Friday thing : 1st husband gift

Another origin story.

There are a lot of things from my husband that I could (and eventually will) tell about; he’s a great gift-giver, one of many qualities that will keep him at first husband status. But today I’m choosing this bracelet that he ordered from Wanderer to give me on Valentine’s Day in 2017, our 28th as an official couple. We might have done something cute together in 1989 but he was still a child college freshman then who didn’t want A Girlfriend.

The coordinates carved on the pendant land in the Stimson Hall lobby on the Washington State University campus in Pullman, where we met on a fall evening in 1988. Our dorms were working together to design a yard display for Homecoming. As my two best friends & I had walked down to the men’s hall earlier, we decided that we would each choose three guys we liked [based on looks, obviously...we were not the best feminists at that moment] then quickly compare notes to decide who we’d work with. Both of my friends also picked two of my top three choices, so I made my way over to Stu’s group. All I remember about that evening is how confident he was in the design of a cardboard fireplace, that he was funny, and he looked super cute in his shorts. Two of those three things mattered to me.

This bracelet came with a seemingly strong braid holding the buffalo bone/horn pendant but after a couple months of sleeps & showers while wearing it, the threads began to fray. I re-knotted it a few times but eventually it snapped. I began to worry I’d lose it so would wear it only on special occasions when I’d be in one place, where I could easily notice if it fell off. I finally found a silver cuff to attach to the precut holes and it was perfect again. Until one night, when one of the holes cracked, leaving the pendant dangling. My handy engineer (he has advanced far beyond cardboard fireplaces, thank goodness) cut a piece of metal, glued it onto the bone pendant, then reattached it to the cuff. I went back to wearing it more often. But then the glue suddenly stopped sticking in the middle of a hotel lobby in Texas; the carved coordinates were hanging madly by the one still-intact hole. I carefully packed it in my carry-on to be safe for the flight home. Now it’s languishing in a dish on my dresser, waiting for a new remedy.

If the trials of this bracelet were part of a movie, you might figure it was a painfully obvious metaphor about a relationship falling apart - the fraying thread, the broken pieces, the weakened glue. But if you’re a more thoughtful viewer, you would know that those things are going to happen to anything that is used often and loved well. We didn’t toss the bracelet because it wasn’t working the way we wanted; we figured out how to fix the things that went wrong. Okay, my handy engineer husband figured out how to fix things while I lamented. I’ll be wearing it again soon enough though, no worries.

I know I chose wisely that day.