Scout’s Honor
If there’s one thing this country can still agree on, it’s that Boy Scouts are dorks. And I can say that, because for years I was a Boy Scout. I wore the uniform, carried a compass, set some fires. If you’re a nine-year-old boy right now wondering if it’s worth it as an adult to know how to tie a clovehitch, I can tell you it came up in zero job interviews.
But there are a few things that I still remember thirty years later. The Scout Law, for instance: a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Like I said: dorks. Imagine a ten-year-old promising pledging to be thrifty. “The new Xbox? Are you crazy? I just downloaded Subway Surfer three years ago!”
There’s also the Scout Oath. “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” We recited that oath at the beginning of every meeting, get-together, and campout. These poor kids. Nothing gets a girl to swipe right faster than man in a neckerchief enthusiastically explaining the difference between poison oak and poison sumac.
So as I became a teenager and an adult, I didn’t mention my past as a Boy Scout. And you know what? It helped with dating. By the time I was twenty-five, I was ready to take the second major oath of my life. I was engaged. Nothing, however, had prepared me for this. I didn’t know how to choose a venue, pick a caterer, or hire a DJ. There’s no wedding planning merit badge.
I also didn’t know how to pick a ring. I asked my future brother-in-law for advice. He was approaching his third decade of marriage and seemed to know his way around its trappings. “Whatever you do,” he told me, “make sure you pick a ring you can grow into. You don’t want to end up like this.” He held up a fat ring finger choked off above the knuckle. The digit looked swollen and purple. To this day, it was the only finger I’ve ever seen with an hour-glass figure.
The sight of that hand terrified me. What was I getting myself into? You slide this piece of metal on when you’re a young fool, and a few decades later your appendages look like they’ve been garroted. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Fortunately, I had earned the First Aid merit badge and was fairly certain I could give myself CPR.
So when we went ring shopping, I asked for a fitting two sizes larger. My fiancée was dubious. “You’re going to lose it,” she said. “That ring will come off in your sleep.” “You didn’t see the finger!” I told her. “I’ll grow into it!” She shook her head and acquiesced, the first of many stupid decisions she would accept as my wife. We got matching inscriptions from Shakespeare: “Faith and service, Passion and wishes.” Mine, of course, could be written in a much larger font.
Naturally, I spent the first six months of my marriage constantly losing that ring. I would be teaching, and it would fling off at simple hand gesture, once sniping a poor freshman right in his forehead. I lost it digging in the garden, changing a tire, shoveling the driveway. After a particularly close call where I fished it out of drain at the bottom of a waterslide, my wife tried to mount an intervention. “You’re wearing a squirrel’s hula hoop,” she said. “This is ridiculous.” “What is ridiculous is a metal tourniquet at age forty!” I responded. She didn’t get to be right about this; she had been married exactly as long as me. I was going to grow into this ring.
About a year into things, I accompanied a few friends of mine on a bachelor party camping trip. We drove out to Turkey Run State Park in Indiana for a weekend of drinking and tubing. I was excited. Not just for the weekend of bro-ing out, but for once I would be part of a bachelor party where no details would be withheld from my significant other. Or so I thought.
The camping itself was a lot of fun. It’s a pity more Boy Scout outings don’t involve Jägermeister. Turkey Run is famous for its bluffs, steep dirt walls that the enterprising — or drunk — young man can scale and then slide down with only minimal damage to his stonewashed jeans. So in the early evening, my friends and I did just that — we scrambled up an 80-degree, 250-foot cliff, and then sledded down on our butts. To keep the speed manageable, I trailed my arms behind me, digging my fingers into the dirt. And that’s when it happened. Like Gollum before me, I lost my ring.
We looked all over those bluffs, digging into the roots and loam, shuffling mounds of leaves and arboreal debris. But there was no recovering that ring, oversized though it might be. It was too steep, too dark. “Sorry, bro,” my friend consoled me. “You’re just going to have to go home and tell your wife that you lost your wedding ring at a bachelor party.”
That was not a good option. I was new to matrimony, but I already understood that losing a ring my wife had told me to resize at a ritual celebrating the last gasps of bachelorhood would put me so far behind in marriage scorekeeping that I would never recover. I could come home to find Channing Tatum cooking her a romantic dinner shirtless and still be in the wrong. “Don’t start,” she’d say. “At least Chan-Chan buys appropriately sized jewelry!”
So I made a decision. A weaselly, duplicitous, self-serving decision. On my way home, I stopped at the jeweler and picked up a replacement ring. “Make sure this one fits!” I yelled at the salesman.
For a while, I thought I’d gotten away with it. The ring looked identical, albeit smaller. My wife didn’t comment on the fact that it was no longer getting caught on door handles. Maybe she thinks I was right, I thought. Maybe she thinks I grew into it.
In any case, one day my wife came to me with a smile on your face. “Let me see your ring,” she said. “I want to see the inscription.” “Why?” I asked, a column of sweat shooting down your spine. “Just look at your own inscription.” She smiled; she had me. “Then let me see your finger,” she said. “I want to see if your fingers are fatter. Come on. Let me see your sausage fingers.”
I hadn’t grown into my ring. And she knew. You see, in all the things the Boy Scouts taught me, they never mentioned how to cover up a crime. There’s no merit badge that teaches you to pay in cash, to ditch the credit card receipt. Maybe there doesn’t need to be. Maybe you just need to not be a moron.
It’s crazy that when we get married, we think it’s normal to put on a ring you’re never supposed to take off. But of course, the ring isn’t what makes you married. If I had gone home and told the truth, I would be no less married. The thing that makes you married is the oath. That was something I was supposed to know something about. Trustworthy, loyal. Courteous, kind. Thrifty. It turns out that the Boy Scouts had been trying to teach me how to be a good husband fifteen years before I was married. I just hadn’t listened.
That’s why I remember those words. True, it never came up on a job interview. But I need them. Every day, I need them. When I spoke my oath to my wife, I didn’t know what they meant. Now, sixteen years later, I do. And if I were to get married again, here’s what I would say:
“On my honor, I will do my duty to my God, wife, and family. To help them, at all times. To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
