream?” “With caramel sauce?” she asked. “Absolutely,” I said. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. Find him on Facebook.


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