“Dad?”

***

When I was growing up in our little town of Fairfield, the Green Valley Country Club was the pinnacle of social development. There was a golf course, a swimming pool and for all I knew, gold-plated Ho-Hos and Twinkies hanging from Pixie Stix trees — everything ripe for the picking.

“The Club” — that’s what our neighbors called it. They lived across the street from us and let it be known to the whole cul-de-sac that they were packing up the car and heading over to “The Club.”

The kids, who were about my age, never just “went swimming.”

“We’re going the pool,” they always began, glancing at the rest of the hobo neighbor kids preparing to make the 2-mile march to the community swimming hole in flip flops and ragged jean shorts before finishing the sentence with, “At the Club.”

Usually we stood on the sidewalk and watched in dumb silence as they went chugging down the road to somewhere better, somewhere exclusive, somewhere we didn’t dwell on because, in truth, we had no idea what it was like.

“It’s not that special,” my dad said one day, when I asked why we didn’t belong to The Club. “The golf course is nice, but I’ve played better. Who needs it anyway?”

“They’ve got a great pool,” I said, practically hawking the place I’d never actually seen. “Everyone goes there.”

“Oh what do you know?”

The first time the neighbors invited me to The Club, I was elated. Finally, I thought, I had arrived. I ran to my closet and foraged for a clean pair of shorts, any clean pair. Something nice. I didn’t know what to expect at The Club, how people acted or what the regulars might think of the burlap wearing yokels who dared to stop by, and so I prepared myself as well as any other 11-year-old who had just seen the movie “Wall Street” and yearned for at least a patina of sophistication.

I greased my hair.

Using my dad’s non-aerosol spray bottle of Vitalis, I slicked my hair back like Gordon Gekko. I stood before the mirror, holding my breath and pumping the noxious spray until clear lines of liquid grease ran dribbling down my forehead. If I could have found a striped shirt with a white collar, I would have donned that over my Speedo. But my dad had no use for those kind of shirts.

On the way over to the neighbors’ house, I ran into another friend and practically begged him to inquire about my destination.

“Hot day,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Reaaal hot.”

“Uh huh.”

The neighbors honked their car horn and beckoned me. Seeing no opening, I grew desperate. My hands instinctively released the towel, dropping it to the ground.

“Woops,” I said. “I think I’ll need that at The Club.”

When the words The Club managed to italicize themselves, I knew then that I could be a regular, that I could belong somewhere exclusive. So it didn’t bother me in the least when my friend said, “What the fuck happened to your hair?” Members — I had already elevated myself to full membership — didn’t care what others thought.

I shoveled my towel into the neighbors’ car, and I could tell from all their big smiles and grins that they knew how to enjoy themselves, they knew something about class and appreciated it when they saw it. I ran my fingers through — no, over — my hair, and was pleased that it didn’t move. Not a strand. It was a perfect, slick, sophisticated helmet of hair.

“Say,” the neighbor mom said, coughing a little, “Let’s say we roll down the windows.”

“It’s kind of hot,” I suggested, “Don’t you guys have AC?”

“Yeah, but it’s so hot,” she coughed.

I shrugged, a little annoyed that the wind would mess up my perfectly greased hair and also perplexed at the logic of not using the cooler on a hot day, but I figured real members knew best and who was I to question a fellow dues-payer. I spent the trip in the backseat looking at a sliver of rearview mirror, admiring the perfect, wind-proof hair dome atop my head while wondering whether the whole family should see a doctor for the cough it had suddenly come into.

The pool, it turned out, was pretty much the same as the community swimming pool I had regularly visited all summer. It was L-shaped. It had a deep end and a shallow end. It had a couple of diving boards, and a snack shop that served hot dogs and Cokes instead of just Cokes. But there was something about the water that just didn’t seem right. Everywhere I swam, a little trail of grease followed me around — like one of those translucent rainbows you find in bubbles. Only these rainbows stung my eyes.

When I got home, I told my dad he was right. “It’s not so great,” I said.

