A Close Call

Last night, I finally got Tyler to watch the first episode of Sherlock with me. And as I was getting ready for the day, I thought about one scene in particular--Sherlock was commenting that the state of the murdered woman's wedding indicated the health of her marriage. Because her wedding ring was dirty, he deduced that her marriage was an unhappy one.

So, because I have a happy marriage, I decided to give my ring a good cleaning. After all, it always looks so sparkly afterward. (I do clean it frequently, by the way. It's not like my ring was dirty. I just thought of how pretty it always looks after a little polishing up, and went for it.)

But, horror of horrors, as I was cleaning my ring, it slipped out of my fingers, and seemingly in slow motion hit the counter and bounced into the heating duct on the floor of our bathroom. (Why, Utah? Why are there grates on your floors? This doesn't happen in Texas. Right, Texans? At least, I never noticed this until I moved to Utah.)

Now, because of the strange placement of air ducts in our apartment, I have a few of the vents strategically closed to prevent the upstairs from becoming too stuffy and the downstairs from being too cold.

Luckily, our bathroom air duct is one of my strategically closed vents. So although my ring fell into the air duct, the vents were closed, and there it lay--on the closed vents, beneath the grate covering the air duct.

So I motioned Tyler over, almost panicking, and not sure what to do. At this point, I was sure that I was about to lose my wedding ring forever. I couldn't remember if our bathroom vents open and close easily (some of our vents are super stiff, others open and close with a brush of our fingers), and I knew that if I wasn't careful, I could accidentally open up those vents, and my ring could tumble into oblivion.

I started searching for a paperclip, thinking that if I hooked my ring just right, I could pull it  up through the grate safely. As I was ransacking our dresser for a paperclip, Tyler (the wise) suggested I grab some tweezers.

After a moment's pause, I realized that this was indeed a genius idea, absolutely superior to my paperclip thoughts. Especially because there were some tweezers basically sitting in front of my face.

Together, we went back into the bathroom, and Tyler stabilized the vents while I rescued my wedding ring, Operation-style.

I put my ring back on and just sat there, practically shaking and near tears. Tyler, in his attempt to be comforting, said, "It's ok. We're still married." I responded with something to the effect of, "Yeah, but I almost lost my ring!"

And Tyler, again trying for comfort, said, "You would have found something else that you liked."

He was absolutely, 100% serious! I could not believe what I was hearing, so I tried to clarify. And indeed, his thought was that if my ring had been gone forever, we would have just replaced it with something else.

I just--I mean, how do you explain an (irrational??) attachment to an object? I was speechless. And then I rebelled. No way. This ring is an antique. It's one-of-a-kind. Irreplaceable. I actually might have died if we had lost my ring. I would, at the very least, never fully recover.

I'm not totally crazy, right? Is this a woman thing? Or is this just a me thing? (This is where you guys respond and tell me what your wedding rings mean to you. And make me feel better about how attached I am to this object that I can't take with me into the next life--but might try to smuggle in with me anyway. I'm only mostly kidding about that last part.)

It's probably two or three hours since almost losing my ring, and I still feel a little in shock at the horror that almost befell us (me).

But all's well that ends well.

And I'm never opening that air duct again.