A love letter on the beach

Diego & I recently went to Miami to celebrate 10 years together. I had purposefully not brought my engagement ring (already lost one pavé diamond at the beach, and the whole ring for a few years—another story), but I brought the dangly pearl earrings I wore at our wedding.

I wore them out to dinner Saturday night, when we celebrated old-style at Joe’s Stone Crab, with paper bibs and martinis.

The next afternoon before we headed out to explore “Little Buenos Aires”, I put them on again. After shopping for maté and alfajores, dining on fugazzetta and Quilmes at Campo de Argentina, we set out to walk along the beach the 2+ hours back to our hotel. (Long walks have been our thing since our first date in Chicago, when we walked from Constellation on the west side all the way back to my sublet on the Gold Coast.)

I took the earrings off as we set out, and put them in the pocket of my windbreaker, previously owned by Diego’s great uncle Tio Negro, whose apartment we cleaned out last summer in Buenos Aires. There was no zip on the pocket, just a little snap.

I wrapped the jacket around my waist, and we set out amid pink clouds & silvery surf towards South Beach. Eventually we cut over from sand to boardwalk. Diego carried my backpack a few times, and I hiked the baggy windbreaker up around my waist as we chatted easily about the past & future. Unbroken conversation when you have young children is a fine thing.

About an hour fifteen in, feet sore in our sandals and wondering if we should Lyft the rest of the way, I felt in the breast pocket of the jacket for my earrings, which weren’t there.

My response was to crumple to the ground, barely able to say aloud what had happened, what sheer act of stupidity had led us here. Once I said it, I was ready to let them go. Those earrings would not be passed on to Gioia for her wedding, nor worn for any more special occasions.

But Diego said, let’s go back and see.

“We’re roughly halfway between where we started and where we’re going, so if we go back, it’s the same distance. Then we’ll get a car to take us home.”

My feet hurt. My thin sandals were rubbing. I was tired, and so full of regret.

“The only thing more heartbreaking than losing them would be to walk all the way back and not find them,” I said. Another hour and fifteen minutes of searching! But after a moment, Diego’s hope was contagious, and I agreed it was worth seeing.

It as fully dark as we began our walk in reverse. Near silent, our eyes glued to the ground, walking on the wrong side of the boardwalk as bikes flew past. I imagined the silver backings crushed under a wheel, or the pair in someone’s pocket.

We were quiet, thoughtful, tired, a little defeated, but still I was awed by this person I was walking with. He didn’t even remember what the earrings looked like, but he wasn’t going to leave them for lost without a fight.

“I do well with a task,” he said, when I thanked him for both his willingness and encouragement.

We didn’t find them on the boardwalk. We noted various landmarks, a lost pair of yellow socks, a dubious playscape, an infinity pool in an apartment complex, and finally the glowing crown of a tall building where we had turned off from the beach.

Once we turned onto the dark sand of the beach, I felt both an intuition that they were here, and a dread that the sand was infinitely more likely to swallow them whole. But we remembered exactly the tracks we had walked in, and retraced our steps until I saw the blue rounded corner of a piece of packaging I remembered seeing before. I got down and started looking. Within seconds I found one, Diego the other. Perfectly uncrushed, the pair.

I was on my knees again, in tears of relief and disbelief. These earrings, not cheap but not terribly expensive, had just increased in value ten-fold.

And my love for Diego, already 10 years strong, already complex and tensile, pocked with arguments and responsibilities, children and blindness, grew too. I had seen in action something I’ve known but don’t get to see shine everyday—that hard-working, time-willing, optimistic, hopeful soul of the man I chose.

This new Bill Callahan song captures some of what I feel.

Credit is also due to the help of a few guides I enlisted in the search: my friend Justine, nine years gone, whose birthday it was, along with Tio Negro (who seems to have a real sense of humor about my wearing his jacket), and St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. I asked all three to help with the search.

A move from painting to drawing, only doing what she loved, and letting the work get larger were keys to artist Rachel Wolfson Smith finding her way into her true style and voice.

Listen/watch Part 1 of our interview if you love getting inside an artist’s process. Rachel’s interviewing me next, and Part 2 of this conversation is forthcoming on Interstudio.