At the dining room table, while we were watching the women’s volleyball game at the Olympics, she touched my arm.
“Can you reach the salt?”
I passed the salt.
Then out of the blue, she said, “You don’t wear your wedding ring anymore, do you?”
I stopped chewing my lasagna.
“What?”
“Your wedding ring. You don’t wear it anymore.”
I glanced at my hand, spilling sauce on my lap.
Why was she suddenly noticing?
Aha! She’s not wearing hers.
Of course, I’ve long known that she doesn’t wear rings at all anymore. She has arthritis in her hands, and rings either kept slipping off, or, when the weather changed, she couldn’t remove them.
“What’s this about?”
“I just noticed.”
“Is this about that woman in the market who was flirting with me?”
“Oh, please.”
“You don’t think I’m still desirable?”
“Of course you are.”
“Then what’s this about?”
“I just noticed.”
I knew it was about the woman in the market who flirted with me. Have we come to this finally, at this late age?
So at this point in our 62 years, just as I was enjoying the women’s volleyball event, she’s checking me out?
This opened up the whole “where is your ring?” thing again, as it does every five to 10 years.
“We’ve been here for 37 years. Don’t you think everyone knows we’re married?”
“Where is yours?” I stupidly asked.
“I can’t find it.”
It’s an old story. It goes like this.
We had finished a road tour of a play called, of all things, “The Marriage Go-Round,” and had wound up in St. Louis, my hometown. At a family gathering, I introduced her as my “Someday when we get settled we’ll get married” girlfriend.
It went well. Everyone loved her, and everyone asked the same question. “When will that be?”
“Someday when we get settled,” I said. Stock answer.
But this changed things.
We were waiting for a bus in the cold, and she suddenly turned to me.
“OK, we’re getting married now, or you’re going to have to find your own apartment.”
“You mean move out? OK, this winter.”
“No sir, now.”
J.P. Devine places a wedding ring on the finger of his wife Kay in 1962. The Devines took off their rings because of their acting careers, and both of them lost their rings the following year while touring in a play “Invitation to a March.” Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
So we took two buses down to City Hall and got married by Judge Tammany. We still have the bus transfer. Done. We were married. No moving out.
The next day, my brother bought us our first gold wedding rings at a jeweler’s in east St. Louis.
Wouldn’t you know it: both of us lost them the following year while touring in another play, “Invitation to a March.”
This was life in the theater. If you weren’t playing a married couple, you had to take your rings off and put makeup to cover the white ring mark on the finger.
Because we weren’t yet used to wedding rings, or even, for that matter, being married, we left them in a dressing room in another city.
She did that once. I did it three times.
Six decades later, and finally “settled,” we decided to end this “ring-go-round.” We renewed our vows in the soon-to-be-event center Sacred Heart Church in Waterville, Maine.
In preparation, we bought our new gold rings from Lionel Tardiff on Main Street.
End of story? No. At the dinner table, we discovered that we can’t find them.
“Where the blazes are they?”
“I can’t find mine. Where’s yours?
“I don’t know. I can’t find it.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Is Lionel Tardiff still open?”
Pass the salt.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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