"I do." The performative utterance that means somehow "I give me to you." What one gives is either explicit or implicit, and it is always changing. But from outside the negotiation, the ring is only a simple communication of the exchange, a reminder to the beloved and, as Nina sings it here, warning to the world outside. I suppose it's a classic reification, a standard country music trope, this gold band telling over and over the story of yes, but also the story of no.
What an envious dirge it is, with Nina at 25 singing "I'll rememb-errrr to my dy-ing day" over that piano-snare figure, her voice disappearing in a velvety fadeout that suggests the moan could go on until that very last minute. Funny to think of a ring as this - a life's curse as much as a promise, a phantom object worn in the mind of the dispossessed because of its material and spiritual wear on the beloved's body.
I'm not one much for possession, but today I am without two more rings promised me. I am sad for the situation, but not sad for losing them. My mother's house was robbed and the thief took the wedding rings of both her and my great-grandmother, among other things. In her tears to me she spoke of inheritance, of history, of her shame at the situation. All I could say to her, and all that was true, was that it does not matter.
They are melted hunks of gold by now, the little diamonds bent out and tossed into trays with others wretched through the violence of break-in, hold up, and other desperate, sometimes criminal, acts in my miserable hometown. It's the kind of place those Fox News 'cash for gold' ads really prey on and really, my only thought about our break in is - what took them so long? And my great-grandmother is dead, my mother is divorced, and I refuse the concept of possession on the grounds that, while Nina should sing such songs for the world, no lover suffer a feeling thwarted for my pettiness or insecurity. The envy Nina sings of scares me - she desires not sharing but a transfer of title - but I hold true that there is a way one can have a promise strong enough to withstand even such a passion as lover Nina's. And the rings were just some reminder of the way it did and didn't work before, and I have already inherited that.
We didn't invite the criminals in to our house, surely, and I would rather have some nice jewelry than not. But love is not that, and I guess it is important to keep it straight so when a disastrous phone call comes, like it did today, I can say the right thing at the right time: this is not the important thing. We have faith in our phantoms and our promises, our past and future, and we live to love each other right now. We respect the rings other people have, but we don't need them ourselves. We were free before, we are free now, and we will be free. Nothing can be stolen.
