The Hot Springs Exploit

Tensile strength to etch glass. Surprising delicate underpinnings. Secured in a row of imperfect squares. Striking from a distance; a stunner up close. Handcrafted from earth’s most precious resources: platinum and diamonds. Mirroring the hand that wore it for thirty-five years, the ring is rare indeed.

My mother’s hands were always in motion; knitting, weeding, eating, figuring, this ring flashing rainbows. Her bejeweled fourth finger disturbingly competing with the unfiltered Chesterfield she held firmly between her first and second. This one piece of jewelry is the only thing I ever saw my mother purchase for herself.

I knew my mother was a designer clothes and hats shopaholic. The evidence filled two walk-in closets. I had heard the tale of my mother shocking the shoe clerk at Marshall Fields when she bought seven pair of high-heals at once.

“Ma’am. Have you made your selection?” queried the weary though polite salesman.

With her arm majestically sweeping above the open boxes, she replied “Well, what do you think? I am buying all of them!”

In my minds eye, the kindly curmudgeon fell off his tripod stool as my mother waved her plastic card in his face.

It isn’t a part of the story, but I am certain all those shoes had been on sale. Even greater than

Mom’s desire for fine clothes was her delight in bargains. Our house was full of cut glass, rugs, statues and odd gadgets that didn’t match anything. Hunting a good deal is a family tradition, highlighted by my grandmother’s acquisition of left handed golf-clubs. (She asked my right-handed mother why she just couldn’t face the other way at each tee.) Although these items stuffed my childhood, they held little interest to me.

Jewelry was in a different category. Growing up, I stared longingly at the costume pieces and expensive jewels, housed in equal velvet covered compartments whenever my mother opened the top two drawers of her dressing table. “Look but don’t touch,” she always cautioned. These treasures seemed to appear just like other bric-a-brac, after one of my father’s business trips or an argument between my mother and grandmother.

When Mom’s hands became handicapped with rheumatism, she passed her jewelry collection on to me. I deeply love each and every bit, baubles and heirlooms alike. However, it is the filigree ring capped with three round diamonds set flat in platinum squares that touches the deepest part of my heart. I witnessed its birth into my family.

When the ring was new to us, it was already old, uncovered under the brilliant lights and thousand reflections of a Hot Springs Arkansas auction house. At twelve years of age, I was overwhelmed by the assortment of people and could smell their excitement. I perched proudly between my mother and grandmother, the only youngster in the huge gallery. The short, bald man on the raised platform began shouting fast and jumbled words. How could anyone understand him?

Before I knew what happened, my mother was holding a small satin box. As she lifted the lid my grandmother hissed, “Barbara, what have you done?” Seeming more shocked by her own audacity than pleased with her purchase, Mom showed me the antique. Out in the street, where grandma had shoved us, the ring looked smaller and duller than expected.

For a long time, I remembered this event with more worry than joy. For the first ten years she wore it, when it replaced her wedding rings, my mother feared she had been coned out of her hard earned money. Was the ring as bad a deal as the left-handed golf clubs? On the brink of retirement, after selling the house of my childhood and most of its contents, Mom took her one big indulgence to an appraiser. She kept the ring’s value a secret but from that point on, the Hot Springs exploit was recounted with glee.

The ring has been mine since 1995. I wear it with even more happiness than my mother displayed. Rainbows still flash, although my hands are less active. Reading, writing, manicuring my nails or moving a computer mouse, my most precious symbol of family history restores me.

In the next ten, twenty, hundred years, what hand will possess the circle of platinum and diamonds? With Pharaoh like intentions, I have been contemplating entombment. My ring whispers insistently, “Take me with you into eternity.”