Three Class Rings in the Attic, and None of Them Were Mine

Under the Pink Insulation

We had owned the house for eleven days when my husband, Dev, came down the attic ladder holding a cigar box over his head like a trophy.

"Either we are rich," he said, "or someone is going to want this back."

The box was old, the lid held shut with a dry rubber band that snapped the moment I touched it. Inside, nested in a wad of yellowed tissue, were three class rings. Heavy ones. Gold, with coloured stones, the kind of rings that used to be a big deal in small American towns. One had a red stone and the year 1971 cut into the side. One had a blue stone and 1974. The third had a green stone and was so worn I could barely read anything except part of a school crest.

I teach fourth grade. I have spent my whole working life handing children back things they have lost. Mittens, retainers, notes they should not have written. I looked at those rings and felt the same pull I feel when a lunchbox turns up in the hallway with no name on it. Somebody, somewhere, was missing this.

The Family Who Lived Here Before Us

Our house is a narrow brick place on a street of narrow brick places in a town in northeast Ohio that most people drive through on their way to somewhere else. We bought it from an estate. The previous owners, an elderly couple, had both died within a year of each other, and their son lived in Arizona and handled the sale over the phone. We never met him.

I called the realtor, who gave me his email. I wrote a careful message explaining what we had found. He wrote back two weeks later, a short, polite reply. He said none of the rings belonged to his parents, as far as he knew. His father had not finished high school. His mother had gone to a Catholic girls' school two counties over that did not do rings like these. He had no idea where they came from. He said I should do whatever I thought was right.

That was not the answer I wanted. I wanted a tidy ending. Instead I had three strangers in a cigar box.

Becoming an Amateur Detective

I spent most of that winter on the project. Dev called it my "ring thing" and was mostly patient about it.

The 1971 ring had initials engraved inside: R.K.M. The school crest was from the local high school, which had closed and merged with another district in the nineties. I went to the public library and spent three Saturday afternoons with old yearbooks, running my finger down the senior pages. There were two boys with those initials. One had died in 2009, according to an obituary I found online. The other, a man named Raymond Mercer, was still alive and living in a retirement community forty minutes away.

I wrote him a letter. A real letter, on paper, because I had a feeling he was the kind of man who would prefer it. Two weeks later, he called the school office looking for me, which mortified me in front of the secretary but delighted me privately.

He came to our house on a Sunday afternoon. He was eighty-one and tall and stooped and wore a cardigan buttoned wrong. When I put the ring in his palm, he did not say anything for a long time. Then he told us he had given it to a girl named Patty at a homecoming dance in the autumn of his senior year. They had dated for eight months. She had moved away with her family that summer and he had never seen her again. He assumed she had thrown it out.

How it got from Patty to our attic, none of us ever figured out. Perhaps she married someone who knew someone who lived here. Perhaps she lived here herself for a while. Raymond did not want to know. He said the mystery was nicer than any answer.

He stayed for coffee and told us about the town in 1971, about the drive-in that used to be where the pharmacy is now. When he left, he left the ring on our kitchen table.

The Man Who Did Not Want It Back

"I am eighty-one," he said, when I chased him to his car with it. "My kids do not want my things. They want my recliner and my tools. This was Patty's, really, not mine. You found it. You keep it. Or sell it and buy something for your classroom."

I stood on the curb holding it as he pulled away, feeling oddly heartbroken.

The 1974 ring was easier and harder at once. The initials inside belonged to a woman who had died in 2016. I found her daughter through a church newsletter. The daughter cried on the phone and then, a week later, asked me to mail it to her in Tennessee, which I did, insured, with a note. She sent me a photograph of her mother wearing it at seventeen, sitting on the hood of a car.

The green ring, I never solved. The crest was too worn and the initials, if there ever were any, had been polished away by someone's finger turning it around and around for years.

What To Do With What Is Left

So there I was, the following spring, with two rings nobody wanted: Raymond's and the anonymous green one.

I did not want to keep them in a drawer. That felt like the same thing that had happened in the attic, just with better lighting. I wanted them to become something again.

Our school runs a lending library out of a room next to mine, and the shelves are falling apart. The kids sit on the floor because we have no beanbags. Every year the parent group raises a little money and every year it goes to something more urgent than books. I remembered what Raymond had said.

I started looking into what selling old gold actually involves. I had no idea. I read a lot of advice, some of it contradictory, about getting things weighed in front of you and knowing what karat you have before you walk in. I looked into a few local Gold Buyers and compared what they said about how they worked out a price. Dev, who is an accountant and cannot help himself, made a small spreadsheet.

I called Raymond first, to check he really meant it. He laughed down the phone and said, "Buy those kids something to sit on."

The Afternoon at the Counter

I sold both rings on a rainy Thursday after school. I had been nervous that the whole thing would feel cold, like I was selling something that belonged to other people's memories. In the end it was oddly gentle. The person behind the counter looked at the green ring for a long time and said it had been worn a great deal. I told him the story. He listened.

I had read enough to know I was trading Gold for cash at a value based on weight and purity, not on sentiment, and I had made my peace with that in advance. Nobody pays you for a homecoming dance in 1971. That is not what gold is for, in the end. It is just metal that has been in a lot of places.

The money was not a fortune. It bought eight beanbags, two new bookshelves and forty paperbacks chosen by the children themselves, which meant a great many books about sharks.

The Plaque Nobody Asked For

Dev made a small wooden plaque in the garage and we screwed it to the end of one of the new shelves. It says: "These shelves were bought with a ring given at a homecoming dance in 1971, and another one nobody could name. Read something you love."

The kids do not care about the plaque. They care about the beanbags, which are the colour of traffic cones and are fought over daily. But I care about it. And Raymond, when I sent him a photograph, wrote back a letter of his own, on paper, telling me Patty had loved to read.

People sometimes ask me now, when they hear the story, whether it was the right thing to do. Whether I should have kept looking for the green ring's owner forever. Maybe. I thought about it. But a ring in a drawer does not help anyone remember anything. A child on a beanbag reading about sharks, under a little wooden sign, might.

I see the signs on the highway sometimes, the big ones that say Cash for Gold, and I used to think they were a little sad. A reminder that people fall on hard times and sell what they love. Now I think about it differently. Sometimes the thing you sell was never really yours. Sometimes all you are doing is finding it a better place to land.

The cigar box is still on a shelf in our living room, empty except for the tissue paper. I keep meaning to throw it out. I never do.