Meaning

I’m walking, as I do pretty much every day, along the Eastern Promenade near my home in Portland, Maine, when I feel my wedding ring slip off. Luckily, my hands are in my jeans, so no harm done. I slip the ring back on without breaking stride and return to contemplating Casco Bay. I make it another ten yards or so before it happens again. When the ring slips off my finger a third time, I give up and leave it there at the bottom of my pocket. Though the jeans I’m wearing are relatively new, I double-check anyway to make sure there’s no hole in the pocket. Having read Tolkien, I know some rings want to be lost, others to be found, and I’ve already lost one wedding ring, though that was decades ago.

The ring in my pocket doesn’t actually want anything, of course. It’s just a piece of metal and has no meaning other than what I attach to it. It’s sliding off my finger because it’s January and bitter cold and my skin is dry and—­who knows?—­maybe I’ve lost a couple pounds. As I said, it’s perfectly secure right where it is, yet here I am fretting about its safety and unable to reconcile its being in my pocket when it belongs on my finger.

My parka has a tiny pocket with a zipper, and I consider putting the ring there, but that would further distance it from the finger it’s supposed to be on. Also, the zipped pocket of my parka carries its own risks. I’m seventy-three and my memory is becoming porous. Sometimes I have to page back through whatever novel I’m working on because I can’t remember the name of a character who’s been absent from the last couple chapters. And like many men my age I too often find myself in front of the open refrigerator, peering at its contents in the hopes of spotting the reason I’m standing there. Am I even in the right place? Is what I’m looking for in the washing machine? The silverware drawer? The pantry? If I put the ring in the pocket of my parka where it can’t possibly fall out, will I forget doing so? If so, then two or three years down the road the ring will go with the parka to Goodwill, and in the meantime I’ll be left to contemplate what it means that I’ve managed to lose not one but two wedding rings. To some people—­maybe even to me—that might appear subconsciously intentional. My therapist, if I had one, would surely agree, which is why I don’t have one.

Part of the reason I’m fretting is that this would be a terrible time to lose the ring. For the last several months my wife has been suffering from headaches that we’ve been unable to diagnose. MRIs and biopsies seem to have ruled out the most terrifying scenarios, but there’s something scary about not knowing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which reacquainted all of us with mortality and the uncertainty of the future, realities that in the beforetimes we managed to sequester in the back of our brains. To lose my wedding ring at a time when my wife’s health is in question would mean something, wouldn’t it? Yes? No?

Okay, so now I’m going to tell you another story about this same ring, one you may find difficult, maybe even impossible, to believe.

As I said, my wife and I reside in Portland, but for many years we lived up the coast in Camden, where we bought a large, rambling house. It had been on the market a long time because it was old and needed a lot of work and was located on busy Route 1. The first couple years we were in it we spent a small fortune replacing windows, shoring up the back deck, updating some old knob and tube wiring so the place wouldn’t burn down, renovating the impossibly dated kitchen and purchasing new stainless-steel appliances. Money well spent, because our Camden years were wonderful. Our daughters came of age in that house, and when they went off to college and later moved away to begin their own adult lives, Barbara and I threw raucous, wine-soaked dinner parties for our friends, many of whom were also empty nesters. For the first time in my life I was able to write full-time, an unbelievable luxury. Barbara, an office administrator, got in the spirit of things by shifting gears and becoming a realtor. Summers, we had loads of visitors. Okay, life wasn’t perfect. (Did I mention the summer visitors?) I was traveling a lot and Camden was two hours from the airport in Portland, but all in all it was a magical decade and a half of good health, freedom from financial anxiety and general well-being, and it is in this happy context that I offer the story that many will disbelieve, in whole or in part.

But here goes. I’m in our renovated kitchen. I’ve just returned something to the fridge. I’m hurrying because, well, I’m always hurrying, even when there’s no reason to. When I close the

refrigerator door and head to the sink, I’m simultaneously aware of two things—that my wedding ring is not on my finger and that, just a split second before, it was. Time stops while I wait for the inevitable plink of the ring landing on the floor or a countertop. But … no plink. I examine my ring finger, half expecting to find it there, because, though I sensed its absence, I didn’t actually feel the ring slip over my knuckle and off my finger, like I would a decade later walking along the Eastern Promenade. But no, the ring is not on my finger. It seems impossible that it could be inside the refrigerator, but I check anyway.

Maybe when it slipped off my finger, it landed on something soft. A bag of spinach maybe, or a wedge of Brie. But no, it’s not in the fridge. I know this for a fact because I take every single thing out and examine the empty shelves.

When my wife returns, she finds me shining a flashlight into the garbage disposal. The ring, I’m theorizing, flew through the air, landed noiselessly on the rubber seal put there by manufacturers to keep dimwits from sticking their fingers into the disposal when it’s running, after which the ring slipped, sans plink, into the mechanism. Wildly improbable, you say? Maybe, but if you’ve read Sherlock Holmes, then you know that once all plausible explanations have been ruled out, the only remaining explanation, no matter how far-fetched, must be true. My wife has not read Sherlock Holmes and does not share his logic, and she demonstrates this by turning on the garbage disposal. I wince, fully expecting to hear the sound of my wedding ring being chewed to bits. But again … no.

