Thing Number One | Jewelry

I wear three rings. Funny thing, whenever I get a new student clinician from Loma Linda University, I skim through the list of things required of LLU student clinicians and grin when I see that such students are to wear rings on one finger of one hand only. And even that was a concession from a Seventh Day Adventist institution that doesn’t really approve of wedding rings at all. Strong SDA brides and grooms exchange watches on their wedding days.

But I’m not SDA and I’m not a student clinician, even though I’m an LLU alum, and I wear three rings:  two on the ring finger of my left hand and one on the middle finger of my right hand. All three are from Jon (who, by the way, was compliant with this requirement when he was an LLU student clinician and wore just the one ring on the ring finger of his left hand and that one ring was from me).

First ring | My engagement ring. Jon gave me this ring the day after my twenty-second birthday. I was kind of expecting it but, as always, he made me wait and took me through a fabulous day of driving up PCH, stopping at Mission Santa Barbara and Mission San Luis Obispo, eating lunch at an adorable restaurant, and finally ending up on beautiful Moonstone Beach in Cambria with me crying in the car because I thought I’d gotten it all wrong and he wasn’t really going to propose. You’d think I’d be used to this kind of behavior, almost eighteen years later, but I almost ended up in tears last Christmas Day because the diamond and sapphire bar pin I’d been mooning over for months was the very last gift he gave me and I’d given up hope of its appearing.

Second ring | My wedding ring. Dad took Jon to the Jewelry District in Los Angeles to buy my engagement and wedding rings (so sweet). Jon picked out the diamond (a little over three-quarters of a carat) and two bands. One of the bands was used as the base for my engagement ring and the other was my wedding ring. Both rings are white gold. My mother’s wedding set is white gold and I’ve always thought diamonds looked better in white gold than in yellow gold. Jon and I got our rings engraved as our first anniversary gift to each other:  engagement ring “JDP to MJB 9/24/94”, my wedding ring “JDP to MJP 8/19/95”, and his wedding ring “ MJP to JDP 8/19/95”.

Third ring | My tenth anniversary diamond band. We spent our tenth anniversary at Huntington Gardens in San Marino and Jon gave me this ring at the end of the day, of course, while we were at dinner. See? I should be used to this. This ring is precious to me because it symbolizes ten years of choosing to stay together and love each other even after the sweetness of young love and the magic of the wedding has worn off. We’d gone through career struggles, health issues, and the non-appearance of the baby we’d thought we’d already have. But every day, we chose to draw together and love each other. Almost seven years since he gave me my anniversary ring and almost seventeen years since he gave me my wedding ring and we are still choosing to love each other. And I wear my rings as the symbol of that daily choice.