One Hand in My Pocket

posted at 11:01 am
on Dec. 8, 2002

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I forgot to wear my wedding ring on Friday.  I was sitting in my office at work and I went to get my cell phone from my left front pocket, and instead of my hand getting caught on the rim like usually happens, it just slipped right in, and I knew something was wrong.

On Thursday night, I was faced with a rather harsher-than-usual cat litter box, and I decided it might be a good ounce of prevention to remove my ring before trying to lift pour bag haul dump.  I put the ring in the little tiny jeans pocket, you know, the one you can’t get a quarter back out of.

I washed my hands, watched some TV, went to bed, got out of bed the next morning, had a shower, woke up, got dressed, drove to work.  Note the lack of an item that says “Put ring back on finger, any finger.”

So there I was sitting at work, with one hand completely naked hand.  (The other hand, though ringless, was acceptably so, like Porky Pig running around without pants.)

Taking off my wedding ring is a fairly rare occurrence, basically limited to those times when it would either be dangerous (i.e. clumsily working with power tools), disgusting (removing things from inside a turkey), or just too damn itchy.

But even in those circumstances, to actually forget the thing is off, that’s super rare.

In fact, the last time I can remember I forgot, unless there’s one I’m forgetting to remember, is the day after we got back from our honeymoon.

In my defense, I was still kind of new to this whole ring thing then.  I took it off to wash the car, and it didn’t even cross my mind to put it back on.

Of course, I did remember when, later, Susie and I were at a friend’s post-wedding dinner.  I spent the whole evening with my hand in my pocket or under a napkin, worried that someone would think the honeymoon didn’t go so well.  No one asked.

Anyway, I spent the whole day at work with the same general sense of unease and a definite decline in my typing speed.  What if someone on staff saw the ring missing and assumed there was trouble at home?  Or what if they figured I was announcing I was a cheatin’ cur, and tried to “break off a piece of sugar” in the supply room? That would be awful.  Just awful.  Far too awful to even spend 20 minutes thinking about.

In the end, though, I made it home without any untoward happenings.  No one gasped and picked up the phone to page Susie a 9-1-1. And I was safe at the cafe I went to that evening for a performance by Patti Rayne, as the audience was about 40 women to 3 men.  (The guys left together.)

As soon as I got home, I looked around for the jeans and found them under the bed. I did a little jig when the ring was safely back on the finger.

Ironically, the very next day, Susie and I went to go see a preview screening of the next Lord of the Ring movie. I kept thinking “Frodo, you lucky bastard.”

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