Senti -Mentally Foolish

I don’t know, sometimes it feels like I am a rock, I am an island, and not just because I’m living and working on one, heck I can go weeks, even months, without even leaving the island once!

I just finally realized I’m not a kid anymore. (My AARP membership and the amount of meds I take daily prove it without a doubt!) Even so, some of my geriatric customers still call me “kiddo”! For crying out loud I’ll be SEVENTY soon!! I guess I have to hit my eighties to finally be considered a full-fledged senior adult on Marco Island? Apparently, still being in one’s sixties here you’re considered “wet behind the ears” by the majority of the island’s population! Now and then I’m told I don’t look my age, and I appreciate that, but I still feel so seventy! 

Call it a wonderful curse; it’s my mother’s side of the family that has the fountain of youth gene. When I was running my own jewelry business at the tender age of twenty-four in the seaside town of Marblehead, Massachusetts (I looked like I was fifteen), a customer upon entering the store asked me where my father was? I answered him, “What do you need my dad for?” He seemed perturbed. “I need to see the goldsmith!”  I answered, “My dad’s not here and by the way, he’s in the water heater business in Boston and won’t be much good to you and that broken ring!” “But you’re just a kid!!”

He was completely flabbergasted that I was the resident goldsmith and owned a jewelry store. I promised him I knew what I was doing; he was at first hesitant leaving his cherished dad’s ring with “some kid” who could barely grow a mustache. I completed the complicated repair and called him the next day to pick it up. I’m not sure if he was thrilled, surprised or relieved; nevertheless, he paid me and he was my very first regular customer. It was tough back in the '70s and '80s getting folks to accept a fresh-faced kid selling diamonds, gems and gold jewelry who looked like he should be delivering pizzas for a living. 

Am I senti-mental? I admit I am - I miss the old days when there was some sense of normality and people were generally nice to one another.

I respect things that were made back then. In fact, a lot of the equipment in my workshop dates back to the late 1800s and next to that antique stuff is a state-of-the-art laser welder and engraver and next to that a computerized casting machine. Most of my hand tools on my bench belong to the “Masters” - the Master goldsmiths were my two uncles, Ernest and Richard, who taught me the trade as a beginning apprentice at age nine. Talk about “wet behind the ears!” And those tools are from the early 1900s. My actual workbench, built in the 1800s and that I work on most days, was willed to me by another Master Boston diamond setter named Carmine Fuchetti, who passed away in 1980. Carmen taught me old-world and old-school hand diamond setting techniques. He was the most talented diamond setter in Boston for over half a century. Carmen was in his late eighties when he taught me!

Over the years both my son and the various apprentices I taught learned to respect and maintain this legacy of antique jewelry-making equipment. I hope my future grandsons will feel the way I do about every single tool and my cherished jewelry-making machines.

Senti-mentally foolish! I hear and see that a lot. I have been buying old jewelry and gold from the public for many years now and sentimental pieces show up now and then. I can understand many times it’s a matter of really needing the money but mostly it’s not - Old Auntie Griselda’s passing left a heaping box of jewelry with unknown value… let’s sell it and get the cash! Many times, it’s not worth enough money for a happy meal, and other times, it’s like hitting the lottery.

You just don’t know - even some crummy-looking antique costume jewelry can be valuable, especially if it’s Civil War or Victorian era. One thing always irked me. First of all, sentimentality, as far as I’m concerned, seems to have gone out the same window as the typewriter or word processor. The current generation pretty much wouldn’t give a rat’s derrière for something that previously belonged to a deceased loved one unless it’s a pile of cash. Am I being a bit harsh? No. Seeing is believing, my friend. I’ve had bereaved spouses or kids selling off Gramps or Dad’s gold rings, money clip, belt buckle or worse, his gold teeth immediately after leaving the burial ceremony. To me that’s being colder than the newly departed presently is.

