Riedel Me This, Batman

Last night I needed a drink. We happened to have a couple of nice crystal pinot glasses and I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I placed them up in bubble wrap and brought them with us to LA along with a couple of necessities like a food scale, coffee pot and my favorite wooden salad bowl. We hadn’t actually quaffed any pinot out of them yet, mostly because I have been dieting and the plastic picnic wine glasses we had been using since we arrived five weeks ago were doing the job with the swill that we got as “every day wine.” When I arrived home last night after a long weekend out of town I saw a Riedel drying upside down on the kitchen counter. It seems that over the weekend Jack had her BFF over for dinner. I can only speculate that one of her girlfriends rebelled against drinking her wine out of a coffee mug, and reached up to the high shelf for the elegant glass. Which is perfectly cool with me. Anyway, so there I was in the backyard, sipping swill out of a plastic tumbler trying to decide how I was going to break the news to Jack that I recently discovered that someone had stolen my really good pieces of jewelry out of my jewelry box that I usually keep in a drawer in my dresser in our bedroom here. This thief had particularly good taste and selected the magnificent heavy gold necklace that husband and I bought together on in the Ponte Vecchio on our first wedding anniversary and its adorable matching bracelet; the exquisite and expensive gold bracelet that my BFF gave me, a diamond pendant; gold earrings and another gold bracelet, all gifts from my husband-- and my wedding ring. The wedding ring that my husband engraved with the loving, but misspelled words “TE AMO”--forever. In full disclosure, I misspelled TE AMO in his wedding band too. He still wears that wedding ring today because I followed the advice in Cosmopolitan magazine and got him a ring a size too small and it has never left his ring finger. Mine is a really lovely wedding band with sixteen sapphires and diamonds and it goes really well with my sapphire engagement ring. But, a couple of years ago I persuaded my husband to get me a modest wedding band, an “every day ring” and I saved the one with big rocks for the special occasions. Well, I discovered that the wedding band was missing a few days ago when we were leaving for San Francisco for a wedding. I didn’t panic because the cats knock things over all the time, and I planned to look for it when I returned. But, just as a precaution I took my little jewelry box with me in my suitcase. If I can backtrack a bit, the first day I arrived in LA I had an immediate request. I wanted a new heavy door and asked to put a keyed lock on the bedroom and closet doors. Husband understood that it was less of a desire for privacy and every bit about keeping my jewelry safe under the conditions. I understood long before I moved here that there is no way to secure this house. Jack has found that keeping the sliding door open all day gives her greater mobility in her wheelchair, and also gives regular access into the house by her personal home care worker, dog walker, her handyman and her myriad friends. There are lots of unannounced visits too, and in the last five weeks we’ve been joined by termite inspectors, a plumber and repairmen galore. Before now I guess it hadn’t been a problem because there really isn’t anything of material value here. How I convinced myself, a former prosecutor who has seen every crime imaginable, that I could cope under the circumstances is a story for another day. But the door was the first order of business and we discovered that you really can’t buy a door all that readily. It requires knowing the correct size. Who knew? And then you have to put on your own hinges and doorknobs and it really was much more of a task than we had the wherewithal for. So, I settled for just a keyed lock on the old bedroom door. I was pretty good about locking the door each time we went out, but I do recall now that there was one random day when I forgot to lock it. Jack isn’t terribly observant and it was several weeks before she realized that we had placed a lock on that door. But when she noticed she became very upset. Now life moves pretty quickly here and I had every intention of telling her that we locked the door, not because we didn’t trust her with the kitties, which I knew she believed, but to protect my expensive jewelry which I was pretty sure she had no idea I possessed. Anyway, hard discussions like that are easily deferred, and I rationalized that I would wait until she got new headphones for her listening device. Meanwhile we went to that wedding in San Francisco. When I was dolled up in my wedding outfit I opened the jewelry box and reached for the Italian necklace and came up empty handed. When we got home I discovered all the other stuff was gone too. I cannot, though I have agonized, remember the last time I wore those pieces, or figure out how in the world someone got into that room at a rare time that it happened to be unlocked. After a few really sleepless nights I made the decision to call the cops. Not that I expect the LAPD to solve this caper, but so they can check my missing stuff against the daily list they get from pawnshops. So, I was in the backyard aglow from the alcohol and fading sunlight. I felt good about the decision and was going to try to find a clever way to learn the last names of all the people who work for Jack, so I asked husband if he’d seen her. He had, a few minutes before sweeping up the shards of Riedel from the floor.