Bought a ring today....

Whoops! I had actually posted this here so Cary, who videotapes our cats, could see the ring. I was unable to send her the photo via Yahoo IM, so I put it up here and planned to take it down...and forgot. :) And now there are comments, it seems rude to remove it. So I'm putting it back up.

I needed a ring. It was important to me at that moment, to have one. The budget was not really there for one, but I figured no harm in looking, anyway.

The art stores were mostly stocked in "beautiful but modern." I could have ordered one I liked for around $130, but I don't know...ordering a ring just doesn't seem right. I don't want to see one in a catalog. If a ring is supposed to be personal, a catalog seems far too remote.

The jewelry stores were either barren, unimaginative, or depressing. Depressing how? The estate-type rings were numerous but dusty and unshined in one place (if you are a jewelry store, why would you let your wares gets dingy?) and all you could think of were the people who came in to sell them because they were broke, or their loved one had left them or died. The karma was bad.

So I wandered into 3-D Light (the local fantasy/head shop), although I specifically did not want another cheap silver ring that I would soon tire of. I wanted a wide band, and I wanted stones. I looked at the many rings he had available, in the wall cabinet stuffed full of earrings and D&D figurines. This was another place where the jewelry was all tarnished, but it fit with the place. It was part of the mystique that if you found something here, it would be because you could envision it untarnished.

Well, I couldn't "envision."

The store owner wandered over and asked me if I were looking for something. Normally I say "Just looking!" (i.e. "leave me alone, thanks!"). But these past few weeks I've discovered that if people want to help you, a wise person says "thank you."

I told him I wanted a ring. He steered me over to a cabinet that I had already checked out, and I mentally prepared myself to be polite while I said "No, thanks."

But then he opened it up, and started taking them out, and making me look at them, and telling their stories.

And that's when I realized I'd been saying "no thanks" to people for far too long. He finally pulled out this ring...one I never would have even looked at twice if it hadn't been handed to me, and I realized that it not only fit physically, it met my criteria. It was silver. It was wide, although not in the manner I had envisioned. It had gemstones (citron), and it was handmade.

It looked like music. And in fact, that is the first thing Mark's mom said to me when she saw it. "It looks like music" (meaning, musical notes).

And it was under forty bucks. Since everything financial is measured in terms of spays or cat food, we were talking 3.5 bags of cat food here.

I bought it. And I'm happy with it.

The store owner told me it had been around for over 25 years. There had been a jeweler/artist living in Ithaca back then who used to sell him prototype rings that never went into production. This was one of them. That was back when I was walking around Ithaca as a college student. The future was open then, and it's open now.

Stories and people. I need to remember to value them more.