a chipped wedding ring

My husband's wedding ring is chipped on one side. He took a chunk out of it while doing what he does best... playing slide guitar. Sometimes I think the chip is a bit trashy, but I actually kind of like it. It reminds me that often the best things about us aren't necessarily the neat, polished, perfect and pretty things. It's the rough-around-the-edges stuff that gives us cred in life - the scars prove we have had some good times and some bad times - we've been to war and made it out alive. I don't know what your chipped wedding ring is, but cherish it.

Bob and I were watching a movie the other called "Beginners" (more about the movie later), and I was reminded of this brilliant beyond brilliant quote from The Velveteen Rabbit. It's a conversation between the Rabbit and Skin Horse...

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.

But the Skin Horse only smiled.