Where I hang my bracelet

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I wear two silver bracelets on my right arm. The elder dates from the summer of 1987, when I spent a day with my father on Block Island. My tendering the invitation was the first purposeful communication I had made to him in six years, and during the day I meant to tell him that I did love him. It was the summer after my freshling year at school. My parents had been divorced, though not separated, since sixth grade.

As we strolled around, he asked if I wanted a souvenir. He might have meant something like the ready-made wax rip-off figurines from Cypress Gardens, but what I wanted was the bracelet. Simple unworked sterling silver, it is a bangle large enough to go around my broad hand (it slips easily off the clenched fists of smaller-handed adults).

I never did tell him what I had meant to tell him that day. He got drunk and I got mad. Yet I wore the bracelet, knowing it represented something to me if not to him. The younger dates from the Christmas of my junior year, when he gave me a cuff. The simple reason is that now he knew something I liked. The reason I prefer is that he knew why I wore the first and gave me the second as an answer.

The cuff snapped in the summer of 1991, in the beginning of what I call my bad year. I didn't take it as an omen, though I was close to that. It took me a month to find another that I liked, and in those four weeks I listened in vain for what had come to be a reassuring clink of bangle against cuff. There was too much silence.

Now

Depending on my position, my bangle bangs, as it ought, against desks as I write and keyboards as I type. When I'm in my own space, I can tuck it someplace safe; when I'm elsewhere, I sometimes take it off. And when I take it off, putting it someplace safe and where I won't forget it is a priority. So I hang it on my ear.

When my sister and I were little, we wanted pierced ears. Without piercings, we resorted to makeshift earrings. This was before magnet earrings, before sticky earrings, and we made do with the resources at hand. We had those brightly colored plastic bracelets (and rings, and poppy beads), and we slung those bracelets over our ears.

(Ears are so useful. Did whoever invented pince-nez have no ears, or just no common sense?)

And so now when I, say, wrestle with a copier with my arm in up to the shoulder, I hang my bangle on my ear. Grown-ups have been known to scoff at this practice, saying it looks foolish. (They are grown-ups, which requires a mindset an adult does not necessarily have.) Foolish because grownups worry about what other people think, perhaps, but practical. Safe and out of harm's way and I always know where it is (like Harold's gift to Maude). Nor am I liable to leave it behind.

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Last modified 23 November 1997

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