That Quote Has a Ring To It…

Words Worth their Weight in Gold

Illustration courtesy of Esoterica Magazine

On June 4,1989, the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I was in the Reuters office in Beijing, taking notes from our reporters in the Square. They were using clunky, barely portable mobile phones with an hour of juice, and their lives were in danger. I used those notes to cobble together stories to update a horrified world. One of our reporters dictated a quote from a protester in the Square.

“I have just smoked my last cigarette. Tonight, we are all going to die.”

Boom! Jump right to the second paragraph, there is a spot waiting for you there. As a lifelong journalist, I always relished a crackerjack quote. I got goosebumps when an interview subject let loose with something pithy and colorful. In my mind, I instantly saw the words in print.

When Barbara and I first met at the Indianapolis News, where we both worked as reporters, she had a well-worn brown leather book where she had been recording her favorite quotes for years. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, the best of the best of the best. From novels, short stories, poems, a few from exceptionally well-written newspaper articles.

There was one quote from a former boyfriend, too, which I thought showed a lot of damned gall. I tried to get myself quoted in her book but never succeeded, although in fairness she stopped updating it soon after we met, so the competition was over. I did get to say “I do” while standing next to her in a church, and as quotes go, that’s the neatest one I can think of.

I loved that Barbara kept a record of her personal favorites, and I loved that words meant so much to both of us. The first Christmas after we were married, she gave me a sleek leather journal of my own, and I must say, looking back today on its brittle pages, the quotes I chose to keep have more than withstood the test of time.  

Like this one from Fitzgerald, in “The Freshest Boy.” “It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open, and the slightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never touch them any more in this world.”

Or this, from E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web.” “She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." 

So was Barbara, by the way, which is probably why I loved that quote.

I proposed to Barbara in the summer of 1971. To my astonishment she accepted, and we were going to be wed in October.  When she said it was time to go shopping for wedding rings, I knew that was an important part of the process, so we went. But then she asked something that took me by surprise.

“What quote do we want to have engraved in the rings?”

“Quote? In the rings? Is that a thing?”

“Of course, it is! You pick something with special meaning to both of you, and you get to wear it close to you for life. You can divide one quote in half and put part of it in each ring, so you need to see both rings together to understand it. It’s very romantic.”

“What about a quote from Dorothy Parker?” I asked, helpfully.

“Dorothy Parker is good. You have a particular one in mind?”

“I was thinking, ‘What fresh hell is this?’”

“In our wedding rings?”

“I guess maybe not.”

“You’re being a real smartass.”

The singer-songwriter Carole King had a huge hit song that summer called “It’s Too Late,” about a romance that had run its course and was over. Barbara loved it, and declared it to be “our song,” which I thought implied a certain lack of confidence in our long-term marital prospects. It’s possible my Dorothy Parker suggestion was just me being defensive.

Our quotation deliberations went on for several days. We needed something soon. Those rings weren’t just going to  engrave themselves.

If truth be told, I did have a very romantic quote in my back pocket, from the William Butler Yeats poem, “When You Are Old.” It was the sweetest, most romantic quote I knew. In my mind, it distilled the very essence of love.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

But we were 23-year-old children then, and a quote about getting wrinkled and triple-chinned with hair in our ears wouldn’t have been perceived as a great idea at the time. Wisely, I decided to leave the search to Barbara, who, after all, read much classier stuff than I did.

Each Saturday, instead of reporting for work in the big newsroom, I went directly to the “cop shop,” a small press room at the Indianapolis Police Department. I would show up at 6 a.m., look over dozens of crime reports from overnight, and pull out the most promising ones. I had until a 10 a.m. deadline to file my stories. On this particular Saturday the miscreants and rapscallions had been busy, and making the 10 a.m. deadline was going to be tough.

A word about that cop shop press room: squalidness. It was a truly creepy place. I was the only person there on the weekends, which only intensified the creepiness. I was kept company only by a cadre of cockroaches and mice. If anyone cleaned the place regularly, I never saw any evidence of it. When I walked across the room, my soles made tacky squeaky sounds. Flyffe! Flyffe! Flyffe! I did not want to know what that sticky stuff was on the floor.

I was at my desk, drumming away on a Remington typewriter, drinking tepid dime coffee from a foul vending machine and moving my cheese danish around like a three-card monte game, trying to keep the cockroaches from finding it. The mice wouldn’t come out with me there, but the roaches were not so shy.

At 10:02 a.m., the phone rang. I figured it would be Barbara; the nice thing about us being in the same business, she knew my schedule. She had big news, and couldn’t resist calling as soon as she knew I would be free to talk.

“I’ve been busy. I found us a quote for our wedding rings!”

“That’s great. Tell me!”

“Are you familiar with the poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell?

“I don’t think so. But do we really want the word mistress associated with our wedding rings?”

She ignored my misgivings and pushed ahead. “It was published in 1681, after Marvell died. It’s about this guy trying to seduce a girl, and he’s basically saying he would like to spend more time wooing her, but they’re kind of in a hurry, so maybe they should get right to the sex part.”

“I’m wondering when this starts to get romantic, Barbara.”

“Listen. Here are the first lines of the poem:

Had we but world enough and time, 
This coyness, lady, were no crime. 
We would sit down, and think which way 
To walk and pass our long love’s day.”

“That’s it? Maybe if I saw it written down.”

“Don’t you get it? That’s US! That’s where we are. We have our whole lives ahead of us. We’re going to see the world and write about it!  It’s all out there! We HAVE world enough and time! We can put “world enough” in one ring, and “and time” in the other!

Her obvious excitement made me a little anxious. Yes, we were young, but cripes. I had never been out of the country. Scarcely been out of Indiana, for that matter. World enough? I didn’t even have a passport. I was sitting alone at a sticky desk under a flickering fluorescent light, trying to finish my cheese Danish before some cockroach got it.

Still, you had to appreciate her optimism, her confidence, her attitude. The Marvell quote was her recognition that together, we could make good stuff happen. It was a whole lot better than, “It’s Too Late.”

It turned out Barbara had seen our lives in the distance and had etched our dreams into 18 carat gold. We got to see the world, me with Reuters and Barbara with the New York Times, back when the going was good for journalists. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall, the Acropolis…

We lived in Manhattan, Hong Kong, Washington and Santa Fe. We raised a son who grew up to be a wordsmith, a storyteller and screenwriter. We glided past the 50-year mark together. We harvested the good quotes, savored the snappy phrases that came our way and never lost our passion for words well-used.

Today, when I twist my wedding ring in a certain light I can see “World enough.” I don’t need to look inside Barbara’s ring. I know exactly what it says.

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