The search for the green ring

April 22, 2024, 10:51 am , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ goes a’hunting for the unfindable

Sounds like a minor Tolkien fairy tale: the search for the green ring. It’s missing, you see. Gone. And in a way, we all have a green ring that we’re searching for: missing car keys, a disappearing tv remote, a vanished credit card or the favourite pen. All like my green opal ring. Which is lost, somewhere in the ether.

I bought it south of Melbourne where the gemstone is mined. It’s a favourite, a beauty. Or was. Deep green with a speck of a black dot somewhat adrift of centre. It fit snugly on my left index finger. A gentle tug got it past increasingly gnarly knuckles. But now it’s south of nowhere.

Left on an edge of a sink? Down the plug hole? Dumped dumbly into the kitchen recycling bin? In a gym locker? Lifted? Eaten by a Shih Tzu puppy? I’ve been vainly looking for that opal green ring for years, under couches, behind kitchen tops, left amid things left in tidy forgotten piles.

I still check pockets when I do the laundry. Still check clothes when I go through a wardrobe of old stuff to give away. Still check when I put on a long abandoned jacket on a cold day.

Actually, I used to be searching for two lost objects. One, of course, is the green ring (still MIA). The second was a string of pearls that saintly Aunt Lil gave to Jane many decades ago. They were in an elegant red gingham sachet (Lil was always stylish). Green ring and a string of pearls. Lost together. Maybe it’s the way the mind defaults. Both together and filed under Lost in the twilight zone. They were always missing together. Never separately.

Then, three years go- upheaval. We moved house after 38 years. I pulled an old rusting cabinet away from a wall. And there was the chequered sachet with the pearls. I immediately knew the green ring, that opal ring, was somewhere near. But it wasn’t. They weren’t together. What a shock, not to simply discover the pearls, but to find, against every human instinct, that the ring wasn’t there.

So, the hunt for the green ring continues. Every now and then, I find a little stash of stuff, a box of semi junk or a bag of more stuff and I’m convinced the ring is there. Today, it was a little whicker basket with cards, old photographs, a child’s bow tie, a business card from Apple (good grief), a mini table mat. But no ring.

I do have a list of The Gone. It includes a drivers licence, a single sealskin waterproof sock, a picture of one of my sons when he was starting to walk, a Mets baseball cap, a cerulean blue coffee cup, a pocket sized diary of an overland trip I took from Edinburgh to Delhi, a perfect secateurs that cuts anything cleanly, a good quality pre-IPhone camera that disappeared in Italy, Woody the cat, a pair of Ray-bans.

And, of course, the opal ring. It’s somewhere.