“What’s not?” he said. “Jesus, what happened to your hair?”

The Vitalis held pretty well, even after a few hours of swimming. My head still bespoke of Old Money, whatever that meant.

“The Club,” I continued, happy to be able to say the words a few more times. “I went to The Club today and you were right — it’s not so great.”

“Jesus,” he said, suddenly sitting up, “You went like that? Did anyone see you? Tell me. Tell me who you saw.”

I rattled off a list of neighbors and other people who seemed to recognize me, or at least smiled broadly and frequently in my general direction. My dad wrung his hands and said something about going across the street to the neighbors to apologize, while I went to the bathroom mirror and stood studying my reflection for a moment, wondering what I had done wrong before I turned on the tap and washed my “god damn hair” in cold water like he ordered me to.

***

Emmeline has made friends with a banjo player. For the past several months, we’ve been going to the Saturday farmers market at the Ferry Building, and while we’re waiting for our breakfast we sit Emme down in front of a banjo player and let her dance.

“Hey! Hey!” he said the other day, when I plopped Emme on the worn blanket he uses for a stage. “My regulars!”

“We missed you last week,” I told him.

“Was I here last week? No, no I guess I wasn’t, I guess I wasn’t. I came but there was a saxophone player and it just didn’t seem right, so I left. Too much. Too much.”

“Well I’m glad you’re back.”

There was a momentary silence, and Emme started to get antsy, probably thinking, “Stop talking to the bearded hippy, pop, and make him work for his money!”

Emme grunted at him and pointed at the banjo. He began to play and leaned in close to me, winking. “She’s pretty bossy,” he whispered, “She’s pretty bossy.” We shared a laugh and watched together as Emme started tearing up the carpet with her feet.

One day Emme heard some music and began to shake her knees. No one had ever taught her to dance — she just started doing it. The months went by and she was able to move her legs around a little, too. She shook her butt. Her hands soon found the rhythm and were flapping about like wounded snakes. The other day she was sitting on my lap when Dana pressed her hand into a toy. It began to play music. Emme startled and bolted from my lap. I expected her to need a hug. Instead her knees began to shake and she spun around smiling several times. I look at her sometimes and wonder where she came from, because my while dance ability is limited to the Worm, hers seems to to know no bounds.

People began to gather around the banjo player’s carpet. Emme smiled at first and then grew shy. She found my leg and wouldn’t let go. I could feel her knees shaking and could see her little butt bouncing. She was dancing on my leg, too shy to continue in full view but unwilling to stop. I thought for a moment about when kids lose that innate ability to dance, when something heavier suddenly weighs on them and their arms remain glued to their sides as if they’re sprayed on.

“It’s OK,” I whispered, unsticking her from my leg and shaking my own knees, “You can dance. Watch dad.”

I raised my arms and spun on the carpet, my own butt bouncing. My face turned red like it always does, but I knew soon enough she’d start up again, so long as I didn’t do the Worm. And she did. She began to spin, her arms out wide, her head back and her face contorted into an enormous, gleeful smile.

It struck me that someday she’ll get bigger.

It’s a hard thing to imagine when you spend a year changing someone’s diaper, feeding them through plastic nipples and gesturing like a cave man. But watching her dance, watching her spin, seeing her react to the world in ways I never would, I realized that someday she’ll grow lean and long, someday she’ll get older, someday she’ll get headstrong maybe, or maybe just become more comfortable with who she’s been all along and someday — probably a lot of days — she’ll do the stupid, silly things that kids always do and potentially embarrass her father. I felt a chill like tap water on my neck, hoping that as I grow older too, it will always be so easy to shake my knees and raise my arms in the air and make her feel like she belongs.

***

“This outfit is kind of embarrassing.”

My friend Doodaddy seemed a little surprised that I named my wedding ring, but considering I belly dance and talk to clowns, I’m not exactly sure why.

