Cabuchon iolite in simply worked silver

Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children.

Moving: No swimming: rain

14 August 2001: Cats and rings

I've been catsitting a coworker's cat. She left on Friday, told me not to bother checking on the thing over the weekend and Monday would be fine. I opened the door Monday expecting to find a dead cat ("What did you want me to do, leave a note? 'Cat dead, details later'?") but found only a plant uprooted. I sat on the floor reading and petting it for about a half hour. For a cat, it's affectionate, especially toward a stranger. Today I did the same.

It's an interesting creature in that it lacks its off hind leg. Hence the name Skippy.

I have quite liked being able to pet a critter, even a gimp critter, with my whole hand instead of just my fingertips, a critter who kneads with its front claws (status of left forearm: lacerated) but does not turn to nip if the petting is not happening exactly as it ought to. And being able to stroke it really hard. I love petting my buddy because I love my buddy, and I love the perfection of his feathers and his dusty smell, and I'm glad the whole gentle-fingertip thing makes him happy but it satisfies roughntumble me only emotionally, not sensually.

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News. This weekend when I wrote the clutter entry I said that the puzzle box held retired honored jewelry and named the lapis Tolkien ring. As of Friday, the moonstone Tolkien ring was in there too. I have bought a new ring.

In early June I hied myself to the Park for a day and read by a creek in a moraine meadow. I had wanted to explore Estes Park, Tourist Town U.S.A., for a long while, but we have never stopped in town for anything but food and drink before. Last winter after hiking we passed and I popped into an interesting store on the way to the food. RDC tolerated that for not very long. Today, without my favorite misanthropist, I nipped into this shop and that shop. Of the quarter-mile stretch of road I bothered with, left and right, there was just the one first store I liked. The rest were t-shirts and taffy (salt-water taffy is sold in the Rocky Mountains why?), as expected.

But anyway, my store had my ring. Silver with a cabuchon iolite. It was, naturally, the wrong size. Every ring I find is approximately a seven, and my only size-seven finger is my left ring finger, which is occupied. Too big for the right pinky, too small for the right ring finger--do most people have more than a half-size difference in the finger sizes between their dominant and other hands? I bought it anyway, figuring it could be resized. In Denver I found a silversmith who was actually downtown, off Larimer Square, whom I somehow had never noticed before in a back courtyard. For nearly the cost of the ring, they were able to resize it. Shrinking it to my pinky would have jeopardized the setting, as would increasing it any more than the right ring finger size.

So I retired the Tolkien ring. Its shank was nearly worn through after ten years' hard wear, the stone was scratched to the point of dullness, and the notreallyprongs that clasped the stone were beaten to a pulp. It was time. I tried to retire it 3.5 years ago, but that ring didn't last. In fact, when the center stone fell out of the ring I bought then, I was surprised to see that it wasn't as deep a stone as I had thought--purple tissue paper had been crammed under the setting both to lift it up and to enhance its color. With this new ring's setting, no such cheat is possible.

Trey liked it when I came back to work. Haitch and I shopped that night (no travel clothes yet for me and it's getting near time) and she liked it too. "Do you like it for me or do you like it yourself too?" I had to know. She liked it herself. RDC got home soon after we did (or after my reading of my mother's letter) and he did not like it. "Well then it's a good thing that I get to wear it instead of you."

He said it wasn't as nice as some of the work we saw in Santa Fe, fr'instance. Well, maybe not, but in Santa Fe the few rings I saw on display either didn't have stones or had turquoise, which I don't wear. All through the old section of Santa Fe, where artisans display their wares in the street, it took me the whole day to decide that on a new cuff. I'd been looking for rings, too.

All I know is that I have had my eye out for several years to find a ring to become flesh of my flesh, and now I have found it.