By David Anderson
My wedding ring saved my finger.
My wife’s played a part in saving her life.
Sometimes, lost in thought, I’ll catch myself absently twisting and turning it round and round. My best friend of 48-years-marriage made it herself.
Cast from a simple circle of wax melted away in the white-hot heat of a furnace and replaced by molten gold, the ring got caught one day in the closing of a car door. I hollered – more for effect as it turned out once I discovered I wasn’t hurt – and from then on, it’s been bent out of shape and won’t slip over the knuckle.
On the other hand – that of my wife’s – her “token-of-commitment-that-you-will-keep-these-vows” had to be cut away when the emergency room staff became alarmed at the purplish color angrily spreading beyond the diamond of her rapidly swelling finger.
The bees did not take kindly to her traipsing through their territory – a neglected pile of brush and leaves in our yard which they had laid claim to, but with which bees she had begged to differ.
They won.
Almost.
Stung over and over – and over again – the bees in her hair and in her clothes, she threw up on the way to the hospital. Everywhere. Windshield, dashboard, clothing, all inundated.
And she was becoming unresponsive.
I was losing her.
They rushed her in, hooked her up to all manner of whatever, and then noticed the restriction caused by the ring.
One Christmas, now many years back, she picked out a replacement given that the ‘never ending circle’ of hers had ended.
Occasionally, not often enough, I’ll hold her hand and reflect on what matters most.
Like the time in the parking lot of the underground garage below the high rise medical facility where we had an appointment for x-rays, to determine why – sometimes in the middle of the freeway, sometimes behind the shopping cart at the grocery store – her eyesight would completely shut down and her world would go totally dark, a disaster in the making in either case. Everything immediately in front of her and all around her would disappear.
Then, in what seemed like an eternity but usually was an interminable second or two – although at 60 mph a lot can happen in 88 feet per second – it would all come back.
But not this time.
The elevator doors opened, and I stepped inside but she didn’t join me.
She wasn’t there.
With the honking horns of busy mid-day traffic without, and the unfamiliarity of the underground garage where cars could be heard coming and going within – somewhere very close to where she was – she stood stock still beside the passenger door.
She couldn’t see.
It had returned.
Silently cursing myself for being so insensitive, while at the same time realizing I too had only recently been thrust into this unfamiliar dark and most unfriendly and unwanted world certainly not of our choosing, I retraced my steps and took her hand and we crossed together.
Whether it’s marriage or family or church or community, or any organization or business concerning that which matters most, our eyesight often blurs.
Of what we are mostly to be about, priorities and principles that trump all else, the grid through which we filter how we respond and the decisions we make, an ancient proverb reads:
Bind them in your heart, tie them around your neck, fasten them securely around your finger.
Those are commitments that have a ring to them.