You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
A $1.45 loss over the course of 20 years.
Amortized that’s about a .07 cents per year.
What am I talking about?
This story begins in 1990.
A fellow office worker is going through a divorce. He is harried and apparently has more financial burdens than one man should have to worry about.
“What’s wrong Jim?” I ask.
“I gotta pay my light bill,” he says. “This divorce is killing me.”
I don’t know what to say to him.
He pulls a small gold wedding band out of his pocket.
“You wanna buy it?,” he asks.
Strange question on any other day, but since I am getting married in a few months, I ask, “how much?”
“$50 bucks,” he says. “I’ll let you have it for $50 bucks.”
I try the ring on. It fits. I’m not a big believer in marital symbolism. Love is love. Love doesn’t have a price tag, nor does it care if I wear an expensive ring or one made of lead.
I don’t think like Liz Taylor. I don’t certainly don’t think like a woman.
“I’ll take it,” I say stoically.
My wife doesn’t seem to care. She has her ring. She seems happy. This little gold wedding band I bought myself solves 2 problems. I now have a ring that officially takes me off the market and best of all it doesn’t empty our bank account.
I will wear this ring for close to 20 years without much thought. Every now and then I will tell the story of the ring I bought for $50.00. Some people wince when they hear the price I paid. Some people shudder when they hear I bought it from a guy getting divorced. Some say it’s bad luck. These are the same people who avoid black cats and won’t walk under a ladder. I don’t care.
Some question how I could do something so crazy. Crazy is what I do. And the ring wasn’t bad luck for me. I wore it for 20 years. Sometimes marriages just fizzle. Sometimes the passion and spark dissipate and no amount of gold on your finger will ever revive it.
Is it the fault of a $50.00 ring purchased from a divorced guy?
I don’t think so.
Time has passed and I am no longer married. I no longer wear the ring. It’s been sitting in a bathroom drawer for a while and I usually forget it is there till I open the drawer and see it. Then it aggravates me. Then I want to get rid of it.
It is a reminder of what was, not a symbol of what is going to be.
So today I take the ring to a jewelry store in town. It’s a little strange to hand over the jewelry to a man with a magnifying glass for an eye.
People all around me are selling large amounts of gold. I see chains and rings and pocket watches are on the counter around me.
The guy next to me looks a little rough, like a scallywag who might have just come from a home burglary loaded with someone else’s stuff. I eye him carefully.
I have only this tiny ring. I hand it to the man. He says little.
He weighs it and does some computations.
While he is calculating, I think to myself, if it brings me a few bucks for an adult beverage at my local watering hole, that’s more good than it’s done for me in the last year sitting in that drawer aggravating me.
“$48.55,” he says quietly.
I nod affirmatively.
I laugh to myself as I think about getting almost exactly what I paid for it 20 years ago.
It’s funny how life has a way of evening things out.
I don’t know what the going rate for gold is but I know it is high. I don’t know what the going rate as 20 years ago, but I bet it wasn’t this high. The price makes me think I was either ripped off 20 years ago or perhaps today.
Then I think who FREAKING cares. Fifty dollars then! Fifty dollars now. It’s gone. It was a little ring that lived on my finger for 20 years. It didn’t afford me the meaning of life. It didn’t share with me the secret of marital bliss. It basically did its job. It told other women I was spoken for and it afforded me a good story every now and then.
And now, well now it’s gone.
And where the little ring goes next in the universal construct is what sort of intrigues me. Who will buy it next? Will they cherish it and place a renewed vow of love upon this circular bond?
Who is the next poor bastard dumb enough to buy it, to wear it, I chuckle to myself. How long will his love last? Forever? 2 years? And what will he do with it when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
The man with the magnifying glass eye writes me a check for $48.55. I thought I would be ecstatic, perhaps relieved.
Strangely, I feel nothing. Perhaps that is the real symbolism of the ring now. Passionless, who cares, move on, so yesterday.
It means nothing to me. Getting rid of it is nothing more than a business decision.
So I think about how I lost $1.45 over 20 years of ownership. A depreciation of approximately 7 pennies a year.
And there’s the real twist. I lost 7 cents a year on a ring. But what is the true price of a marriage failed? Did I lose? Am I now winning?
I guess I can think about that esoteric question the next time I buy an adult beverage at my favorite watering hole using ring money from a time long long ago.
And that is crazy.™