Class Ring

All the time, you hear the stories.  News media just eat up these ‘novelty stories.’

Someone finds an object – wallet, letter, postcard - begins an exhaustive effort to find the original owner (or failing that, a family member).

• There’s the one about the letter being delivered 70 years later. 
• There’s the one about someone finding a lost or stolen purse or wallet. 
• There’s the one about a missing class ring being returned to its rightful owner. In fact, I ran across this article today. 

Sad fact: I’m still waiting for mine to come home. 

My Farragut High School class ring - Class of  (sound of muffled voice) – went missing a couple years after I graduated. I don’t remember the exact details but it had something to do with a romantic relationship that went sour. She had my class ring. We broke up. Then, I no longer had the ring. 

Like I said, the exact details are fuzzy, but I seem to think that she gave me back the ring and then I chucked it off into the darkness.

Bad move.

Sometimes the decisions we make as teenagers aren’t the ones we’d make as our older version selves. If I had the whole thing to do over again, I would have accepted my ring back and gone on about my business. Then, two years later when I met Lisa, I would have had the FHS Class Ring as a memento to give to her. 

Imagine how romantic it would have been, for example, if I had been able to present that ring to Lisa. Think about how special the moment would have been she was able to wrap some yarn around it to make it the ring fit. Then, I would have experienced the joy of watching her wear it.

Sigh.

Alas, that was not meant to be. All I could experience was ‘that moment when you realized you were a doofus two years earlier’. And the best thing I had to offer was my FHS ‘Senior Key’ (just not the same).

Not that Lisa even gave it a moment of thought. At times, she’s just so doggone practical.

In later years, she loaned it to Holly. She wore it at certain times – like on school spirit day during homecoming – during her own years @ FHS. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, after all these years, I am still waiting for my call. I’m waiting for some person to discover the selfsame FHS class ring in the muck somewhere, clean it off, polish it up  and find my initials engraved on the inside.

In my imaginary story, he’d call the counseling office at Farragut and ask if they had any alumni records from the class of (sound of muffled voice) and was there anyone in that class with the initials JDG?  (A quick look at my senior yearbook tells me there would be only five possible candidates).

Then, the person would take that list, do an exhaustive search and find that less than two miles from Farragut High School lives a person matching those initials and that class year. Eureka, he’d find me!

The Farragut Press  might even want to do a story about the lost ring, the finder and the effort to get the story back to its rightful owner.

Anyway, I am still waiting for that call.

JG

Originally posted 11/7/2013