The One Ring Wants to Be Found
Funny family story comes back around after only 27 years.
My oldest brother was kind of a high-school heartbreaker, and in return, had a vengeful ex-girlfriend throw away his class ring during his junior year in 1981. My parents were upset, but he could never figure out where it had gone.
Cue music: a young boy in Knoxville recently was building a fort in the woods, and came upon a shiny object with a name engraved on it. He put out a Craiglist ad and contacted the high school name on the ring. The high school tries to track down my brother, unsuccessfully. (His name is apparently fairly common in Tennessee.) But, someone at the high school tracks down my father in Ohio.
Here’s the story about a very honest young man who went through a lot of trouble:
http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=67308&catid=8
Moral of this story: Hmm, I’m not sure. But it makes me feel kind of warm and fuzzy.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
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I didn’t know your brother was our 2006 Poet Laureate Donald Hall. 😉
I bet your parents are happy, it’s always such a bummer when your kids lose their stuff. 😉
Supervillainess
Ha! What a weird story, right? And the fact that the high school was able to find my dad online but not my oldest brother, who lives in Knoxville still.
I’m sure he can do a lot with that class ring now. Like give it to his wife 🙂
Emily A. Benton
that’s cute.
Karen J. Weyant
A great story! Don’t laugh, but I am a great Goodwill/Salvation Army Store shopper and once I found a class ring in a pair of jeans. What’s even scarier is that I knew the person! (And thus, I was able to give the ring back to its owner)