Three years ago I got married. My wife put a ring on it. This ring.
She didn’t buy it. And I didn’t buy it. It came from my mother.
It was her mother’s. I’m wearing my grandmother’s ring.
That’s weird to write.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. I was meant to wear my grandfather’s ring.
And, I am in a way.
Let me explain.
Poppa, as we called him, died before I moved to Portland—12 years ago.
My grandma died a few years later. But before she did, she told my mom she wanted me to have his ring.
So, when I was planning to marry, I asked my mom to bring the ring to me in Oregon.
When we sat down together and I tried it on, it didn’t fit. Poppa has sausage fingers. See, he worked with his hands for 99 years—right up until the end. I put on the ring he wore during his nearly 70 years of marriage to my grandma and it felt like a bracelet. There was no way I was going pull it off. Mainly because it fell off.
I was bummed. But my mom to the rescue. Like the trained magician she is, she pulled out from no where this ring, which looks like a man’s band.
She said it was my grandma’s. And I was confused. I looked at the inside and saw the initials W.K. (William Keil, Poppa had no middle name) and CHL (Caroline Hedges Keil), my grandma’s initials. Engraved, also, was 9-7-’40, the day they got married.
I could tell Poppa had had his hands on this ring. He made jewelry after he retired and there were tiny hammer marks on the outside of the two bands that make up the one ring. The bands look silver but it says 14K on the inside, so I assume it’s gold.
I play with the ring a lot and look at it from time to time and think of them—my grandparents, whom taught me many things, who are gone but not forgotten, who are fading form my memory the more that time passes.
I think that it's special that I get to wear their ring. The one she wore, and the one he worked on.
That their ring is our ring.
I think of the two of us and the four of us coming together like these two silver looking gold bands are coming together.
That their ring is our ring.
I think of the two of us and the four of us coming together like these two silver looking gold bands are coming together.
This ring that touches the vein in my finger connected my heart.