Trends : LOVE STORIES: : THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY : ‘Band of Gold’

From true love to stabbed-in-the-back love, from quick love to love that just won’t die, View writers have chronicled looks at love in the ‘80s for Valentine’s Day eve. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the guilty, but all are true . . . even if love sometimes isn’t.

We tend not to think of parents as lovers. Not in any sense of marzipan chocolates, touched fingertips and his remembering carnations as her birthday flower. Parents do not kiss deeply. They certainly do not make love. Unthinkable.

Despite my existence, I neither presumed nor wanted to visualize passion and intimacy between my mother and father. Little affection was visible in their lives. The Depression. World War II. Blighted eras that were snuffers of more than their dreams.

Even the wedding rings my parents shared seemed nothing more than some ceremonial insistence.

Hers was a thin band of copper-red Victorian gold. His was a great signet, engraved and initialed with EJD intertwined.

Thereby hung a parlor parable.

Mom and dad, two days into their winter honeymoon, were throwing snowballs. Dad’s pitch sailed high and outside. So did his wedding ring, along with the snowball.

“We got down on our hands and knees and raked through the snow with our fingers,” Mother remembered. “For hours. Then I found a broom and a little brush and went through every patch of snow again and again. It was dark when I finally found it. I always told your father: ‘Eddie, if I hadn’t found that ring, our marriage would never have lasted.’

“And then you would never have been born, my lad.”

I remember that ring for lesser reasons.

It raised welts wherever dad’s open palm delivered the licking.

It tapped out endless and distracting Sousa marches on the steering wheel of his car. Dad made the bass drum noises. His ring was the solo snare. Burrrumph, burrumph-pitter-tat-tit.

It was the door-tapper that roused me for school, a paper round, Saturday chores, my first job on a weekly newspaper.

He never took the ring off. Not for more than a half century. The edges softened. The initials faded. Then dad died.

Mother removed her wedding ring after the funeral.

She wears it on a chain around her neck.

It tinkles against Dad’s great signet and she touches them often and smiles in her thoughts.

I think they must have been very much in love.