The Trip - The Ring

My ring is fixed. It's my Isaiah 54 ring.

Originally it was my dad's mom's engagement ring. She was "Little Grandma," at 4' 11", so I had to get the ring re-sized. It fit on my pinkie OK, but it kept wanting to fall off, so the ring finger is safer.

The red stone is synthetic, and the small white stones on either side are white sapphires. It was the best my Grandpa could afford in 1924 on an Army enlisted man's pay. I asked one time, about eight years ago, how much it would cost to replace the red stone with a real ruby, and the guy said it would be $8,000 to $10,000. Same for an emerald, which is my birthstone. Never mind...

A couple years ago, my ring started pinching me on the underside of my finger. Not some little St. Patrick's Day pinch, but a sharp, stabbing pinch. The ring had snapped apart where it had been resized, and I couldn't trust it after that, so I stopped wearing it.

I brought it along on the trip, hoping we'd find a place to get it fixed, and finally remembered it when we were in Yakima visiting a dear family friend. We stopped at a jewelry store (where they serve chocolates and wine while you shop), and the lady said they could fix it up, no problem. But then she said I'd get it back in five days, and that just wouldn't have worked for us at all. So I took the ring back from her, unfixed.

We stopped at the mall to go to Radio Shack, because I had a misunderstanding with the new DVD player I had just picked up at Costco, and I thought I needed an adapter for the setup we have in the motorhome. But then our friend remembered seeing the right attachments on the TV, so we didn't need to go to Radio Shack after all. But on the way out of the mall, we passed a little stand where the guy was from India and looked like Jeff Goldblum (when he was younger) and did jewelry repair "while you wait." Perfect. He said it should take 15 minutes, so I went back out to the motorhome, fetched the ring, and he fixed it and cleaned it up, and now I can wear it again.