Attention All Jewel Thieves: The jewelry pictured in this post is NOT mine. These images were taken right from the Internet. So don’t bother coming here to rob me. Thanks for your cooperation.
And just in case you think I’m being paranoid….My grandparents once had their picture in the paper when they went to the opera. My grandmother was wearing a new silver mink stole. “Stole” is the operative word here because, when he saw the photograph, my grandfather wryly commented, “Here come the robbers.”
He was right. The next day the stole was stolen.
Now on with the post.
Jimmy Fallon’s recent weird and awful accident caused by his wedding ring has got me thinking.
About rings.
Engagement rings and wedding rings.
And how dangerous they are.
Well, mine are. That’s for sure.
I first got engaged in 1968. So, on and off, I have had forty-seven years of the ons and offs of the ring business.
In 1968 I got my very first diamond engagement ring. It was pear-shaped. (God only knows why.) And it was picked out by my future mother-in-law with absolutely no input from eighteen year old me.
Red flag.
Granted neither my nineteen year old fiancé (another red flag!) nor I knew anything about the four C’s of diamond shopping. And Mother-to-be*** already owned a whopper of a brilliant cut and had good friends in the jewelry trade, to boot.
***She had asked- no, demanded- that I call her “Mother.” She had no daughters of her own, you see. I did NOT want to call her “Mother.” Another red flag.
It was, in fact, a very nice ring, but I never had the feeling that it actually came from the guy who was going to walk me back down the aisle. It just felt more like I was marrying his family.
I didn’t give him a wedding band. Back in those days, it was not the fashion to have a double ring ceremony in our religious neck of the woods.
Sigh.
Let’s draw a veil over that ill-starred romance- and piece of jewelry.
Enter husband number two. I have no recollection of the wedding band he gave me. I do remember buying him a gold one.
As to the engagement ring I received, now it was a beauty. A three carat pear (again) and a real honey.
Which he later stole for the insurance money. Along with all my other jewelry because he felt the marriage wasn’t quite working out to his satisfaction.
I never saw any of my jewelry again. (Save for one Cartier tank watch and the aforementioned wedding ring that I was wearing at the time of the heist.)
And as for him? He got shot by his fellow partners in crime when they decided they didn’t really want to split the swag three ways.
Aww. Such a shame.
Sadly he survived. I was heartbroken
I had to spend good money to divorce the crook. But not before I hunted him down (he had gone on the lam after he recovered from the bullet wound) to try and recover some of my other belongings.
As to that wedding ring he gave me? I threw it at him in a hotel room in Elmira, New York. It bounced off and went flying to who knows where.
Some chambermaid probably still has it. Good luck to her.
Husband number three gave me three engagement rings.
The first- a small sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds to form a delicate flower- was returned to C.D. Peacock’s when a co-worker snickered and pronounced it suitable for a fourteen year old girl.
He was right.
Back it went to be exchanged for a handsome pear-shaped (again!?!) sapphire embraced by twin pear-shaped diamonds.
Much better.
Believe It Or Not Crown Jewels Sidebar: Not only did this engagement ring precede the much more famous one that Prince Charles gave Shy Di a few years later, it turned out the two gems- sapphire and diamond- are the birthstones of our two children.
On a more melancholy note, Princess Diana and I shared something else besides engagement rings. We were both divorced on the exact same date -August 28, 1996.
But before that sad event, to celebrate after Nick was born, (the only son after four daughters) I got a hankering for a diamond ring.
So off to a family friend we went and hubby plunked down the money and I got the lolly.
Years later, the friend turned out to be a tad shady, the diamond had a tiny flaw- and the marriage had some larger ones.
I should have known from the get go.
I had given him a very handsome gold band from Tiffany’s.
Which he was loathe to wear.
He claimed that being a lefty, it bothered him when he played tennis. So early on, he wore it on his right hand.
This always reminded me of the great Moms Mabley quip. When asked why she wore her wedding ring on the wrong hand, she remarked that she had married the wrong man.
I’ll let Moms speak for herself about her marital woes. (Be warned. There ain’t nothing PC about Moms Mabley. So listen at your own risk.)
But soon, he jettisoned the wedding ring altogether.
I should have gotten the hint. But I was a slow learner and lovingly held on to my plain gold band for twenty years.
I remember well the day that I took it off.
