Diamonds aren’t forever.

My grandfather came to Canada from the old country (Latvia) when he was a teenager. He had learned the art of watchmaking in his native village and apprenticed with a watchmaker in a small town in Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula. Afterwards he opened up his own business, a small shop in which he did watch repairs and some jewellery setting and selling. The story goes that a man came to him with two small diamonds to be set into earrings and never returned. We’re talking the nineteen-teens here, before everyone had a telephone and much business was done without the kind of rigorous documentation we expect nowadays.

Years passed. My grandfather quit the watchmaking/jewellery business and started up a wrecking company with one of his brothers. In those days, wrecking was a very different business than it is today. Now, if you want a building torn down, you hire a company which demolishes the premises and carts away the garbage. When my grandfather was in the business, the wreckers themselves bid on the jobs because they would sell what they salvaged. When my parents built their house, they acquired beautiful solid oak doors from a wrecker. Times have changed.

Anyway, he sold his store and much of the inventory, including one of the unclaimed diamonds. The other he made into a small ring, and when my mother was a baby, the story goes, they tied it around her wrist with a pink ribbon. Her hands become rather too large for the ring, and so she gave it to me, and I wore it next to my wedding band on the inside because it was just a bit too loose and I feared losing it.

Lately I noticed that the claws needed to be retipped. This evening as I was making supper I realized that the diamond was gone, that the basket was empty. I don’t know where it could have happened, although I’m pretty sure it was while I was cooking. Little Princess and I chewed our stir fry very carefully because I thought it could have fallen in the wok.

It wasn’t a very good diamond. I’m not upset about the cost of replacing it, if I chose to do so. It upsets me because it had sentimental value. Nothing lasts forever. Not even diamonds.

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