A Life Defined By More Than A Wedding Ring

I was a student. I was a girlfriend. I was a wife. I was a tennis player. I was a cheerleader. I was a granddaughter. I was a backpacker. I was a sports writer. I was a friend. I was younger.

The camera-in-a-box put a simple tool in the hands of tourists for capturing memories.

Wife standing on the shore of Lake Louise with the snow-covered Rocky Mountains as a backdrop. Click.

Kids splashing in the waves pushed across the flat sand of Cannon Beach. Click.

Girlfriend laughing with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. Click.

Hawaii. Click. Acapulco. Click. Paris. Click.

Some moments of our lives - the ones we plan to remember - come in expected places, usually in the two-week space we carve out from all life’s details to create those moments. We go on vacation. We take photos and buy postcards. And when we dive back into the details, we pause long enough to share the moments with good friends and patient co-workers, then put them away. That’s done for the year, another task crossed off the long list, as though part of life’s duties is banking memories to withdraw in our old age much like funding a 401K.

The year we went to Colorado to ski. Click. The year we camped in Yellowstone. Click. The year we stayed home and built a deck. Click.

But somehow, somewhere, the details of life eclipsed the memories in those snapshots, and to think that old age would consist of only those vacation memories became frightening. The mental images and the context of where these vacations fit into real life melted away across the years.

At Christmas, my parents dug out the family slides of vacations to Seattle and Glacier National Park, to the beaches of Washington and Vancouver, B.C.; as they flashed on the screen they seemed void of any experience I remembered. I had no memory of these spaces in my teen years.

When I put college behind me for the first time, and began taking grown-up vacations, I played in Mexico and San Francisco, I went on safari in East Africa and toured the castles of Denmark. Now, though, I can call forth only snapshots from those trips that seemed at the time so large they could define who I was. Somewhere I learned that life’s details endured long after the vacation glow dimmed.

And I learned it in an unexpected place.

During some of the time I dashed across the map as a traveler and as a sports writer, I was also a wife. Other women in my acquaintance had been and no longer were wives. And I recall wondering at their moving the wedding ring from left to right hand in what appeared a seamless maneuver. Why did they hang on to the role after the curtain closed? Was the fact of once having had a husband better than never having had one? Did the diamond continue to announce this status and these women continue to define themselves as ex-wife? Was it akin to pulling out a photo album constantly as a way of remembering happier times?

Then, somewhere along the way I stopped writing about football games, I stayed on this continent to vacation, I became single again. And I put the wedding ring into a small box where I kept my rings: the abalone ring my parents bought me when I was 5 and we vacationed in the California Redwoods, the aquamarine birthstone ring my grandmother gave me on my 10th birthday, the aquamarine birthstone ring my boyfriend gave me on my 16th birthday, the ring I had made with tanzanite I bought in an alley in Mombasa, Kenya.

When I want to shorten the distance to my past, I slip on the abalone ring, which fit my thumb at 5 and now is snug on my little finger. Or I slide the birthstone ring from my grandmother onto my wedding ring finger because that’s the only one it fits. And after some of the pain of no longer being a wife dulled, I put the diamond ring on my right hand to see if that persona still fit at all. It did, but the ring got stuck. So I wore it for four months and during that time came to understand a life wisdom that so many before me and around me already knew: It’s not the big moments we purposefully create that define us. Rather it’s the details between those moments. I weave all those details into my life and that shapes who I am. It’s just that simple.

I am a daughter. I am a girlfriend. I am a sister. I am a writer. I am a teacher. I am a friend. I am a hiker. I am older.

, DataTimes MEMO: Susan English is the Weekend Editor at The Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5488 or at susane@spokesman.com

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