I proposed to Sara in a fumbling, mumbling, bumbling manner as the clock ticked over to midnight on New Years Eve in 2001. I had plans of proposing while we celebrated the new year with a group of friends, but a snowstorm put a damper on going outside, much less meeting up with people from out of town. It ended up being a pretty feeble proposal, but she took me up on it and a year and a half later, we were married.

A few months later, on a trip to Europe, Sara made a stop in Italy to buy my wedding band. It was a beautiful, meaningful ring.

We graduated from college, married the next day and two weeks later, we were settling ourselves in Portland, Oregon. I managed to get a job at a gourmet pizza place that summer, doing prep work and tossing pies. Sara was toiling away at OfficeMax as a graphic designer. We were living the dream.

Since I was working with pizza dough and different messy ingredients, I would take my ring off my finger every day when I arrived at work. It was encrusted with crushed diamonds, so food and crap tended to get mashed into it and make it impossible to keep clean. I would carefully slip into into my front pocket of my jeans. Not the regular pocket, but the smaller pocket on the right side that no one ever uses for anything. I figured it would be safe there.
Well, one day, I put it into the regular pocket by mistake at the start of my shift. After we closed, I swept and mopped the floor and Sara picked me up from work. Before I changed into some sweatpants, I reached into my pants pocket to find…nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly. There was a hole big enough for a ring to slip out of.

So, my wedding ring had fallen out of a hole in the bottom of my pants pocket, onto the floor at work, where it could have been swept it up with all of the dirt and discarded scraps of food, dumped it into a trash bag and then threw that trash bag into the dumpster with dozens of other identical trash bags.

Fuck.

I couldn’t get back into the store that night because I didn’t have a key, so I went in right away the next morning and scoured the floor, hoping against hope that it had rolled underneath a cooler or underneath the oven and was still there, waiting for me to find it, but no luck. I tried to find the trash bag from the night before in the dumpster outside of the store, but the trash collector had already emptied it. Needless to say, I was devastated. A ring that my wife had brought back from her family’s historical home, a ring that signified her love and bond with me and less than two months into that bond, I had lost it.

I’m not ashamed to admit that there was some crying. Some blubbering. Some profuse apologizing. Sara was apoplectic. She couldn’t understand how I could lose such a thing. How I could be so careless. It was a dark time.
A week after the incident, I came home from work to find Sara in a better mood. She asked me to join her on the couch. I sat down and she asked for my left hand. I laid my hand in hers and she slipped a new ring onto my finger and kissed me. It was just some cheap ring from Fred Meyer, a plain silver-ish band. She promised that once we had more money, we’d take a trip to Italy together and get me a better replacement.

I’m not ashamed to admit that there was some crying.

Flash-forward five years to 2007. We are in Oslo, Norway on vacation. It’s my first trip overseas. We’re in the land of my ancestors and having a wonderful time. So wonderful, in fact, that on the third day there, after a day of exploring, I fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon. While I was asleep, Sara slipped off my replacement ring and went to a jeweler to find me a new band. I was so out of it that she was able to wrestle the ring off my finger, sneak out of our hotel room, sneak back into our hotel room and put a new ring on my finger before I woke up.

Sadly, the ring was just a little too large for regular wear. When Sara traced an outline of my old ring to take to the jeweler so that she could get the right size, the new ring ended up one size too large for my finger. But I kept it, anyway. Now, I wear my original replacement band on my finger and the new, Norse replacement around my neck on a chain. Each and every day I have two reminders of the love that we share. And y’know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.