Because it’s a weekend — a lazy, sun-burnt Sunday — and we’ve all got nothing better to do, I’m filling you in on the story behind my wedding ring. If you’ve heard it already, my apologies. If you haven’t, try to picture me twirling it around in a coffee shop right now, watching it spin and dazzle in the light while I think of my wife and smile a little to myself.

Don’t forget to check Babble tomorrow. I took over. Seriously, it’s shameless.

***

My wedding band came from a wholesale jeweler located deep in a labyrinth of bulk dress shops, shoe stores and any other type of mass distribution outlet that could be crammed into San Francisco’s Jewelry Mart. Anything that glistened, it seemed, qualified as jewelry.

The whole ordeal took about ten minutes, and we, my wife and I, left with a thick platinum band with milled edges. I didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time. The ring just looked nice. And it had heft. That was the most important thing.

People will tell you to buy something pretty. Buy something classic.

“You’ll be wearing this your whole life — hopefully,” the clerk said, laughing at the joke he probably has made a million times before.

Truth be told, hopefully is an understatement. Now that doesn’t mean I have no faith in our marriage. I simply have no faith in myself.

Throughout my life, I’ve owned a score of rings — starting with a mood ring my mom picked up at a garage sale when I was eight. I swear to this day the ring made me better at sports, even if, at the same time, it made me ripe for schoolyard beatings.

The ring had a thin gold band that was rubbed down to the width of dental floss, as if the annulus had been worn daily by a trapeze artist. Nestled under four flimsy prongs, the mood rock flashed deep blue. I don’t remember it changing colors often, and maybe that’s because I mostly buried the jewel deep in my pocket.

I pulled it out only during a game of football and only when I started fumbling passes. Try as I could to barrel down the field and conceal the ring at the same time, it would soon become clear to my classmates that I was, in fact, wearing a gemstone. It was the size of Rosie O’Donnell. There was no hiding it.

“What the hell is that?” my friend Dwayne scoffed the first time he saw it.

“It helps me catch,” I said. “Just throw me the ball, you’ll see.”

Dwayne eyed me for a long moment. He shook his head.

“Okay, go deep.”

Maybe it was the way he said it, or maybe it was a sparkle of recognition that he’d seen a side of a friend he hadn’t noticed before and wasn’t pleased. But I got the distinct impression that his instructions for me to perform a wide out post pattern were not so much an endorsement of the ring’s influence on my catching abilities as they were an embodiment of Dwayne’s desire for me to run very far away from him.

Nevertheless, a surge of confidence coursed through my body as we lined up for the next play. Like young boys who believe new shoes account for greater speed or higher leaps, I felt the ring would beget a safe catch – or maybe even a first down.

“Okay,” Dwayne said, after I caught a long bomb. “Second down. Go deep. I’ll hit you.”

I did and he did, and the rest was history.

Until I lost the ring.

Looking back, it was really my first heartbreak. The ring was my talisman, warding off the clumsy spirits that plague childhood. I used to hang it on a nail above my headboard. I even gave it a name.

“Goodnight, Molly,” I would whisper, hoping to god my brother Jeff, with whom I shared a room, wouldn’t hear.

“Who the hell is Molly?” Jeff asked once, not long before the ring vanished.

“My ring,” I said.

“What? What ring?”

“It’s a mood ring,” I answered confidently, as if every boy on the block wore one.

Even in the darkness, I could see his face contort. “A mood ring?”

“Well, not a mood ring, per se,” I retreated. “It brings me luck. It’s really more akin to a rabbit’s foot. A perfectly normal, completely masculine good luck accessory … keepsake … I mean, horseshoe. A stout mascot of fortune.”

I’m not sure Jeff was to blame. I know he told my dad about the ring not long after our nighttime conversation. My dad’s response was not quite promising, if I intended to keep the ring through college and into retirement.

“A mood what? Who the hell is Molly?” my dad demanded.

In the end, I woke up one morning and the ring was gone. I tore through my bed sheets, fearing I’d knocked Molly off the nail. I moved the bed and groped through the carpet. I checked the heating vent, but she was nowhere to be found. Even years later, as we all cleaned the house and prepared to move, I pushed aside card board boxes and gave the bedroom one final search.

