29 August 2003

With This Ring

Paddy and Bertie met at a dance in 1930. By all accounts he was a handsome cad of nineteen who danced with all of the girls and made them laugh and she was a straightlaced, no-nonsense girl, just eighteen. When she finally accepted his request for a dance after declining for the majority of the evening, she found him much more agreeable than she had imagined, and he felt the chase had been well worth his effort. She fell head over heels in love that night. He did, too.

Their courtship was brief and Paddy and Bertie were married in a small ceremony in a tiny Catholic church in Pennsylvania in 1931. Paddy was too poor to afford an engagement ring, and could not even afford a wedding ring of his own. He gave his wife a plain, thin band of silver on their wedding day, a ring rumored to have been purchased at Woolworth�s department store. They moved into the flatiron building in their small town and each day Paddy walked the four miles to work. He was a butcher while Bertie stayed at home to make a comfortable nest for her new family which included the baby girl that would arrive, unexpectedly early and while on vacation, in December 1932.

The handsome cad, his straightlaced wife, and their imaginative daughter, Ginny, lived a poor but happy life during the Depression and World War II. Any money Paddy and Bertie managed to save was spent on their daughter and on yearly vacations to New York City to shop on 5th Avenue, to see Broadway shows and to enjoy the big city life. The trips continued until Ginny was in High School and too grown for family vacations, when she was going to dances of her own.

Though Paddy passed away unexpectedly in 1953, when Bertie was only 41, she never remarried. Bertie also never took her plain, silver band off of her finger until she had her first serious illness and her fingers were too swollen for it to fit. I remember her opening her top dresser drawer, pulling out a wooden jewelry box, and showing the ring to me -- Ginny�s daughter and Bertie�s only granddaughter.

Bertie told me about how her husband was a good man, a good father and a friend that she missed very much. The ring was magical to me. It held so many secrets, in my mind, of the grandfather I knew only in pictures, his handsome face smiling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City or holding my mother on his shoulders on top of a building in Brooklyn, my grandmother laughing beside him in shots. Their amazing and happy life came without fanfare and flash, without diamonds and grand houses, without new cars and white linen-clad vacations in Cape Cod. I admired them. I admired the ring.

When Bertie died in October of 1985 I was asleep in her bed, wearing the Dire Straits t-shirt I got at my first concert just thirteen days before. My father woke me in the morning to tell me she had passed, and I opened her dresser drawer and wooden box and took the ring before my mother could bury it with Bertie. After the funeral and our trip back to our house in NJ I hid the ring in my pink jewelry box.

I take the ring out now every once in a while and look at it, put it on my finger, and imagine what it would be like to find that simple and true love that Bertie and Paddy had. One day I may. If I do, I already have my ring. My handsome cad has that cut out for him.

Thanks to Kate for the idea. Bertie would love you.