The Setting: Halloween Night - about 9 pm - The soccer field a block away from my apartment.
As part of my goal to get more exercise, I was taking advantage of the decently warm weather. (Tuesday I went out with a football and soccer ball and it felt good to get running again.) Wednesday, I went out with just my football, and I was for the most part, punting the ball nearly straight up and trying to field it.
And after about only 5 minutes, I fielded a punt, and something didn't feel right. The ball came into my hands, and I noticed that my second finger on my left hand was empty. My wedding ring had fallen off and was somewhere in the grassy field.
Had it just fallen off? Was it near where I caught it or where I kicked from? Or did it fall off minutes earlier when I was running into the endzone or recovering an errant kick. Literally, the ring could have been anywhere in the field.
I spent the next 30 minutes searching, including crawling on my hands and knees, feeling in the near dark. The whole time I was thinking about what I was going to say to Brittany. Because I was raised by TV sitcoms, I expected my wife to be upset. But after coming up empty in the dark and now being quite cold in my athletic shorts, I knew I had to go in.
And I give her all the credit in the world, because from the moment I told her, there was not one second where she panicked, got upset, or blamed me for losing it. We gathered our battery powered lantern, put a coat on Rocky, layered up ourselves and went out looking for it.
So now it's Halloween night, about 10 pm, and we're in the middle of a dark field with a lantern and a dog in a purple coat. And the lantern made such a difference that I was just completely sure that we would find it. I mean, it just fell off. It didn't get buried. No one could have taken it. It's just sitting there in the grass, and with the lantern, we'd be able to spot it right away...right?
So we looked and looked. We made sweeping paths, row by row. I looked in the spots where I thought I had kicked from and caught from. We looked all over. But it was dark and it was cold and we just couldn't find it. But still I held out hope. I would wake up and with the power of daylight, it would be obvious. It would just be sitting there in the sun, waiting for us, and then it would be over. I was sure of it.
7 am came, I woke up, 23 minutes before sunrise to go out and look for it. And when I got out there, I was shocked out how much difference the light made. The field was shiny and lit and I thought for sure, it would just be a matter of walking the field for a few minutes. After 30 minutes, Brittany joined me before she had to go to work. We walked the field again with the sun shining and couldn't find it. She had to go to work, I had to go in and get ready for work. She said we should get a metal detector. I didn't want to pay for that, and I thought that all we needed was to borrow a rake and we'd be able to hear it, or we could just keep looking.
After I showered and got ready for work, I went back out just to check. But no. I couldn't find it. And I had to go to work for the first time as a married man without my ring on. And I had to start accepting that maybe we weren't going to find it. Maybe I blew it and we'd have to buy a new one, and spend another $400+ but it wouldn't be the same, and I didn't want to even think about it.
All day long, my fingers instinctively felt for it, just as I check for my wallet, except that my fingers found flesh instead of metal. I couldn't focus on my work because I was thinking about my ring, and I couldn't think about finding the ring because of all the work I had to do. At 4pm, this day of all days, we finally had our work team outing at a bar--an event that had been in the works since January. My plan was to get home by 5:30, and with the help of Niraj and Brittany stay out until we found out. Maybe my landlord had a rake that we could borrow.
Well, the team outing lasted until 7pm and I emerged from the bar where I didn't have a signal. So I called Brittany to see what she was doing. And she said that she and Rocky had driven 45 minutes to the northside to rent a metal detector for $25. I couldn't believe it. I was holding out hope that we would find it on our own and we wouldn't have to pay anything to fix my mistake.
Well, now we had a metal detector. The only question was would it work? Brittany told me that she saw students playing soccer in the field that afternoon. My heart sank. What if someone had already found it. At this point I was accepting the fact that it might not be in this field anymore. We could search for the next 5 hours and the whole time, it might not even be there.
So around 8pm Brittany showed up in the field with the metal detector, I was there with the lantern, and Niraj was on his way. She started sweeping the area, and it was picking up things. We found one sprinkler head that was hidden from view, and a couple other hits where whatever it was, must have been buried, because there was just nothing on the surface. Every time she got a hit, I ran over with the lantern, and felt with my fingers for anything there. And every time there was nothing. I couldn't help but think that now the ring was lost and we wasted money on a metal detector too.
And then, it only takes a second, after she got a hit with the detector, she bent down and plucked it from underneath a clump of grass.
I couldn't believe it. There it was, in the middle of where we had been looking for hours upon hours. And it had only taken 20 minutes with the metal detector. I just couldn't believe it.
The weird thing was, when she got the hit, I came over with the lantern, was in the right spot, and couldn't see it. But it was there. And she found it.
And ever since then, it's been this huge relief, and it just feels amazing to be back to normal.
