Lost and found: A stranger’s ring, a family discovery | Maria Panaritis

A ring.

It sparkled from the sidewalk. Glittering in the morning sun near a broken driveway apron not far from a Delaware County elementary school this past Wednesday. Silver. Sparkly stone. Engagement-style setting. Not where it belonged.

It felt bulky but hollow in my hand. Probably not precious in the world of gems but perhaps enough to someone out there that it deserved at least a good try in finding its owner. An inscription was indecipherable. The magnifying power of a jeweler’s loupe beckoned.

The woman who answered the phone at a shop a few towns away from mine said they would be happy to help read the inscription. What, if any, clues did this lost ring embody about its owner? The store would be opening in 10 minutes. She told me to come by.

I hadn’t been to a jeweler since picking a modest wedding band nearly a decade earlier. Journalists typically aren’t in the tennis-bracelet income bracket. Neither are forever-kid-of-long-dead immigrants. Cash-economy workers who wore flannels in winter, Fashion Bug tees in summer, and thin gold wedding bands that they never, ever talked about.

As such, the thought struck: I couldn’t ask a favor of a merchant and turn around and walk out. You just don’t do that. Not as a kid who sweated alongside mom and dad in a small Upper Darby sandwich shop, an hour-by-hour tightrope walk, you hoped, toward enough hoagie-and-chip sales to pay the family’s bills.

I rummaged through a box of memories that had been left untouched for 25 years. I pulled out two carefully compartmentalized relics. These, I decided, would be offered as a touch of business in exchange for the jeweler’s generosity.

One was a small woman’s ring with an empty setting that probably once contained a small pearl. I’d never seen the ring on my mother’s finger. When she died in 1996, I acquired the forlorn piece, not knowing a thing about its history. I had been unable to ask my dad anything, either, because he died a year before her. I dropped mom’s ring into a plastic sandwich bag.

Then I plucked out of this same box a men’s pinky ring. It, too, had turned brown. It, too, had never been worn by my father while I was alive. It, too, had become mine the day that fate handed me and my sisters the irretrievable loss of both our parents, and whatever stories had been theirs but never shared.

I drove for 15 minutes to a shopping center. The folks at the jewelry store buzzed me in. A trio greeted me with a smile.

“This is sterling and zircon,” the man said of the engagement-style ring I had found on the sidewalk. Nothing more than glass in place of a real gem.

In other words, no big deal. Something you could find online for maybe $20, $50, $100. The inscription was a marker of its manufacturer.

I then reached into my pocketbook and pulled out the Ziploc.

The same jeweler again peered through his magnifying tool. Both rings, he said, were gold.

A pearl, he confirmed, had indeed appeared to have once been ensconced in the smaller one.

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I asked if they could find me a new pearl. Something classic. Mom and Dad married in 1963 in Greece. A two-week courtship, an arranged marriage, as so many poor immigrants had done. Maybe my mother, Panagiota, was wearing that pearl ring later that year in November 1963, when in a West Philadelphia supermarket the public address system blared with news that John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. Everyone in the store began shrieking and crying. Mom spoke no English but managed to understand just enough.

“The president! The president!” she remembered shoppers shouting in her direction. I know little more about her early years in this country than this singular anecdote.

Next up: the pinky ring.

“Fourteen karat,” the jeweler said.

Why, I asked, had part of it tarnished to a hue of green?

“There’s copper in 14-karat gold,” another member of the customer-care trio chimed in.

Its square face, the jeweler said, was bisected by a diagonal strip of onyx. On either side of that strip: two pinhead-size stones.

“I see a January and July here. Is there a January and a July?”

Maybe all of this was too loaded emotionally and I was struggling. Maybe I hadn’t yet had enough morning coffee. I was utterly confused by his question.

“What do you mean?”

Before he could answer, he amended the original query.

“How about a December/January and a July? I’ve got a topaz here and a ruby.”

My heart skipped a beat.

My father’s birthday: Dec. 25. My mother’s birthday: July 26.

“There you have it,” the jeweler said. “Your mom and dad, right here on this ring.”

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I had no idea, I said with the stunned look of a deer in headlights, that my father had a sentimental streak.

Christos was a quiet man. He worked long hours. Panagiota, too, by his side. Their story was cut short before we could pry.

I asked if others often came to the store, only to accidentally discover such things about their family. Not really, I was told. Most people know the story; they usually just want to know what the jewelry could sell for.

They finalized my order for the repaired pearl ring. What value, they asked me, would you like us to place on this, for our order form records?

“Priceless,” I said. “It’s irreplaceable.”

With that, and what must have been eyes glued to my back, I thanked them while heading back to the locked front door. The lost sidewalk ring in a pocket of my capris, my father’s ring in my purse. I would soon post about the lost ring on two Facebook pages but hear back nothing over three days.

In finding a stranger’s apparently forgettable ring, a precious story about another found me instead.