Where's Gollum When You Need Him?

John Scalzi asked this morning in his journal who else has lost a wedding ring. <Raises hand> Me.

This should be no surprise. I've been losing or mislaying things all my life, although I'm not as bad as I used to be. As a kid I lost $10 (a huge sum for me in those days) for a couple of months. It eventually turned up hidden beneath the dress of a drink-and-wet doll in the basement. I'd apparently hidden the money there so that the twice-a-week maid, Ethel, wouldn't take it or throw it away. This wouldn't have been a bad thing, had I remembered my crazy hiding place.

On a college spring break trip to visit Evelyn's family in Connecticut, circa 1977, I let a wallet slip between the seats in her mother's car. For years afterward, Evelyn's mom would instruct her to ask me "Where's your wallet?" at every opportunity.

But the worst loss I ever had was the ring. It was of gold and white gold, the white gold woven in a Celtic pattern. An alleged psychometrist once claimed it had been in a fire. A man had given it to John's mother before returning to Cuba, promising to marry her when he got back to the States. She never saw him again.

It wasn't completely my fault that I lost the thing. It was always too big for me, and I was always playing with it as it slipped up and down my finger. You know how Sauron's ring shrunk to fit Isildur, only to slip off his finger later? Well, this didn't shrink, and it couldn't be cut down to size because of the filligree. I had Bonnie at Monkeys Retreat in Columbus make a couple of little rings to slip inside it, to make it fit better. But first I lost one of these inner rings, and then the other. Then one day, I didn't have a wedding ring any more.

I searched all the usual places, then and later. I even seached the sidewalks up and down High Street. An alleged psychic said to look behind the refrigerator. But the ring was gone forever.

The clunky ring I had Bonnie make for John, based on the design of my ring but not actually filligree (I hope I'm using that word right), still sits in a box in our bedroom. John was never big on wearing it anyway. Mom subsequently gave me one of her wedding rings, a plain gold band. That was too big, too. That sits in a different box in our bedroom, a knot of black thread around it to make it less apt to slip off if I do wear it. Which I don't.

John and I have been married for 25 1/2 years. We wore wedding rings for about the first year of that.

Karen