I felt exactly like Melanie Wilkes when she took off her ring at the bazaar to donate it to the Southern cause.
But I replaced it with wedding ring number four. This husband had designed it himself- twisted strands of different colored gold.
I can’t find it.
The brilliant writer and great expert on human nature, Colette, once said that three moves are as bad as a fire. And somehow in my move from Colorado to Chicago, it has disappeared.
He had declared that he didn’t like jewelry but I gave him a gold signet ring custom intaglioed with a Celtic cross.
It looked a little something like this. (But nowhere near as fancy.)
He loved it. And if photographs don’t lie, he’s still wearing it.
Last but not least, The Kid and I exchanged platinum bands. Times had changed and gold was out and platinum just looked hipper.
(He used to thrum it against the strings of his bass guitar, He liked the noise it made.)
I loved the one he gave me. Delicate and dainty. I miss wearing it. My finger feels so bare without it.
So much for the marital jewelry inventory. That’s an awful lot of rings for anyone except Elizabeth Taylor, I’ll grant you.
But do I think there is one more in my insurance schedule’s future?
I do.
Joke: These two hippies got married in a bathtub. It was a double-ring ceremony.
True story: When I was a graduate student in New York City, two of my lab mates somehow managed to conduct a courtship under everyone else’s radar screen [or at least, under mine, which was set to “clueless”] and eventually got married. One day, the newlywed had to do a particularly obnoxious procedure in a fume hood, so he removed the ring from his finger and placed it on the countertop. He then removed the lid from the hydrochloric acid tank, and must have absent-mindedly placed it so that it covered the ring. Subsequently, he went into a complete panic when he could not find the ring, and pretty much shut down the lab for the next hour or so while we all had to help him look for it.
I resolved then and there to never get a ring for myself, if and when I would ever get married [eventually, I did, 29 years and counting, ago]. When people ask me why I don’t wear a ring, I tell them that the ring is metaphorical. On the other hand (her hand), my wife has a nice band that I bought for her at a very good price in the diamond district, but it no longer fit her after Michael was born.
I know that all pales next to your stories, Ellen, but nothing else comes to mind this morning.
Wow. I guess this post rang a (Pavlov’s) bell, Doc. This is quite a comment and I award you the brass ring. Thanks for chiming in here this morning. Your remarks were most appealing.
Better appealing than appalling. Or Linus Pauling, as the case may be.
That reminds me about the time Quasimodo planned to retire from Notre Dame and needed to find his replacement. One of the applicants screwed up big-time, forgot to let go of the rope as instructed, banged his head on the bell, lost consciousness, and fell out of the window to the street below.
A crowd soon gathered, and Quasimodo ran down to where the applicant was lying, dead in the street. A passerby asked, “Do you know this fellow?”
“No, but his face rings a bell….”
About a month later, the brother of the dead applicant came to the Cathedral to try out for the same job. Again, Quasimodo explained how to ring the bell. And again the applicant grabbed the rope but forgot to let go, with the same outcome. And again, a passerby asked, “Do you know this fellow?”
“Nope, but he’s a dead ringer for his brother.”
Very cute, Victor Hugo. But what? No “Ring Cycle” puzzle? Götterdämmerung. Ring-a-ding-ding.
Actually, Ellen, allow me to recommend The Ring of Truth, co-authored with Martin Herbach, which was published September 5, 2014, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And if I wasn’t so busy working on chemistry papers, listening to opera, and telling jokes, I would write up the “midrash” to that puzzle.
BTW, I never thought I would ever have to dis-recommend a Woody Allen movie, but “Irrational Man” (which opened this weekend in the Twin Cities) just did not do it for me. It’s about a burned out college Professor who becomes simultaneously involved with a married woman about his age and an eager though infatuated star student in a class he is teaching. And then it gets complicated. Very unrealistic, not to say derivative of earlier (and much better) Allen flicks like “Crimes and Misdemeanors” … although I did enjoy the soundtrack. Spoiler alert: cyanide stolen from the chemistry teaching lab is an important part of the plot.
Safety first, Doctor. Thanks for the movie tip. But I avoid all Woody Allen films like the pedaphile plague. He is a creep and he mines his icky and narcissistic life for the plots to his cinematic self-testimonials. Unfortunately he recycles the same plot- luscious much-younger woman inexplicably falls for older man. Yuck. I’ll save my dough, thank you.