Bling is Life, and Life is Bling

When you're alone a lot you get fixated, but it's very interesting, the folds of a fixation. These are my favorite earrings, natural brown pearls that blush red (rare), and their color and proportions go well with any type of clothing, and I like the white-gold bead caps and white-gold shepherd's hooks. The rich difference between white gold (gold plus palladium) and sterling silver became obvious after I traveled with a woman whose peacock pearls on white-gold hooks had a distinctive glint of quality that said so much about her classiness, her priorities, her affection for and care of herself. It's in the details. So when I could, I got my own pair and was delighted -- one of those purchases you later realize was a grant from the shopping gods (like the black silk skirt I wore for seven years and no matter what size I was it fit me) and gives terrific joy.

Then I lost them. At the mammogram center we women must cozy up, shoulder, neck and ear, to the squash machine and even my dangling pearls got in the way so I took care to remove them and put them in a small ziploc bag and stowed them deep inside my summer purse, or thought I did. Days later at home I looked in vain for my pearl earrings. I phoned the mammogram center which called back in the middle of an important meeting but for the first time in life I took the cellphone call (because a return call from a medical center is rare) and asked if they'd found a pair of brown pearl earrings with white-gold shepherd hooks, and they had not. And I thought, of course. Finders keepers with anything that classic and wearable.

The purse's patent-leather trim was cracking and shabby so after the last of many obsessive searches through the purse I tossed it and had since wondered if the pearl earrings were somehow in it and I just hadn't smoked them out. In that case they were gone forever.

I ordered another pair from the same company in Thailand and received two black pearls without any gloss or glow, like old bowling balls or shoe soles -- but kept them for their white gold hooks, hoping someday I'd find pearls like the first ones to hang on them. Then I ordered coffee-brown Swarovski (glass) pearl earrings on silver hooks, and they are nice but without that caress of red that made all the difference to my coloring, as if the lord of chic had selected them for me. And slowly, with many pangs, I gave up my fixation. They were lost.

I use as my two "jewelry boxes" those plastic shells that salads come in; one is for gold-tone metals and the other silver-toned. (Every normal woman over 50 will have amassed a cool-earring collection.) The other day I dumped out the container of gold-tone metal earrings and saw the little bag with my prodigal pearl earrings in it. In haste I'd mis-filed the gold under silver, and it hadn't occurred to me to look there.

Very pleased to have them back. I deserve this fine good luck, especially in the dead of winter when it feels sometimes as if one's earrings are close and fond companions.

Hope Emerald, Etc.

I prized two pendants for sentimental reasons -- one emerald, not a crown jewel, cloudy but green enough to remind me of nature, and one handsome oval smoky quartz, in superstitious terms a highly protective stone, market value five dollars. Wore them joyfully. Last January, hid them and forgot where, so for weeks and months I have torn closets apart, dumped out winter boots, stood on stepstools, searched the garage, and clawed from the cupboard boxes of Jello, thinking: "Maybe I put them here. Or here. Or here. . ." Maybe I hid them in the bottom of a trash can and they got thrown away, or in the folds of an old sweatshirt I bagged and tossed. Could I have done that? The thought gave me a pang. I'd looked everywhere. They were gone. To get a hold of myself, I recalled the Roman poet Catullus, who chided, "Cease this folly, and what you see is lost, set down as lost."

Even so, in the final week of June before leaving for Washington I sheepishly googled "patron saint of lost items," and murmured this "unfailing" prayer to St. Anthony to find the pendants -- sweetening the deal with an offer, if I found them, of a $20 donation to the nearest church:

"Blessed be God in His Angels and in His Saints. O Holy St. Anthony, gentlest of Saints, your love for God and charity for His creatures made you worthy, when on earth, to possess miraculous powers. Encouraged by this thought, I implore you to obtain for me (request). O gentle and loving St. Anthony, whose heart was ever full of human sympathy, whisper my petition into the ears of the sweet Infant Jesus, who loved to be folded in your arms; and the gratitude of my heart will ever be yours, plus $20. Amen."

Son of a. . . In the pantry just a half-hour ago behind a stack of canned tomatoes I found a ziplock bag with the green pendant. I stepped back and felt my heartbeat in my throat and was so grateful I collapsed onto the futon.

I said, thank you, St. Anthony. It is half of what I wanted, so you get $10. Returning to the same pantry and shelf, I moved some cans aside and there was the quartz pendant.