Bejeweled
Twenty-five years ago my mother-in-law gave me a pair of sapphire and diamond earrings. They had belonged to her mother, an elegant lady of Los Angeles, and they arebeautiful, although at this point I should admit that my taste in jewelry is not very sophisticated. I am drawn to bright, shiny objects -- baubles, as Monte would say – and I also tend to become fond of things for no real reason other than sentiment and association.
But I did not realize how many jewels and trinkets I had accumulated until just last week when (inspired by Monte’s penchant for getting organized and eliminating clutter) I purchased some clear cases with tiny compartments and set about sorting through all my earrings, rings, and necklaces within them. It was a fun mission, the kind of task I would have delegated to my daughter when she was a little girl. In the course of my sorting I managed to get rid of a lot of junk, and everything I kept is now untangled, matched with its mate, and immediately visible.
An at-a-glance assessment (which was never before possible) unequivocally confirms that most of what I treasure, jewelry-wise, is cheaply ornamental or cherished primarily due to the story, place, or person associated with it. In any event, I definitely have sufficient decoration and sparkle at hand for the rest of my days. Never did the term “embarrassment of riches” so aptly apply.
Which brings me back to the sapphire and diamond earrings, the rare item in my collection that probably has some worth in dollars beyond two or three digits. (My husband's grandmother had class and good taste and was apparently a woman of some means.) When my mother-in-law gave the earrings to me, she did so with only one caveat: “Wear them. Please. Don’t wait until you’re an old dowager.”
And I did wear them. Once. Maybe twice. My mistake was to put them in a safe deposit box, and what’s the likelihood of spontaneously adorning yourself with something that is locked away in a bank vault? Years passed. I forgot about them, of course, because such objects have no intrinsic value or importance; they are valuable only when you wear and enjoy them, and they are important only when...well, they are never actually important. And they cease to exist when you stash them away, except as some sort of unmet potential -- like a missed chance, like a Cinderella slipper that no one picked up. Heaven knows I don’t need any more of those.
Lately I have had a fascinating flurry of contact with old friends I knew in the misty recesses of the 1960s and 1970s and hadn’t talked to since. (Good material for another blog post, perhaps? I’m thinking something along the lines of What Facebook Hath Wrought…) Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that I am now effortlessly exchanging comments about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, for example, with people I went to school with during the Vietnam War. It’s been fun, mostly, but it’s also a splash of icy water sometimes. One minute you’re new and blank and lovely and suddenly all your peers are people with grown kids and grandkids and pensions and golf clubs and houses in Florida and too much history to update you on and all the patina and gravity of age, and it takes you by surprise again and again until you finally sit down with the fact that this is where your generation is -- with you right there among them -- and, as my father used to say, “The clock is ticking” and, as J. Alfred Prufrock used to say, “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker”…
No great revelation here. Only a simple statement of intent: I am going to wear the damned earrings, the sapphire and diamond ones. I may be headed fast toward my dotage and dowager time, but I can still get in under the wire. I recently released the earrings from their meaningless captivity in the safe deposit box, and I am going to wear them to ride my bicycle today, and I am going to wear them to a reception at a gallery tonight, and I may just hang around the house, bejeweled, in my pajamas sometimes.
And after I have sparkled for a bit, I am going to give them to my daughter, and I will tell her to wear them right away.