making potable lemonade

I'm afraid we have to go back to the earring. See entry of December 19th for sorry details. The "repair" blogpost was meant to be the penultimate mention of the earring, followed by a final anecdote of victorious completion, with both earring and relational repair with Laura, who lost the earring and has since looked under every couch in Farmington.  She's found lots of gum, spare change, and ball point pens, but not the earring that got away from her pocket.

Shortly before Christmas, I had brought the remaining earring to a bead artisan who was going to Make It All Better. Who cares about the scathing reviews of her shop on the Internet? Those were harsh, surely unfair; she's quirky, I figured, but she must know what she is doing. She owns a shop, after all.

Yani and I spent a long time with this shopkeeper. I described my idea of earring mitosis, dividing it in half to make two smaller ones, using the beads bearing the original earring karma (no, no; I didn't mention karma. I was very concrete.). We went over each bead.

Saturday Ting went to pick up the finished earrings! As she handed Ting the pair, the how-the-heck-does-she-stay-in-business beader said, "I might not have done it the way she wanted." Her notes to self on the little envelope revealed that she wasn't listening as concretely as I was speaking: "make another like this but not exactly," she had written. She dissected the original one, all right, but mitosis had gone bad. We had mutant earrings.

Now I had paid $35 to have my one good earring made much larger and weirder, and created a massive and definitely fraternal twin earring to boot. Laura, who still feels responsible for this whole thing, sneaked out of the house yesterday and drove the unwieldy things through the falling show to another bead artisan a friend recommended. She came home, my devoted spouse who is understandably tired of this whole thing, with original-sized earrings strung so tight that the beads fall at an angle, as if you are standing in a very strong wind at all times. A basset hound with its head out the window of a car going 60.

Who feels worse about all this? The neurotic one who is embarrassed that she has to have her earring right, laden as it is by now with meaning -- plus emotional, fossil fuel, and financial investments? Not to mention that it has morphed into the project that won't let me complete it? Or is it the one who thinks she has to fix the damn earring to make her cancer-stricken spouse happy no matter how unreasonable the hang up? I note again that we are fully aware that this is still about gaining a sense of control over circumstances that are raging through our lives.

So this morning I decide to put the earrings in a wheelbarrow and lug them to a real jeweler. I call first and say, "I would like to make an appointment to tell a story to the jeweler." That's just a sentence I've never said before, and it felt weird because I knew I should just fling the earrings into the snow while driving on Route 84. But there was all this stuff caught up in making some potable lemonade out of this sour situation. The jeweler gets on the phone and he says, very kindly, that he would like to hear my story, to please come when I can. I walk down the street to the store, shake his hand, and he begins to listen. He sketches and measures. When I ask when he thinks they might be done, he asks "when do you start chemo?"

He is going to try to fix it by Wednesday, the day before treatment starts. He made several careful drawings, and treated the job more thoughtfully and tenderly than the surgeon treated my scars. Though all this will double the original cost of the silly earrings, it feels promising and comforting. It feels like maybe I will complete this weird episode and walk into the "infusion room" on Thursday with crystal earrings that reflect light and say persistence, hope, repair.