The ring glittered like a handheld star, its opal on fire with a radiant geology pulsing from within the stone. I’d cleaned it up pretty nice, found a box that fit such a tiny present, and I’d even sliced a piece of foam with my pocket knife to fit the box, so the ring would perch inside it like a professional jeweler might have had it displayed, all this without a jeweler’s price tag.

Then I designed my own greeting card, a hand-drawn cartoon with stick figures to express a pun-nishingly romantic sentiment I’d scribbled at the bottom of the panel. I was new to this writing business and our marriage still qualified as being in its formative stage. I am happy to report that the tradition of giving a tacky, sketched card has persisted for 38 Valentine’s Days. The year of the ring might have been number three in the progression. I’m not sure. I certainly don’t remember what I wrote, but I know the stick figures were naked and doing something a little obscene, a style received so well the first time I tried it, it too has turned into a tradition. I’m lucky to have married a better artist, which means my etchings don’t have to go public.

Over the years, she saved the cards in a shoebox she stashes – let’s just say in a place I hope no one else ever discovers. And don’t ask her where. She has sworn an oath that if I die first, she’ll bury the whole lot. Should she go first, I’ll toss them on the pyre even before I nudge the casket in.  

One other fact about this early Valentine’s Day I was hesitant to mention at the time: I’d found the ring in a urinal at the high school where I taught English. Some teen-ager, I presume, had broken up with his girlfriend and tossed it there in disgust, a fairly expensive but apparently disposable token of their love. I finished, flushed and picked it out with my toothpick. I couldn’t believe my luck!  And if you can’t go on reading until I mention this, then yes, I threw the toothpick away.

“This is beautiful!” was the first thing she said upon opening the present.  

“Where ever did you find it?” was the second thing.

I still believe that love should be grounded by honesty, but back then as she slipped the ring on her finger, a hundred lies lined up in my head like mercenary soldiers, ready to storm love’s citadel. They were simply waiting for orders.
“Would you believe I found it?”

She nodded. I was, after all, the same guy who returns from a bicycle ride carrying another bungee cord he rescued from a roadside ditch. The same guy who crushes aluminum cans for recycling, buys his clothing at thrift stores, has never purchased a new car, and carefully opens packages he receives, so as to reuse the wrapping paper or carton. The guy who once strapped a three-drawer dresser (minus one drawer) he’d found beside an alley dumpster to the back of his 750cc Kawasaki and hauled it home to Cortez, all the way from Durango. What could be that unusual about finding a ring?  

I hoped she’d just accept it as another found thing, one of the mysteries of love. Nobody should have to understand love as if it were a science. There are no proofs, only hypotheses. Every day is a further investigation.

 
“Unbelievable,” she replied.

I pictured myself at that moment as a modern-day Chaucer, narrating the urinal’s tale, while we pilgrimaged down a muddy lane toward the Why-Can’t-We-Be-Merry cathedral. If parents could see what Valentine’s Day looks like at any public high school, they’d lock their children up. It’s really part farce, part drama, but mostly pure desire and disappointment. Every surface in the secretaries’ office from opening to closing bell is overflowing with floral deliveries, vases, cards, candy and stuffed animals, all waiting to be received by anxious and unsuspecting hearts.  

At least one boy at the high school where I worked would not be having a happy Valentine’s Day, that was a sure thing. His identity and tragic story are impossible for me to recount, which is likely the way he prefers it.

I could have, maybe should have, let the question of “where ever did you find it?” go, buried the entire provenance under a metaphorical bushel basket, moved on toward a quick and passionate embrace, but I decided to stick with the same approach I have used now for nearly four decades: she deserves to hear the entire sordid truth.  

“Okay,” I said, “perhaps there’s something you should know before you get too attached to the ring.”
“Is it a story?”
“Yes, and a dirty one at that.”

 

– David Feela