I should be grateful to have been proven not just wrong but borderline lunatic, but I’m not. My wife’s explanation for the missing ring makes elegant use of Occam’s razor. The ring slipped off my finger earlier in the day, or the day before, or last week, and I’ve only now noticed its absence. I am, like my father before me, a careless man. Hadn’t I admitted as much years before when my first wedding ring went missing? Barbara had wanted to replace it with another gold-plated one, but I’d talked her out of it. The battleship-gray titanium ring we settled on instead was attractive but not terribly expensive, so that when I lost it as well, we wouldn’t feel so bad. A failure of imagination as it turns out, because here I am, staring at the stainless-steel sink of our remodeled kitchen in Camden, Maine, feeling ­really, really bad.

Now fast-forward a couple years. During this period my wife and I have discussed replacing the second ring but somehow haven’t gotten around to it. Because, really, what would be the point? I’d just lose that one, too. And since there’s no remedy for my carelessness, Barbara has had little choice but to send me out on book tours, to writers’ conferences, to the West Coast to work on film projects, as an apparent bachelor. During this same period our daughters have married and moved away. One is living in Brooklyn, the other in London. It seems unlikely they will ever live in Maine again, and with them permanently gone Camden has begun to feel remote, our large house too full of empty rooms. We think about selling the place and setting up shop in Boston or maybe on the Cape. We’ve had a great run in Camden, but all good things come to an end.

What I will miss most is the kitchen, and this is where I am when the thing you’re not going to believe happens. Once again I’m in a hurry and I go to the refrigerator, where I find what I’m looking for (back then when I opened the refrigerator door I knew what I was after), grab it with my right hand and close the door with my left. And just like that, in the time it takes to say Bilbo Baggins, the missing ring is once again on my finger.

Not instantly. It didn’t just materialize. Rather, I felt it magically slide on. That reality, however, is seriously undermined by the fact that it couldn’t have, so when I look down at my hand and actually see it there, I just about fall on the floor. Where has it been this whole time? In an adjacent dimension? But then, suddenly and blessedly, clarity arrives, and I understand. All this

time the ring has been right where I put it. The handle on the fridge, like the one on the freezer, is not rectangular but rather curved, like a human ear—wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. You’d be much more likely to grab it at the top, where there’s room for your whole hand, than farther down, at the ear’s lobe, where there’s barely room for, say, your ring finger.

The day I lost the ring, I’d shut the door and without thinking slid my fingers down the handle as I turned ­ toward the sink. My ring had wedged itself into the handle’s curved bottom and remained there, patiently awaiting the return of my finger. I’d felt the ring both leave and return as a vague sensation that was difficult to ignore but also impossible to trust. Because come on, what were the odds? How many times—month after month after month—had my wife and I been in and out of that refrigerator? How many times had we slammed the door? How could it have remained there all that time? Answer? Somehow. It had somehow remained there where I unwittingly put it, not just wedged in but invisible, because you’d have to bend over at the waist to see it, and even then you’d be unlikely to because the stainless-steel handle of the door was the same color as the ring.

So. How much of this story do you believe? None? Some? All? How much should you believe? After all, I’m a professional liar. To me, though, whether or not you believe the story is immaterial. My point is that stories, by their very nature, are incubators for meaning. We tell them to entertain but also to make sense of things, or try to. Science would have us believe that very little of this world, or our experience of it, is intrinsically true. No matter how much we might want it to, the world, science argues, doesn’t mean anything. It simply is. Much of what we want to believe may well be an illusion, because in the end we have the same purpose as all other life-forms—­to successfully transmit our genes so that the species survives. Our desire to believe otherwise, to attach meaning to experience, is probably linked to our desire for agency. (Granted, not everyone is comforted by the idea of agency; some would be consoled by the lack thereof, because if free will is an illusion, then we’re off the hook, blame-­wise. Like the world we inhabit, we simply are, no need to fret over complicity.) To a storyteller, however, agency is as necessary as the air we breathe, and as natural. I’d no sooner lost my wedding ring than I began to attach meaning to the loss: it was gone because I was and had always been a careless, easily distractible man. Ironically, the ring’s return altered that narrative, but its replacement was just as heavily freighted with personal significance; my marriage, as it turned out, was strong enough to withstand the carelessness that I’d feared might doom it. Or maybe the ring’s return meant something else entirely. Maybe my wife and I were being given permission, or even encouragement, to leave Camden, to begin the next phase of our lives together. Now here was a meaning I could embrace.

Except it’s apparently not the last word on the subject, because a decade into that next and possibly final phase of our lives together, I am once again fretting as I walk along the Eastern Promenade, and not about something new but rather the same old thing. Despite accepting—­at least in the rational part of my brain—that the ring in my pocket has no intrinsic meaning, I can’t help feeling that it does. Rightly or wrongly, I often sense that the world is seeking my full attention, as if there’s something about my experience that it’s afraid I’ll miss. Which would explain why, over time, I have developed such a powerful conviction that even if the scientists are right and our lived experience has no intrinsic meaning, we are morally obligated to behave as if the opposite were true, as if divining its meaning were our primary mission.

What’s become clear during the writing of this essay—and probably should’ve been clear from the outset—is that what I’ve been fretting over all this time was never about the ring itself. It’s also clear that the meaning storytellers and other artists delight in searching for is infinitely flexible, tacking and veering with abandon as circumstances on the ground change.

Is this a bug or a feature? I’m inclined to believe the latter. We tell ourselves it’s answers we’re after, but maybe it’s the questions we love.

 

From Life and Art: Essays by Richard Russo, to be published by Knopf in May.

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are … , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls.

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