Heavy Metal.

I tried on my wedding ring yesterday. It isn't mine yet, really. We bought it, and our wedding date is engraved inside now, and it looks perfect nestled against my engagement ring. But it's not mine yet.

We found this ring at the little neighborhood jewelry store that my engagement ring came from. We love this place; the first piece of jewelry Michael ever gave me, an Edwardian aquamarine ring, came out of its window, and he bought the diamond earrings I wear every day there too. When we're out running errands on Sunday afternoons, we always stop to look in the window. Or I should say I stop and look in the window and point things out, and Michael nods disinterestedly -- unless it's close to a holiday or my birthday. That is a cliche that has worked well for us. I am very sparkly because of it.

The ring's original engraving was from June 1914, which is about when my engagement ring was made as well. I like to think that the woman who wore this was about five feet tall and had little hands and fingers like mine. I like to think it was bought at a jewelry store on 4th Avenue and given to her at a church in Park Slope or maybe Sunset Park, or maybe, if there was trouble in the family and a wedding wasn't such a good idea, at Borough Hall on Joralemon Street. June 1914 was a turbulent month; all hell was breaking loose in Europe, and so maybe she had an inkling of what the next years would bring. Maybe she tucked a piece of muslin doused in perfume into her corset, and after the wedding, she and her new husband caught an evening train to the shore for their honeymoon. Maybe she wore the ring until she died; maybe she sold it to put food on the table. Maybe it was lost and then found 10 different ways, and she cried each time. Maybe with some coaxing, she let her daughter play with her jewelry, and she watched her with a gimlet eye to make sure that ring didn't disappear into the baseboards. Maybe, during the weeks before her husband gave her this ring, her eyes shone with dreams of what was to come. Maybe, together, she and her husband made them real.

So it's not my ring yet.

Johnny and Me.

I've been trawling the interwebs lately for shirts for Michael's groomsmen, a job made easier by the lovely Maggie, who found the wonderful T.M. Lewin company so I don't have to. Her husband and his court were decked out in gorgeous Prince of Wales shirts for their summer Outer Banks wedding, and when I saw her pictures, I thought, that look is for me. Well, maybe not me per se. But you know.

The point, though, is that I can't wait to see Michael and our friends in Jermyn Street shirts and thick-knotted ties. Anyone who's been across the pond knows that British men clean house when it comes to dressing for the occasion, and I love seeing a good cutaway collar on a man. It makes me think of the first time I went to London, and of a gray day in a smoky pub. It also makes me think of Johnny Apple, and that is the clearer remembrance.

I first saw Johnny while I was in college; he had come to lecture at my journalism school, and I forget exactly what he talked about. It was the first spring after George W. Bush took office, and it may have had something to do with the recount. It doesn't really matter. Much later, he told me that he'd given that speech off the top of his head with a raging fever and upper respiratory infection, but he'd still made it to the Magnolia Grill in Durham for Karen Barker's pie. "Next time you go, tell her Johnny sent you," he told me. (I still have never been.)

But what I remember chiefly, besides Johnny peering over his reading glasses at his audience, was his voluminous shirt. That shirt! Billows of pink-and-white checked cotton, a cutaway collar unbuttoned at his neck, the hem tucked into a pair of rumpled chinos. His feet spilled out of his loafers, and I felt sorry for them; Johnny, I do believe, could be just as hard on his shoes as he was on his colleagues. But his shirt, which was probably made for him by Harvie & Hudson, stuck in my brain. At Johnny's memorial service years later, Charlie Rose made reference to that self-same shirt, as Johnny had worn it or its twin nearly every time he appeared on his show. No one could accuse Johnny of being a style guru, but when he wore that shirt, to me, he was absolutely himself, as he always would be.

I actually met Johnny under far less auspicious circumstances. I was working through my first weeks as a clerk in his office. Johnny and his wife, Betsey, had been on their usual summer jaunts through Europe and beyond, and from Sweden had sent back a grand case of Orrefors crystal. I signed for it and probably 20 other boxes one day, put it away, and forgot about it. Two weeks later, I received a frantic call at home from my boss: where was Johnny's crystal? We must find it. Surely you didn't take it, did you? We must find this box. Johnny is raising unholy hell about it.

I came into the office, hunted in every corner and crack, and no box was to be found. Every employee looked under their desk for it, just in case. We rooted through Johnny's office, tossing aside boxes of files and cases of wine from promoters. No box. No crystal. Oh God.

Later that week, my boss pulled me aside and informed me, in a voice reserved for wakes and firing squads, that Johnny was coming into the office that day, and that I should be prepared. That afternoon, as I sorted the mail, Johnny came into the mailroom.

"Young lady," he boomed, peering at me once again over his reading glasses. "I don't want to beat a dead horse, but that was a thousand dollars of crystal you just blew."

I swallowed hard. "Yes, sir," I said.

He turned on those loafers -- probably a different pair, although these looked just as beleaguered as the last -- and strutted away. He wasn't wearing the pink shirt; it was a ratty pale blue polo shirt that I think he reserved to wear while doing his expenses. I remember seeing it strain over his stomach at his desk, piles of receipts in front of him.

Two days after that, Johnny came padding up to my desk and plonked two bottles of Australian something-or-other next to my keyboard. "I think you'll like these," he muttered, and told me to come back to his office for more whenever I wished.

After that, most of the wine drunk at my house came from Johnny Apple's stash, and we were friends. I sorted his mail and surreptitiously fact-checked his analysis pieces, and he gave me wine and told me where to eat pretty much everywhere I went. (And that damned box was found stashed away by a ditsy secretary who had fretted that the cleaning staff would run off with the crystal.) The winter after the great crystal caper, I had a long layover at Heathrow and saw Johnny's sartorial brethren traipsing through the terminal. I laughed out loud.

Now Johnny's been dead for a few years, and Betsey is out flogging -- her words, not mine -- a collection of his food writing, and there Johnny is on the cover, large as life, in a pink checked shirt, peering over his reading glasses. Were he still with us, he would be exactly the same. We would be the better for it.