Such is life, many of you young-uns may accept it. I can’t. Going through a box of a departed loved one’s jewelry is an emotional rollercoaster that can be a tearful experience for the seller and even yours truly. Lying there is dad’s high school ring that your mom wore around her neck telling the boys of the graduating class of 1941 that the two of them were an item, and then Mom wore that ring every day, every week and every year your dad (or grandfather) was fighting for our freedom in Europe. There in the same jewelry box is the same simple sterling silver I.D. bracelet your mom presented to your father the night before he shipped off to Europe and the unknown with hand engraved in script lettering… “Come back to me,”along with his G.I. serial number. Your Dad wore that same bracelet when he stormed Omaha beach on D-Day, June 6th, 1944, and survived the worst world war in history. He then made it back home to your mother without a scratch. I’m tearing up just writing about this. Why, in the name of heaven, would you want to scrap any of these irreplaceable family heirlooms??     

Some of us appreciate and cherish this sentimental jewelry. Most don’t and sell it for a mere few dollars. I have purchased great great grandparents' original wedding bands from Europe to be scrapped along with 1970s disco neck chains. Don’t look at me like I’m the bad guy here. I’m the one who points out the inscription inside the wedding band GHT to MBT April 12, 1862. What would possess anyone with the idea to scrap something like this for a measly pittance, like the cost of two cups of coffee and muffins at Starbucks? 

Okay, back to me looking like the bad guy. The thing is, sentimental pieces of jewelry that may mean a lot to you don’t mean squat to people who buy gold from the public. If I detect even a minuscule bit of hesitation from a seller, I will suggest they take the piece home and think about it because after thirty days, I’m gonna melt it into an ingot along with all the other gold I accumulated and that’s all she wrote, it’s gone, the ancient family history you once had is melted with someone else’s history and can never get it back.

 A few years ago, I had a distraught granddaughter change her mind after a few months and wanted her grandmother’s band back. I regretfully had to tell her it’s gone now it had been turned into a different piece of jewelry. 

It’s not always a depressing experience. Around ten years ago when I was at my Front Street location, three sisters came in with a small silk bag of a recently deceased aunt’s jewelry and asked if I would separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I wasn’t all that busy at the time; I offered them my condolences and said it would not be a problem. Most of Auntie’s baubles were not valuable but there were a few gold pieces the sisters divided up between themselves. Thirty minutes later that was the end of it, or so I thought. Suddenly, one of the sisters pulled a ring out of her pocket… “Oh, I almost forgot and there is this thing!” She was embarrassed to show me because it was so ugly. It was a large, tarnished, hideous nugget ring with a considerably sized and dirty emerald-cut glass center stone. “It’s costume, right?” At first glance, it appeared to be, although it tested 14kt gold. Once I cleaned it thoroughly and closely examined the “large glass stone,” I gasped. Ladies, this is a real diamond!!! At this point, everyone’s jaw is on my showcase. I completed a full examination. I estimated it a bit less than five carats (when a diamond is in its setting it’s impossible to know the exact weight of the diamond without removing it and weighing it loose). It was one of the most beautiful diamonds I have ever laid my eyes on. At that time, I estimated its ballpark value around $100,000!! When I told them this, the surprise went from euphoria to… he’s slinging us a cartload of B.S. I couldn’t believe they didn’t believe me. All righty then, so you don’t believe me? I’ll give you $500 for the ring right now! (Remember now I told them its value and they don’t want to believe me!) Then they came around. I suggested they have it checked out at their hometown jeweler. 

It gets better. A half hour later one of their husbands called me and lambasted me for getting the girl's hopes up about the junk ring. Once again, I offered the five hundred smackers on the barrelhead for the “glass stone ring.” He stammered for a few seconds…but Richard, we can’t figure out how she would have come to possess such a valuable diamond, she lived a modest life, she spent the last twenty years in a nursing home, no one ever saw her wear that ring. I asked how old she was when she passed away? Dear Aunt Mary was ninety-eight.

My romantic guess would be it may have been reset from an original engagement ring that was presented to her from a fiancé that may have gone to war and never returned, wearing the ring may have caused emotional pain that proved to be too much to bear and she reset it in the 60s or 70s to that current ugly one and never wore it. Heck, then there is another reality scenario… Mary could have won it with a straight flush on Thursday poker night at the Shady Meadows retirement home…  Who knows? 

And by the way, I stand to be corrected about one thing. One of the sisters called me a couple of months later, laughing joyously over the phone about the value of the alleged glass and gold-tone ring she was going to throw away. It was finally appraised at the New York diamond exchange. When the rock was removed from the setting it was a bit heavier than I estimated, so I was off by $25,000… It was valued and sold for $125,000! God bless Aunt Mary!