Lost

One thousand two hundred and sixty seven days ago (or so), I left Idaho Falls en route to Pittsburgh.  I had a truck full of miscellaneous things to keep me alive while I waited for my family and my belongings to catch up with me 3 weeks later—a table, a TV, clothes and shoes, something to shave with, a toothbrush, enough propane/gasoline/camping fuel to burn down Nebraska (the movers wouldn’t move it), and so on.  I’m also remembering a cooler full of frozen chicken.  I won't bother trying to explain the chicken.

My stuff, all in the back of my truck and covered with a tarp, drove with me and my parents across 2,000 miles of US dirt.  Arriving in Pittsburgh on Thanksgiving 2008, I unpacked my few things and waited for my family and the rest of my house to catch up.  Oh yeah, and I started my new job.

Somewhere before, during, or after this move, I lost my wedding band.  Why wasn’t it on my finger, you ask?  No, it was not what you think… the ring had shrunk over the years.  I’m certain my fingers have stayed the same size since I was younger and leaner, so the only explanation is the shrinking ring theory.  Who knew 14k gold could do that?  The only finger it would fit on was my pinky, and I didn’t want to be known as a pinky finger ring guy.

So, for the 1,267 days (or so) since I lost it, I had been running around town ringless, up until about a year ago when I gave up hope that I’d find it and purchased a cheaper ring made of tungsten as a suitable replacement.  No one can buy gold these days without a second mortgage on the house and a lien on your firstborn.  Being ringless is not what you think, though.  I didn’t get one date out of it.

At first, I blamed the movers.  A sketchy bunch, I envisioned them rummaging through our boxes and pulling out anything of value to subsidize their expenses—jewelry, collectables, clothes.  Fortunately, we didn’t have much that was worth anything—at least anything that could be easily stolen.  This theory kinda fell apart when items of significantly more value showed up unharmed and intact—oh, say, my Seinfeld DVDs.

Yet, without another plausible explanation (such as me simply dropping it somewhere), I was without a valid explanation for its disappearance.  I think I even blamed my kids at one point, which is something I rarely do.

Anyway, time went by.  Favoring my tungsten ring over my gold ring (hey, it was a better fit), I forgot about the gold ring altogether.

This morning prior to leaving for work, I was going through my coin box to find quarters for the vending machine (its Monday, after all) and, after not finding the requisite number needed to buy something of high sugar content for later consumption, I decided to look in less obvious places.  One such place was my truck—the same vehicle that took me and my crap clear across the country 1,267 days ago.  I didn’t do a hard search, but I did check the usual coin locations.  One such location is the little vinyl boot that resides at the base of the 4-wheel-drive shifter.  I drop coins there from time to time simply because I have no other place to put them, and I still haven’t gotten to the point of telling the kids in the drive-up windows to keep the pennies.

This location is accessible on 3 sides: the front, the back, and the passenger side.  The driver side is inaccessible—at least 95% of it is inaccessible—due to the shifter’s proximity to that side of the box in which it resides.  However, I had located a coin—a dime, I think—that was part way in this little location.  Grabbing it, my finger brushed up against another coin further buried in the inaccessible part of the boot.  So I went for it, too.

Instead of a quarter, I pulled out my wedding band.  Yeah, the 14k gold one that had shrunk and then lost itself 1,267 days ago.  Dirty, but still in good condition.  To anyone watching me, removing it from the shifter boot must have looked like Sméagol pulling the One Ring out of Shire Creek in Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, there it had sat for 3.5 years, the only thing between it and the roadway below being a thin piece of synthetic leather.  I had turned the house upside down a while ago looking for this ring (this is about the same time that gold was selling for $1,500 an ounce, but my intentions were honest, I swear), only to come to the realization today that it had been within a foot of me this whole time whenever I was driving to and from work, church, errands, whatever.  I had even thought about selling the truck at one point in the recent past… the ring would have gone with it for sure.  In other words, a freebie for the new buyer.  But, I held on to the truck.

I have only one idea on how the ring got there: I had to put it somewhere since I couldn’t put it on my finger and probably because my luggage had already been packed for my move out east.  So, I put it there… only to completely forget about it.

Moral of the story: don’t buy gold.  So, when you put it in a dumb spot and forget about it, you won’t be out $1500 an ounce (or $500 for 14k gold items).