Clay

Saturday night, while gazing vacantly at my hand, I noticed with a start that my wedding ring was gone. I could not have been more dismayed had the finger disappeared along with it. A simple white gold band, with our initials and the date of our marriage engraved inside, it's graced my hand for almost 47 years. This is not the first time it's been absent though. Each time I go to the hospital I give it to my wife for safekeeping. But it's also gone AWOL.

The first time it came off my finger involuntarily was when I mailed a letter on Keren Kayemet Street in Jerusalem. Long before, to prevent terrorists from depositing time bombs in letterboxes, the postal service cemented the openings, leaving only a thin horizontal slit for mail. With my left hand I dropped a letter into the box and as I withdrew my hand I saw with horror that the ring stood in the opening. upright and alone. As carefully as I imagined a brain surgeon would operate, I slowly inserted my fourth finger into the ring and brought it out of the box, all the while imagining how I would tell a postal clerk, in my poor Hebrew, that my ring was in a postal box on Keren Kayemet Street.

The second time it unintentionally came off was during a training exercise held by my Israeli army reserve unit. I don't recall the exercise, but I think it required me throw something. Whatever it was, my ring followed it, falling somewhere into the sand about ten yards away. I despaired of finding it, but somehow, scratching about on my hands and knees, I did.

The third time was on a flight from New York to Tel Aviv, when I noticed that my ring was missing. I rooted around my seat looking for it but with no success. Once back in Israel, I phoned El Al and reported the ring missing. A few days later, the man in charge of the airline's Lost and Found Department called me to say that he had found it. He had personally searched through more than twenty plastic bags of the trash collected during the cleaning of our plane. He refused a reward, but he did recommend a charity to which I made a contribution in his honor. After that, I had a jeweler insert a guard to narrow the size of the ring.

This is the first time I've lost my ring in America, in San Diego, as a matter in fact. We're here to attend a wedding. Our hotel's plumber, who opened the trap under our sink here at my request, found nothing. I'll check the other suspects, but something tells me that this time I'm not going to find my ring. Then what will I do? Perhaps I could ask my brother to let me have my father's wedding ring. I'm sure my brother, a generous man, would do so without hesitation, although it would probably cost him a pang to part with an item associated with a father he so adored. My wife suggested that I might wear a band she inherited - she thinks it might have belonged to one of her great grandfathers. She also suggested that we might buy a new ring, as much as possible like the old one, with the same inscription. The new ring would be smaller, though, and sit more securely on my finger.

I will consider all these possibilities, but as good as I am at selling myself a bill of goods, I could not pretend that any successor was the real thing, the ring with which my wife married me and that I had worn for almost 47 years. But perhaps it's just as well that my ring finger remains unadorned. Its nakedness will remind me of the vanity of human wishes and that nothing lasts forever, nothing, that is, with the exception of love. As long as I'm alive, with or without a ring, I'm indissolubly bound to my wife, and after I die it will live on in our descendants. To quote Ira Gershwin, The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they're only made of clay, but our love is here to stay.