“Come on,” my dad shouted from outside. The horn on the Ryder moving van beeped. “Your ring’s not there!”

He seemed pretty sure of it: Molly would not be found. But I just sat there for a moment, my fingers caressing the wall where the nail hook was hammered in so many years ago. A dust bunny curled on my lap for company during the vigil.

Sure, I learned to catch footballs like the other boys, and I enjoyed not being beaten every day. But still, the loss weighed on me. The ring had special powers, I was sure of it. And when it went missing, I lost more than a bauble. I lost that certain something that leads one to believe in the unbelievable – that a strip of gold or platinum can mean more than the metal it’s made of.

I was careful with rings after that – and I ended up naming quite a few. Most of them were silver and most of them were purchased from sidewalk vendors or head shops. Some of them had engravings in Chinese or Japanese symbols – more than likely cruel jokes played on inebriate college students.

“It means courage,” one head shop clerk said, as she fingered what appeared to be an ancient symbol. Her stifled laugh said the ring might mean something else altogether. I named it Clarence.

But Clarence was lost, like so many other rings, when I dropped him while walking down the street. Sunlight caught the worn oval just so before it bounded down the sidewalk and slunk into a sewer grate.

Rings can never remain on my fingers, thanks to a lifetime spent nursing nervous ticks and spasms. The same force that compels me to twirl my hair or crack my neck forces me to slip the ring around a thick knuckle and curl my finger. I don’t know exactly why I do it. Maybe it’s the feel of pinched skin. Or maybe it’s a yearning to lessen the odd weight on a solitary finger. I’m certain other fingers would want to share the burden. But when I’m bored or when I’m thinking, I’ll peel a ring down my finger, position it directly over a knuckle and then make a fist.

It’s one of the many nervous spasms that my wife, Dana, can’t stand. And she knew it would lead to a lost wedding ring sooner or later.

“Why don’t you just buy a cheap silver one?” she insisted. “You’re just going to lose it and we’ll be out a thousand bucks.”

“They don’t cost that much,” I said.

“But you’re still gonna lose it is the point,” Dana continued.

Though I didn’t say it at the time, I knew I wouldn’t lose the wedding band.

It had heft.

As we searched for wedding rings in the bowels of the jewelry mart, I eyeballed the big fat ones and ignored the skinny ones.

“Try this one,” the clerk said, handing me a thin white gold band.

I frowned, “No, that won’t do.”

The clerk pressed on. “But it’s the latest style,” he said.

I snatched the ring, fitted it gently over my knuckle and made a fist. The circle collapsed into an oval.

“See?” I said. “It won’t do.”

“Who wears a ring on a knuckle?” the clerk chirped. Dana shrugged and rolled her eyes.

“Here, try this,” the clerk said, handing me a thick platinum band with milled edges.

The ring felt like a river stone in my hand. I slipped it around a knuckle and smiled as the ring held firm under a curled finger.

“We’ll take it,” I said.

On the way home, I slid the ring around my knuckle again.

Dana rolled her eyes. “Stop doing that. You’re going to crush it.”

But I knew better. I had crushed all the other rings or lost them. They simply could not withstand my nervous ticks. This ring was different, and I liked that. And it had to be different, because I would wear it all my life. It deserved a special name.

During our ceremony, after Dana slipped the ring on my finger and made a dramatic, if secret, show of pushing it past my knuckle, the name simply came to me. At that moment, I realized I would be able to fidget with the ring forever, or at least until my fingers irreversibly curled from arthritis. But I also realized I possessed something sweeter again, a talisman that meant more than the metal it’s made of.

Later that night, as we dozed off under the warm covers, I leaned over and kissed Dana.

“Goodnight wife,” I said.

Moonlight caught Dana’s smile. “Oh, I like that,” she said. “Goodnight husband.”

We kissed again and hugged in the soft light.

“Goodnight Molly,” I whispered.

“Who the hell is Molly?”