If Luca Brasi is sleeping with the fishes, my ring’s keeping him company

                        
“My social life’s a dud, my name is really mud.” -- From “Talk Talk” The Music Machine (1966) My wife isn’t like me when it comes to searching for and/or repairing old things. She’s more likely to buy a new car, for example, than to spend time on having her old one fixed. It’s just the way she’s wired. I, on the other hand, am still driving the 1991 Honda Civic I got when the price of gas was a $1.25 a gallon and I didn’t have any gray hair. Well, not that many gray hairs. Now, as I bear down on the double-nickel (a birthday I’d just as soon ignore), I think I understand my wife’s attitude a little better. Some people think new things are intrinsically better than those with some miles on them. I get that. But I will always be younger than my wife, no matter how old I look. Her graduating class is getting set to mark its 40th anniversary this summer and there isn’t a power in heaven or on Earth that could get my wife to attend. She’s adamantly anti-reunion. Oh, she’s got no problem (well, only a few) when it comes to joining me at mine, but when it comes to hers, that’s a road my wife’s never going to travel. “C’mon,” I said the other night. “It’s your 40th! You should be there.” “How many ways,” she asked, “can I say no?” “You’d have fun,” I said. “I’ll run interference for you.” “That’s just it,” she said. “You love a crowd.” She had me there. Given a choice between standing alone or joining a conversation, I’ll always take the plunge. It wasn’t always so, however. When I was stuck in the purgatory that was high school, I knew only a few people and trusted even fewer; as such, my outlook tended to be a bit occluded. Where others saw opportunity, I anticipated disappointment. Which is why it was with great trepidation that when I finally mustered the nerve to give my class ring to a girlfriend, I was already two years clear of high school, churning my way through the perilous waters of college life at Notre Dame, a formerly all-male bastion of Catholic abstinence that had only recently admitted its first class of women. My class ring meant a lot more to my hometown honey, apparently, than it did to me, otherwise I would never have parted with it. Especially since I’ve never seen it in 35 years or so. What happened was so simple and common that I hesitate to even bring it up ... it’s happened to every guy who, being miles away from his one true love, finds another one. Go ahead. Throw stones. I deserve it. But even though I strayed, I always took care of my former girlfriend’s class ring, a trinket to me but a treasure to her. An exchange was negotiated. And so it happened that on a summer’s evening during the year of our nation’s bicentennial, there came a knock at the door to my basement bedroom. “Come on in,” I said, turning down the volume on “Four-Way Street.” Down those three steps walked the 12-year-old sister of my former girlfriend, a shy but sly lass who’d never really liked me and, under those circumstances, liked me even less. “You have it?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, handing over her big sister’s class ring. She pocketed it. “You have something for me?” I asked. Kid sister headed up the steps, turned and smiled ... an oily little grin that I knew meant trouble. “I have a message from my sister,” she said. “OK.” “Your ring’s at the bottom of the Scioto River,” she said. “It’s not coming back.” And then she slammed the door to my subterranean shelter. What could I do? I turned up “Carry On” ... and did just that. I’ve learned to live without my high school class ring, but I’ve missed it. You only get one, after all, and I’ve always been way too fond of things that reverberate with the echoes of times past. Which was why I was so struck when my wife, having been cleaning out her bathroom closet one day last week, made a startling discovery. “Guess what I found?” she asked, flashing that I-know-something-that-you-don’t smile. “The keys to your 1963 Impala convertible,” I replied. “No,” she said. “Take a look inside that cabinet.” There, on a shelf, pretty as a picture, was my wife’s high school class ring. “I thought,” I said, gazing at the long-lost totem, “that you said it was gone.” She shook her head. “I said I didn’t care one way or the other,” she said. “Now I’m glad it’s back.” “But you weren’t even looking for it,” I said. “I look weeks and months for things that are lost.” “There’s a lesson in that,” she said, and began making plans to buy a new pair of sneakers, even though there’s nothing wrong with the old ones. Mike Dewey can be e-mailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.


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