Walk Home Together

When I was growing up one of the major rites of passage for a young girl was getting her ears pierced. I begged and begged to no avail starting when I was about ten years old and the answer was always the same…sixteen, and not a minute before. That seemed totally unreasonable. Absolutely light years away. Like full-on adulthood. 

But eventually, either I wore my mom down or she couldn’t think of anything else to get me, because right after school on my twelfth birthday I was sitting in the chair at Rings n’ Things at the mall picking out my first studs. 

Should I do the little gold balls like everyone else did? Or get silver to match my retainer? Maybe the fake sapphires for my birthday month? In the end, I got the gold balls because at that age I was lot more of a conformist. 

I was thrilled. I kept looking in the mirror that afternoon thinking how mature I looked. Just utter bejeweled sophistication with my unfortunate perm and teal blue Esprit sweatshirt. 

As everyone knows, the studs stay in for six weeks, twisting them a couple of times a day to help them heal properly, and then you can start changing them out. 

Of course, I wanted to wear the dangliest, sparkliest earrings I could locate. Mom quickly vetoed that and I guess she was right. The rhinestone chandeliers would have to wait a while. Anything worn in my preteen ears would need to be small and tasteful. Damn it. 

One day, on no particular occasion at all, Dad came home from work with a little white box. He presented it to me.

“See what you think about these right here!” he said in his booming voice. 

That’s a translation. In his North Alabama accent, and I say this with love, it actually sounded like

“See whatchoo thank bout these raht heuh!” 

I opened the box and inside was a pair of teeny tiny circular gold earrings with a little twist in them. Absolutely perfect and appropriate. I loved them and wore them immediately. 

It was a happy day and as the oldest sibling sometimes overwhelmed with two little brothers, I remember feeling special and loving that little bit of attention. I wore the earrings nonstop for weeks. 

But, I was twelve. 

I may have taken them off to go swimming with my best friend Marlow. I may have forgotten them in my pocket thinking I’d put them back in on the way to somewhere. They may have fallen off my dresser and gotten sucked into the vacuum cleaner. At some point I realized they were lost and I was devastated. 

I never said a word and honestly my dad probably never even noticed. But I knew, and the guilt was suffocating. It took a long time, years, before I stopped feeling terrible about it. 

I understand now that my disproportionate emotional reaction to losing them was probably undiagnosed anxiety and my always-severe inner critic. If I only I could go back and tell that sweet, awkward, worry-wart of a girl that it was not such a huge deal, that people lose things, it happens. Dad didn’t even notice. And I finally got over it, sometime before high school. 

I moved on to other earrings. Big, dangly, flashy ones for a while. Rhinestones and real stones and even some feathers one time. Tasteful handmade hoops and diamond studs. I still love earrings of all kinds. 

But…guess what the internet coughed up 38 years later? 

Or I should say, guess what I found last Wednesday night when I did a boredom-fueled investigation into some random online jewelry shops? 

Yup. I found them. Or a nearly identical match. 

I haven’t taken them off since they arrived in my mailbox (well, except to take the picture) But if I do take them off, it’s ok. If I lose them, it’s ok. 

It’s all ok. It always was.