January 07, 2007~~8:37 p.m.
New *bling* from an old man...

We went out on Friday night and returned home with a new engagement and wedding ring for me. It was inexpensive. The diamond is of a much lower quality than the one in my "real" ring. And it has none of the sentimental value that the other ring does.

But I love it. It is simple and classic. The gold is white. The wedding ring is a plain band. The engagement ring is a simple solitaire. It is beautiful. It matches the grown-up me much more than the ring we picked out (that I didn't remember being on the list of rings we'd picked out) when I was 20.

For years, my wedding set has been the only yellow gold jewelry I've worn. Everything else is sterling. I love sterling. I am a silver girl. We'd talked many times about getting me a new wedding set to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Something we could design ourselves and have the diamonds from the original ring set into. I agreed, on Friday, to push that back five years, to our 25th, and get a temporary ring now.

Honestly, I haven't been so excited about looking down at my finger since I was a newlywed.

It is SO *me*.

Yesterday, the husband turned 40. FORTY! It's weird. I'd never slept with someone in his 40s before. As it turns out, it wasn't so different. Ha.

I told him last night how much I loved that he understood how sad I was to be without a wedding ring and how he remembered that I never really felt like my original ring suited me very well and how he picked out the perfect temporary ring, brought it home, and got down on one knee to ask me to be his bride all over again. That, really, it was one of the happiest moments of my life and that I was so lucky to have married such a wonderfully romantic man.

He looked at me like I was crazy.

And I looked right back.... What? You don't remember it happening that way? Honey, you JUST turned forty. I didn't realize the memory loss would come so quickly with the aging.

He laughed.

And besides that, we're BOTH getting old and as both our memories continue to fade we can be pretty creative with the truth. If we tell the story enough times, we'll start to believe it and then that will be the way we remember it. And doesn't it make a better story that way?

Yea, he's old. And there are wrinkles where his skin was once smooth. The grey hair is creeping in with the blonde. But I love him, that romantic guy of mine. :)

~Alice