Ironwood

For most of my marriage I didn't wear a wedding ring.

Not a statement. A practical matter. A metal band bites when you pull a heavy bar off the floor. It catches on things when you're under a car, and there are places you should never put a hand wearing metal while an engine is anywhere near alive. My hands have always worked for a living, even when the living came from somewhere else. I've built motors. I once built a big, honestly kind of fancy chicken coop from a picture in my head, with a pencil, a square, a skill saw, and a hammer drill. Nobody handed me plans. The plans were the picture.

I've struggled with ADHD and the working memory that comes with it for as long as I can remember. My head loses things. But my hands remember. Whatever the picture is, if I can get it into my hands, it gets built. I stopped being ashamed of that a long time ago. It's just the shape of me.

So for most of our marriage there was no ring, and the years went by, and the marriage held anyway, because a marriage was never a ring.

The second ring

A while back my wife gave me a new one. Wood this time. Ironwood, with a line engraved on it, borrowed from You and I, by SYML:

and we lived to laugh about it

The wood is not a downgrade from metal. I didn't know that until I looked.

Ironwood is not a species. It's a name a tree has to earn. It gets given to a handful of trees around the world whose wood is so dense that a piece of it drops in water and sinks, wood that fights nails and dulls saw blades, wood you shape slowly or not at all. The one I keep thinking about is the desert ironwood, which grows in one desert on Earth and nowhere else. It can live eight hundred years, and likely longer than that. And then there is what ecologists call it: a nurse tree. In a landscape that kills most seedlings before their first summer, the shade under an ironwood is about ten degrees cooler, the soil under it a little richer, and so hundreds of other species get their start under its canopy. The hardest wood in the desert is the thing everything else grows up under.

You can see why a person might get quiet, turning a ring of that name around on a finger.

And the practical part: wood doesn't bite. It's warm to the touch. It doesn't care about a barbell and it doesn't conduct anything. It isn't a ring that asks my life to hold still so I can wear it. It's one made for the hands I actually have. There's a word for that and the word is known. Being loved is one thing. Being known is the rarer thing, and the proof of it is always specific: it fits, exactly, the person you actually are instead of the person you'd be easier to shop for.

The line it carries

The song says it plainly. You climb the thing, you fall down the thing, and you live to laugh about it.

What I notice about that line is the tense. You can't laugh about it during. During, it's just the climbing and the falling. The laughing only exists afterward, when the two of you look back at the same stretch of road and find it funny now, because you crossed it together and you're still here. I wrote once about the two clocks, the one that runs while things happen and the one that runs in the rearview. The engraving lives entirely on the second clock. It's a bet, written in the hardest wood there is, that the story ends with both of us laughing.

I read this ring differently than I read the first one. To me it's a reminder, and it's on the hand I work with, where I can't miss it. It reminds me that what I say and what I do matters. That I'm important to somebody, and that somebody is as important as I am. That's the whole truth of it, and it turns out the whole truth fits on a ring.

The younger man

There's a competitor I've gotten to know. I won't name him, and the details don't matter. What matters is the shape: younger than me, seriously dedicated to his craft, and just as dedicated to the slower, less visible work of building himself into somebody solid. The discipline shows up everywhere once you look for it. In how he practices. In how he treats people when nothing is on the line. In how he stays pointed at the thing he's building when it would be easier to drift.

People assume that between an older man and a younger one, the respect runs one way, downhill. It doesn't. I look up to him. Part of why I wanted to build alongside people like him in the first place is that watching that kind of commitment makes me better at my own. Whatever he takes on next, I'd bet on how he carries it, because you can already tell by how he carries the small things now. That's not a mystery. That's the most reliable read there is.

Commitment recognizes commitment. It's the same thing the ring reminds me of. Somebody is paying attention to how I carry the small things too.

What I do with it

For years I thought the ring question was about jewelry, and I was wrong. It was about whether the commitment had a form I could actually live in. It took somebody who knows me better than anyone to find the form: a wood hard enough to be mistaken for metal, warm instead of cold, carrying the name of trees that grow slow in hard places and let other things grow up under them. That's not a bad picture of what I'm trying to be. For her. For my kids. And it happens to be the same idea I've been building on the whole time: what you actually do, kept honestly, is worth more than anything anybody says about you.

What I say and what I do matters. Now I wear the reminder.

and we lived to laugh about it

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