Sixty-Eight, Asking for the Second Time, and My Granddaughter Holding the Laptop

The First Ring Cost Me Three Months of Overtime

In 1979 I bought an engagement ring from a jeweller in Church Street, Pietermaritzburg, with money I had earned doing night shift at the railway workshops. It had a diamond so small that my late wife, Joyce, used to joke she needed her reading glasses to find it. She wore it for forty-one years. When she died in 2020 I gave it to our daughter, because it felt wrong for it to sit in a drawer.

I mention all this so you understand that I am not a man who thought he would ever buy another one.

The Bowling Green

After Joyce died I did what our children told me to do, which was keep busy. I joined the bowling club in Scottsville because a neighbour played there, and because the alternative was sitting in the lounge watching repeats of rugby matches I already knew the scores of.

Doreen was the club secretary. She was a widow too, seven years longer than me, and she had a sharp tongue, a loud laugh, and an extraordinary ability to roll a bowl so that it curled in at the very last second and kissed the jack. I lost to her four times in my first month. The fifth time I asked if she would like to have tea afterwards, mostly so I could find out how she did it.

That was three years ago. We have had a great many teas since. We have been to the Midlands Meander twice, argued about the right way to make a cottage pie, and sat through each other's grandchildren's school concerts. Last winter, when I had my knee done, she drove to my house every day for a fortnight with a casserole and a crossword.

Somewhere in the second week of casseroles I realised that I wanted to ask her properly.

I Did Not Know Where to Start

The trouble was that I had no idea how any of it worked anymore. The jeweller in Church Street closed decades ago. I did not want to walk into a shop in a mall and be talked down to by a young man in a suit who would look at my walking stick and make assumptions. And I did not want to ask my own children, because they would get excited and tell everyone, and Doreen is a woman who finds out everything.

So I asked my granddaughter, Thandeka, who is my son's stepdaughter and nineteen and studying accounting at UKZN. She is the most practical person I know and she can keep a secret, because she has kept several of mine, including the time I reversed into the postbox.

She came over on a Sunday, sat at my kitchen table with her laptop, and said, "Right, Grandpa. Budget. Size. What does she wear?"

I said I had no idea about size. Thandeka rolled her eyes so hard I worried for her. Then she said she would handle that part, and two weeks later she reported back that she had "accidentally" tried on Doreen's dress ring at a family braai and they were the same size. I did not ask questions.

Learning That Things Have Changed Since 1979

What surprised me, scrolling through Engagement Rings with Thandeka over several Sunday afternoons, was how much choice there is now. In 1979 there was one question, which was how big a diamond you could afford, and the answer was always "not very".

Thandeka explained, patiently, that there were stones now that looked and behaved very much like diamonds but were not mined. She showed me Moissanite Engagement Rings first. I had never heard the word. She told me it was a different stone altogether, very hard and very sparkly, and that a lot of her friends' older sisters had chosen it. I said it sounded like a medication. She said that was a very Grandpa thing to say.

Then she showed me Lab Grown Diamond Engagement Rings, which she explained were actual diamonds, the same stuff, just made by people instead of the earth. I sat with that for a long time. It felt strange to me, at first, the way microwave ovens felt strange when they came out. Then I thought about Joyce's tiny diamond, which some poor man had dug out of the ground somewhere for very little money, and I found I did not mind the idea at all.

The Arguments We Had at the Kitchen Table

Thandeka and I disagreed about almost everything, which I think is why it worked.

I wanted something old fashioned, a single stone on a plain band, because that was what I knew. Thandeka said Doreen was not an old fashioned person, she was a woman who wore orange lipstick to the bowling club AGM. She was right.

I wanted something big, to show I was serious. Thandeka said that at our age, being serious meant not making her worry about getting mugged at the Liberty Midlands Mall. She was right again.

I wanted to know what Joyce would have thought. Thandeka went quiet for a moment and then said, very gently, that she thought Gran would have wanted me to stop asking that question. I had to go and make tea after that, and stand in the kitchen for a while with my back to her.

In the end we chose a lab grown diamond, not large, set in yellow gold because Doreen wears yellow gold, with two tiny stones either side that Thandeka said looked "cheeky", which is the best possible word for Doreen.

The Bowling Green Again

I did not do it in a restaurant. I am not a restaurant man. I did it at the bowling club, on a Wednesday evening after a social game, when everyone else had gone into the clubhouse for drinks and the green was empty and lit gold by the last of the sun.

My knee would not let me go down on one. I had warned Thandeka about this and she had said, "Grandpa, nobody needs that. Just sit next to her on the bench." So I sat next to Doreen on the bench, took the box out of my blazer pocket, and found that every sentence I had practised had disappeared.

What I said in the end was, "I would like to keep losing to you for as long as possible."

Doreen looked at the ring for a long time. Then she said, "You know I'm going to tell everyone in that clubhouse in about four minutes."

I said I had assumed so.

She said yes. Then she put it on, held her hand up against the evening light, and said, "It's cheeky." I nearly fell off the bench.

What My Daughter Said

I told my daughter the next morning, before Doreen could get to her first. I was nervous. She still wears her mother's ring on her right hand.

She was quiet on the phone for a moment, and then she said, "Dad, Mom told me years ago that if she went first she hoped you would not spend the rest of your life eating toast for supper."

We are getting married in March, in the bowling club, because Doreen says the green is the only place she has ever been able to get me to stand still. Thandeka is organising the seating plan. She has already informed me that I am not allowed an opinion on it.