Marking Time with Cultural Significance

Ana Maria Spagna tackles marriage as an institution, an ideal, and a reality, in her essay “So Many Rings,” published in the May issue of The Spirit of Disruption. She weaves the theme of marriage through time, and her experience. As a high school swimmer unable to imagine “marrying anyone” (114), as 17-year-old infatuation with her American government teacher which prompted the writing of manifesto that is the catalyst for this essay. While the manifesto is referenced throughout the essay, and in its meditation Spagna’s changing opinions of marriage, it how she wrestles with her changing opinions that captures reader interest. More specifically, it is how she weaves culturally significant events like Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out TV episode, Washington state’s same sex marriage referendum, and the Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, that keeps the reader moving through her reckoning of marriage and relationships.

By page 115, the reader is made intimately aware of Spagna’s transformation from not seeing herself married to being in a same sex relationships for five years. With such movement of time and the shift in views on marriage as she matures, it can be easy to get lost However, Spagna is able to keep both her personal revelations through time and the reader grounded by using significant cultural events as time markers. Specifically, in the paragraph that describes her fifth anniversary, also talks about the purchase of “rings etched with Hopi symbols,” and the fact that “Ellen wouldn’t even come out on television until a year later.” Ellen is a reference to Ellen DeGeneres, the now-famous talk show host, and her 1990s sitcom, “Ellen.” The episode where Ellen’s character comes out aired in 1997, during the fourth season of the show, and became a cultural and television milestone. So without specifically mentioning the year, Spagna has marked time through a cultural reference that almost anyone gets. And by doing so, Spagna has also informed the reader that she has been in a same sex relationship since 1992. More specifically, as she described sitting “on a still-warm rock on a cold February evening,” sipping box wine “as orange sun splayed out over the Painted Desert,” tells the reader that Spagna’s evolving meditation on marriage, within the confines of 1990s. Same sex relationships were taboo, and marriage “not just distant but preposterous.”

In 1992, same sex marriage was “not just distant but preposterous,” and throughout the 1990s, many states passed legislation making it illegal, including Washington. Fast-forward 20 years and it is acceptable, and legal. Spagna takes the reader deftly through those 20 years by weaving in her revelations at the time, and deepening her meditation on marriage, calling it “a word without movement” on page 116 before stating that “a wedding is something else entirely. When the law passed, we headed for the courthouse and got the piece of paper straight-away,” and then proceeds to describe her wedding ceremony with her “nearly wife” now. Again, Spagna has kept the story moving, and grounded the reader in time by referencing another cultural milestone: Washington state’s same sex marriage referendum. At first glance, “when the law passed” seems like a reference to the Supreme Court, and it isn’t until near the bottom of page 117 that she clarifies it is Washington state’s same sex marriage referendum that passed into law on November 6, 2012. The legalization of same sex marriage in the state of Washington too effect on December 6, 2012, with the first marriage licenses issued on December 9, in accordance with the state’s three day waiting period before signing a marriage certificate. With that simple statement, “When the law passed,” Spagna has clarified the year through a culturally significant event.

Her final use of a culturally significant event to mark the passage of time is woven into pages 118 and 119. The first reference to the event comes at the end of page 118, after she has come to terms with her 17-year-old manifesto and apologized what she might have done to the marriage of her teacher and his wife. She has taken the reader into the past, and must now bring the reader toward the present. She does this in the first sentence of the last paragraph on page 118 when she says that “On the day the Supreme Court struck down the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), I was at a conference teaching an oddly mixed group of older women and young college students, all earnest writers spending a fine summer day in  a not-cool-enough classroom.” Not only does she use the cultural significance of DOMA to establish where she is in time, but she uses it as a way to show where she is in her life, her career. The Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, overturned DOMA on June 26, 2015. Same sex marriage was ruled legal nationwide, and June 26, 2015 is “the one that counted, really, more even than our wedding, since DOMA kept me from being on my wife’s health insurance.” The significance of DOMA is clear, and the reader has witnessed the evolution of Spagna’s thinking on marriage from her “someday-wife” to her “nearly wife” to, now, “my wife.”

Marriage itself is a complicated, sticky, many-layered topic. Same sex marriage brings with it additional complications, and the temptation to go down one rabbit hole or another is strong. Spagna’s mediation on marriage and relationships in her essay “So Many Rings” avoids such traps by using culturally significant events to move the story, and keep the reader grounded through the passage of time.