This is post #200 on speaktherights.com.
It all started July 2014. Carrie, my dear wife, said it would be a good thing for me to do. She is usually right. This time she was spot on.
I do enjoy writing. I suppose it comes easier to me than most. The thing is, and you may have noticed in our pictures, my head is much larger than Carrie’s or most others I come across. I have stuff in my head that just needs to get out! My hat size in a comfortable 7 and 7/8. I like to wear them a little loose. In fact, I really don’t like wearing hats at all. Not my style. My Dad loves to wear hats. If I get a hat, I pass it on to him. I will say there are a few I have a penchant for wearing. I won’t mention them, in fear I might hurt a feeling or two of ones that have bestowed upon me a hat thinking I would wear it. I will say to my financial adviser, I LOVE the hat you gave me.
Post 200. I must be dreaming.
What have we talked about? Football. Politics. Social Issues. Literature. Music. A great deal of music. Family. Faith. Nature. Travel. Schools. Movies. Influences. History. I suppose it is a case of whatever goes.
I don’t live a glamorous life. I do, however, feel I live an interesting life. I am fortunate to be able to share sights and written sounds of places I have been and things I have experienced. I am blessed in that regard. Rhode Island is the only State I have yet to visit east of the Mississippi River. Maybe next summer.
Post 200. How can it be? What took you so long? That is probably a question I know a few folks are asking. They figured it would have been here a long time ago. The truth is, when I started the wheels in motion of getting a new job last Spring, I cut back my speaktherights.com volume a great deal. When I got my new job, I found myself engrossed with learning the ins and outs of it. I didn’t have time to write as much as I once did. I missed not posting more. I enjoyed getting to know my new job even more.
I am blessed to know that there are some folks all over the map that look in on and follow speaktherights.com. I have had fun with it. I really have. Never once did I sit down to write something out of obligation. I wanted to write more on several occasions!
Let me convey to you a story right now.
I love my wedding band. It was put on my finger on February 10, 1996 at Hancock Chapel Untied Methodist Church in Northwest Harrison County, Indiana. This coming February it will have been placed there twenty years ago. I cherish that. I plan on it being there and having Carrie there along with it for many decades to come.
I thought I lost this ring on Saturday morning, October 17th.
Carrie and I spent the most wonderful week on Topsail Island. NC this past week. The weather was perfect. The food was great. We did not run into a single knucklehead on our travels. There was a group of three folks on Topsail Beach Point that were most likely from New Jersey. They talked louder than anyone in North Carolina and they said nothing as they spoke. We forgave them. A lesson to learn here…when we travel up to the Northeast… New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont…folks fall in love with my southern accent. Understand my parents are both originally from Mississippi and I, for whatever reason, have acquired a Southern tone of my one. The folks up North tell me how lovely my accent is. I am here to tell you…no one tells a Norther person how lovely their accent is.
Back to my lost ring.
Though we planned to stay until Saturday morning on the coast, I told Carrie it made plenty sense to me to head up to Raleigh on Friday evening and get a head start on the drive home. Look, we always hate to leave the coast. That day was even tougher for some reason. All we were going to do was go to sleep, get up, and make a long drive. I proposed we make the drive shorter. We did.
We spent the night near the RDU airport outside Raleigh. Planes flew over our room and they were loud. I loved it. I watched football on the TV as I fell asleep.
Saturday morning we planned to drive to Cross Lanes, WV to stop for the night on the way home.
I opted not to get any coffee at the hotel we just left in hopes of finding a Starbucks up the road. It was about 8 AM at this point. We drove up the road about 12 miles and I indeed did find a Starbucks and it was BUSY. It was much too busy for me to wait on a cup of coffee. There must have been twenty people ahead of me. I looked at Carrie and told her I was not going to wait that long for coffee.
As we were pulling out the parking lot to head back up the road, I noticed my wedding band was missing from my left hand and I went into implosion mode. I opened the back hatch of the Ford Edge and looked through stuff I had put in the car when we loaded it at the hotel. I walked over to our original parking spot at Starbucks. I looked. I found nothing. I panicked. I got in the car and raced back to the hotel to look. We retraced every step. We got a key to get back into our room. We looked and literally turned the place upside down. We were there for at least an hour. We went up and down the stairwell we traveled. We looked everywhere we had been. Nothing.
We went back out into the parking lot and looked some more. It was twenty minutes into this looking that I resigned myself to try to believe that I would never see my wedding band again.
Carrie and I drive in silence, the occasional tear rolling down my cheek, back to Starbucks a few miles up the road. I made my way into the store to ask if anyone had found a ring. Carrie went over to the spot where we had parked and was looking around the cars that were now parked there. A nice lady came to Carrie and asked if she was looking for anything. Carrie told her she was looking for my wedding band. The lady held the ring up with two fingers and she too seemed overwhelmed that she had found the rightful owner of a ring of the obvious significance this one seemed to have. If only she really knew.
Before I got into the store I noticed Carrie talking to these people and I thought I saw a ring in Carrie’s hand. I walked toward them. Not much was said. I was numb. It was my ring. The couple had stayed to fight the line and get coffee and get something to eat. They also did not want to leave the premises yet because they wanted to find the owner of the ring. I’d say we showed up just in time.
The thing is, I was a bit larger when I got married. I wear my college class ring on my right middle finger now and my wedding band, I have tried a couple of jewelry store aids, is very loose on my ring finger. I assure you, I plan to get it sized now.
I am blessed again. I would have been in a bad mood for month had I lost this ring.
I want to share a few more images of our trip to Topsail.
On Friday, we witnessed the release of a sea turtle that had been nursed to health by the folks at the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Hospital in Surf City, NC. We have been friends of this place for a long time. On Thursday we went to the turtle hospital to visit. On Friday, we saw one of the patients go back home.
This was Bristol at the Turtle Hospital on Thursday.
This was Bristol about to be released into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. I think it was ready to go.
Have a good life, Bristol.
Speak the rights…
Danny Johnson