Sentimental Value Aside, It’S Just A Ring

I’ve just finished conducting a grid search of my back yard.

I marched up and down, back and forth across, my feet leaving green tracks in the frost. I forced myself to keep my eyes directly downward, sweeping just 2 or 3 feet to either side, searching for any little glint of gold.

I found three pieces of old whiffle ball, one shred of unidentified aluminum, one bottle cap, one half-soggy Milk Bone, and one pile of junco feathers courtesy of our cat. No gold, not even a glint.

Next, I will search the washing machine for the second time, and then the dryer. Then I’ll go back upstairs and go pawing through the bedsheets, although I have already done that twice before. My wife Carol has already done it three times.

We’re looking for a lost ring, gold with small diamonds set in a heart shape. It slipped off of Carol’s finger sometime on Monday. We’ve been searching for two days now, with no luck. This is certainly no tragedy. As losses go, this is one we can live with. A ring is just a thing, although as things go, I would have preferred to lose a comb, maybe, or a tennis shoe.

But it’s also a symbol, a memory. Maybe you’ve lost a symbol like this, too, once in your life. You know it’s not worth getting upset about. Things come and go, and in the long run it makes practically no difference. But this kind of thing has emotion attached to it, too, which makes it hard to keep in perspective. People talk about “sentimental value” for a reason, and that’s because sentiment has value.

Ounce for ounce, carat for carat, there are few things in our life together that have the sentimental value of that ring. It was not our engagement ring, thank goodness, but it comes as close as anything could. It’s the ring I couldn’t afford when we got engaged.

I had always been a bit embarrassed about my choice of engagement ring. What do they say about diamond engagement rings?

You should spend two months of your salary? Three months? Well, I was working at a weekly newspaper, and two months salary would have purchased a pretty darn nice Cracker Jack ring. Carol, to my relief, told me that she didn’t like diamonds. She loved opals, she said, and by coincidence, you could buy the nicest opal ring in the entire jewelry store for just about the cost of the chintziest diamond ring. So, we went in there and picked out a gorgeous, iridescent green opal ring, and I saved my money for what we both thought was far more important, a month-long honeymoon to England and Ireland.

Still, I always felt a bit guilty about that ring, especially about 10 years later when we discovered why an opal isn’t considered a wise choice for an engagement ring. They tend to dry out and crack over time. One day, Carol’s opal cracked, and we ended up taking the biggest piece and re-setting it as a necklace pendant.

So, as our 17th anniversary approached four years ago, I hatched a plan. Carol had once seen a Tiffany ad for a simple gold ring, inset with very small unobtrusive diamonds (almost chips, really) in a heart-shaped setting.

“You know, that’s the kind of diamond ring I might be able to stand,” she let slip, indicating a softening of her diamond stance.

She never expected anything to come of that, since we are not exactly Tiffany people. Yet I took note, because for one thing it was surprisingly reasonable by Tiffany standards, but mainly because this was one anniversary where I wanted to do something special. Carol was badly in need of a morale boost. She had just had breast cancer surgery two months before. She was in the middle of a nasty round of chemotherapy, and her hair was falling out in great clumps. It was, by any measure, the worst year of her life. If ever a woman needed a diamond ring, it was Carol.

Also, I had my own reasons. I was scared to death of being the kind of person who intends to do something nice for someone, who talks about it a lot, and then never gets around to doing it. Nothing like a crisis to make you realize: There’s no time like the present.

So I ordered the ring, and I presented it to her in its turquoise Tiffany’s box on our 17th anniversary, at the Adriatica, the finest restaurant in Seattle. The ensuing hugs and tears must have made a bit of a scene in that restaurant, because when we finally took a look around, everyone was beaming at us. Several strangers came over and asked to look at the ring.

So that’s the ring we’re talking about.

You might be surprised to learn my reaction on hearing it was lost. When I came home from work Monday, I could tell Carol had been crying, and she looked at me with such sorrow that I immediately thought something had happened to one of our children, or at the very least, to one of our pets. When she told me she lost her ring, I was immensely relieved.

It’s just a thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to find it. Both of us have searched the entire house, the yard, the car. We still think it will turn up somewhere, and maybe by the time you read this, it will have. But it could also be on the floor of some shop somewhere, in some parking lot, or down a storm drain.

If so, we can handle it. It was a nice symbol, a nice memory, a nice ring, a nice thing.

But still just a thing.