Impressive Telepathy

Tuesday, February 16, 1993

In June, July, or August of 1973 I attended a big party at a farm near Davidson, North Carolina. I got very drunk. The next day I discovered my 1973 high school graduation ring was not on my finger. I tried to mentally review my actions of the previous night in hopes of figuring out when I had lost the ring. I deduced that the ring must have slipped off in the cooler as I fished in the ice water for a beer. I drove out to the farm and searched the weeds where the cooler's water had been dumped after the party. I did not find the ring. The farmhouse burned down in 1974. In 1981 I moved to South Carolina, where I still live.

On February 5, 1993 (almost twenty years after losing my ring at the party), I bought a metal detector. For more than a week I obsessively thought about the places I would search and the things I would find. I thought a lot about searching for my high school ring. I knew the farm had been sold and a new house had been built on the property. I thought about the unknown people who lived there and how I would ask them to let me search for my ring.

On February 16, 1993, I got a telephone call from a man who said he had my high school ring to return to me. He had bought the farm in 1987 and built a house there. He had found the ring while pulling weeds about a year ago. The ring has my initials and the name of the school on it. The man had gotten the appropriate yearbook and looked through it to see who had the initials "JDM". He had found one of my classmates with the same initials, found a telephone number for the guy, and called him, but that guy had his ring. Somehow the man with my ring had overlooked me in the yearbook. He gave up his search and put the ring in a box where it stayed until about a week earlier when his wife told him they needed to try to find the ring's owner again. The same week his wife decided they needed to try again was the week I was obsessively thinking about metal detecting and finding my ring. They got a yearbook and looked through it. This time they spotted me, called my brother who still lived in the area, and got my telephone number from him. They mailed the ring to me.


Copyright 2008 Jon Maloney