Rings True.
If I count my tree-rings inward, I can discern which winters held me fallow and which summers saw me thrive. The darker the circle, I'm told, the deeper the thaw.
I can remember the taste of Italian Soda, served to me one springtime decades ago– syrupy orange brought to life with tiny alpine bubbles, served in a tall frozen rocks glass. This beverage was passed to me by a warm and supportive hand– a hand that I was, at the time, just learning to trust.
Yes, it may have been a coffeeshop across from the foodcourt in a shopping mall sewn deep into post-agricultural suburbs, but the allure of espresso-coloured banquettes and Art Deco bathroom signage had me in its grip from an early age. My newly-mixed family frequented this picturesquely continental coffeeshop fairly often during the lustrous early years of new marriage. I loved these sojourns to what felt like metropolitan living– a café with adjoining bookstore, replete with the Rats of NIMH? How refined!
When my stepfather married my mom, I was eight years old and received a wedding band that day too. The jewellery shop, tucked into some hillside across a bridge I'd never crossed in memory, smelled faintly like pine. I can remember parking on a slope, and imagining the inside of the store would be just as slanted.
Soberly, my siblings and I stepped into the low-ceilinged jewellery shop and had our fingers measured. I saw how they stored the sizing rings, used for measuring fingers by trial-and-error, on a long metallic bar gently tapering towards the end. Even as a child, I remember modelling this equipment in my mind, memorizing its detail down to the gasket. Storing it for later, when my fingers might be larger. Stronger.
For some time after my new family's trip to have our rings ordered, it all felt like a strange dream. The visit to the suit-maker's later that day was a little more involved and we walked away with a few tangible garments, but something about the jeweller's settled differently in my consciousness.
As a second son with only a couple years' difference between myself and my older brother, I grew into most of the clothes I owned after he grew out of them. I still feel a certain warmth in my heart when I bring to mind the smell of my brother's clothes– a tiny vestige of homesickness after decades of driving away from that place.
But that ring, a simple gold band that hugged my righthand middle finger for several years and resizings, was made for me. Given to me, in front of witnesses and folding chairs and crenelated pink party decorations. My auntie Julie played guitar and sang her rendition of All-4-One's "I Swear" while my mother walked glowingly down our cookie-cutter home's foyer stairwell. After they exchanged vows, she played another ballad while my parents gave each of us five children (from 5 different parents) a ring of our own.
There are a few moments in my life that I can think of when I felt truly safe and secure, and receiving that ring was certainly one of them. It held me in the awareness that I counted in the order of things; that I had my own song to sing.
Each visit, seven gleaming gold bands would then march from the coffeeshop into Black Bond Books next door. By now entirely familiar with each other and the store, we scattered quickly to familiar corners– these two rolling straight back down the magazine aisle like a bowling alley. Another two skittering in tiny circles through the sports section, each finding a wider arc to follow with every passing turn. The fifth would tumble immediately into a table of toys and later glittering chapterbooks, which left the sixth ring to distantly follow the seventh, me, into Fantasy.
I've always been prone to walking off on my own, even at this early chapter in my story. I'd been finding clever ways to shoulder myself out of a clobber since before I can even remember. So off I slunk, quietly, invisibly, but watched.
My stepfather's love for me has always been deep and profoundly nurturing. From the first moment I really looked at him– when he played a Billie Joel song on piano for all our neighbours but mostly my mother one hot summer night years ago– I knew he was a man I could meaningfully love. More, I sensed that he could love me back.
That he followed me to make sure I was safe, but gave me enough space to relax and be myself is something I'll never stop wondering at. I notice how when I go for a walk through the woods, I need to pause and listen for a few moments before the birds go back to singing a song that isn't one of warning. Warning of me. I'm reminded of that when I think back on how he'd watchfully, lovingly, guard me.
He too, in his own way, let me go back to stretching my wings and rustling my feathers in the bookstore all those afternoons. I've always felt ensnared by the piles of tempting plots in a bookstore– the difference between the ones I read and the ones I never got to has often been a matter of chance passings, of birdsong cut short. For stretches of time, my stepfather watched over me, his own ring casting a glistening halo of light across the cornerway. With him, I was safe even when I couldn't feel it.
He's still around to read this today, and for that I'm deeply grateful. My stepdad found me a branch to sit on that could support the weight of my heart. He helped me open my wings to the world, and together we've taken some beautiful flights.
In the years that followed, my stepdad and I backpacked to Italy ourselves and tasted soda while sitting on the sunwarmed steps in Rome. My ring squeezed tightly around my summer-swollen finger and we laughed about how in Italy they just called it soda. He and I always saw eye to eye on the subject of hilarity. For hours, we'd laugh at one thing.
It was the era of backpacking when a tourist needed to tote a paperback guidebook in order to enjoy any kind of activity that wasn't being lost. He'd read on the train that to order water a Roman patron would shout "a-KOO-wah" and so he did that night, to the entire hotel restaurant's barely hidden amusement.
"What is it?" the waitress inquired. "Water" he choked back, by now clearly blushing himself. Our time together felt charmed, in some way. It still does, when we find the right quiet on a long drive home together. If I listen in my heart in just the right way, I can even feel that now.
But back then, it was just an Italian Soda that I knew, and my new dad's fierce love for me, and the sticky feeling of my fingers picking up a hardcover book a few seconds after. It was just an atrium in a shopping mall, cave of stories as yet unread. And I, in it, protected.
Mark and me in Victoria outside Munro’s Books in July 2022. Just before this photo was taken, Mark gave me this book he’d surreptitiously bought inside, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank.