We sat at lunch for almost an hour, drinking coffee and staring at the rings (Zayda’s giant pinky ring, to dissemble and sell to fund the purchase of something more appropriate, Bubbe’s engagement ring) before I decided that, contrary to anything I’ve ever said or thought in my entire life, I wanted this ring. And so I have this ring. Not just any ring, but Noah’s grandmother’s engagement ring, which is something larger than a single carat, making it, in the words of most of my friends who’ve seen it (which is not many) “a big fucking rock” or at least just “big.” It is also quite pretty.

Melanie directed me to a reputable jeweler in the diamond district, so I could have it resized (Noah’s Bubbe was a bit more dainty than I) and in the process it was cleaned, and it has taken on an impressive sparkle that makes me a bit nervous, in a general sort of way. (Also in a personal safety sort of way, but that is different. It is more of a “do I really want to be wearing this and exactly what sort of statement am I making by wearing this” sort of an anxiousness.)

Theater is important to life, dressing up is part of theater. Can you tell I am a tad defensive? Defensive in part becase the other thing, the thing we know nothing about, is where the diamond came from, a question worth asking.

The ring predates any public understanding of conflict diamonds, but conflict diamonds and conflict free diamonds are a bit of a red herring anyhow, for even diamonds that weren’t smuggled out of Sierra Leone are not without blood on them. Historically, diamond mines in South Africa and elsewhere have not exactly been bastions of labor rights. South Africa’s famous apartheid pass laws and migrant labour rules began at the diamond mines, and the diamond companies had a hand in various political changes at the end of the 19th century designed explicitly to keep black labor cheap. It isn’t my area of expertise, the political history of diamonds in South Africa, but that doesn’t mean I get to just ignore it.

Conflict free or not, I would never have sanctioned the purchase of a new stone, because it is just plain silly, because a concerted ad campaign has attempted to persuade us all that diamonds are uniquely rare (they aren’t) and that their exorbitant price is justified by their rareness (it isn’t). Every few years deBeers concedes that they’ve been up to some kind of price fixing, and they promise to make it stop, but they don’t seem to actually stop.

And because there is an element of peeing on trees to all this, a sort of putting your coat on the chair before you go buy some popcorn. This woman is spoken for.

And yet, I’m wearing it as I write this, and I’ll probably keep wearing it. I’m complicated like that.