Wedding Rings.
By Mark Kelly
Pinhead, the cheerful chappy from Compliance, always had a story to tell.
If he started on a golfing anecdote, you could write off maybe an hour. If
he started a historical deposition on some obscure baseball team, you could
forget the rest of the morning. One morning I sat down in his office in
work-avoidance mood. I said "A little bird told me an interesting story
about your wedding ring". His eyebrows hit the ceiling. I played hard to
get for all of ten seconds, then told him of my chance introduction to a
friend's friend in New York the previous week, who turned out to be an
ex-colleague of Pinhead. Pinhead was happy to give me his version of the
story. I was happy to listen to an anecdote which didn't involve one of the
major American sports.
"There's nothing much to tell. I was in a New York bar having a drink with
a few friends. It was the middle of August, the bar had poor
air-conditioning and a dancefloor right by the bar area. So you can imagine
what the heat was like. I was hot and sweaty even before I hit the
dancefloor. Anyway, the song Kung Fu Fighting started playing and I decided
to show my friends some cool moves. I had been learning karate for about a
year at this stage. So I made my way to the middle of the floor and started
throwing it about. The place was jammed but they soon cleared a space
around me. By the time the song was halfway through I was dripping sweat
from my face, my neck, my hands. What happened next was that I gave a very
energetic chop into the air and my wedding band sailed off my finger and
into the crowd. Of course I chased it straight away, but I never did find
it. And that's why I don't wear a wedding band now. It didn't seem right
to replace it with another one fresh off the shelf".
His account tallied in all material aspects with the version told by his
friend. I thought that he might be interested to know of my own wedding
ring escapade, so I trotted it out.
"I may have told you that my friend Mike took me out to Shelter Island for
last July Fourth weekend. We had a great time. We swam from the beach
during the day and did the circuit of all four of the island's bars at
night. As they all close at different times, there's a well-trodden route
between them. You see the same faces in four different venues as the night
wears on, although a little fuzzier in each. You end up at four in the
morning being thrown out of the Dory and asking the throng outside in a very
loud voice where the party's at. The last night I was there the party, such
as it was, happened back at Mike's summer house. The party actually
consisted of Mike's longest-serving male friends arriving, staying long
enough to empty the fridge of beer, which they drank sitting round on the
porch, then departing into the night. I woke up in a shocking state on the
morning we were due to head back to the city, then instantly sobered up when
I realised that not only was I not wearing my wedding ring, but it was
nowhere in the room and I had no memory of where I had last seen it.
Utter panic set in. I imclearbluemediately blamed my drunkenness of the night before
and pictured myself trying to explain the loss to my wife. Not a happy
prospect. So with Mike's help I started to replay the previous day's
activities. We quickly established where the ring had first parted company
with my finger. Down on the beach, before going for a swim, I removed the
ring and carefully placed it inside a half-empty cigarette box, which I left
with my clothes. Remembering this was my cue to race down to the beach and
conduct a frantic search. Nothing. In the depths of my despair, another
layer of memory peeled back. The packet was half-full. I didn't buy any
more cigarettes until the end of the evening. It was inconceivable that I
could have lasted from mid-afternoon until after midnight without a
cigarette. Therefore I brought the packet back from the beach, forgot
about its other contents, smoked the rest of the cigarettes and disposed of
the (as I thought) empty packet in one of the island's four bars. By this
stage I was groaning in resignation at the idea of having to root through
the rubbish bins of all four establishments, just so I could say I had
tried. I didn't entertain any serious hopes of retrieving the ring. But
one final hazy recollection surfaced, which gave me a glimmer of hope. I
remembered smoking a final cigarette from the packet on the deck outside
Chamberlains and finding that there were no rubbish bins nearby where I
could dispose of the packet. Rather than carry it around I balanced it on
the railing which ran around the deck. Feeling sick to the stomach I rang
Chamberlains. "I wonder if anyone happened to find a wedding band in a
cigarette carton last night...They did? Brilliant - I'm on my way over
right now". Ten minutes later I had the ring back, leaving a healthy tip
for the staff member who was honest enough to hand it in. Whoever it was
had to be a smoker - only a smoker would automatically give a cigarette
packet a shake before throwing it into the rubbish. Mike and his friends
said that I was extremely lucky, but on that score I didn't need any
convincing."
I had imagined that Pinhead would be interested to hear that someone else
had a story to tell involving wedding rings. Instead he looked morose and
distant. Unfeelingly, I pressed on and passed comment on the coincidence.
"Yeah," he responded bitterly, "But the big difference is you got yours
back".
The End
Copyright
2000
All rights reserved. All characters are fictitious in this story and no
reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.
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