LOST AND SOMETIMES FOUND

By Dan Miller
November 30, 2007

Underneath the back porch of the house where I grew up, I found an old, brittle baseball glove.
I didn't recognize it as one of my old gloves, but I tried it on for size.
There was something inside one of the fingers that kept my hand from going all the way in.

When I pulled my hand out, to my surprise, out popped an old high school class ring.
Apparently, it had been stuck in the finger of that old glove for years.

Now, this happened in Georgia about 45 years ago, so details are sketchy.... but here's what I remember.

Inside the ring, the initials "R-J-M" were engraved.
It was for the Class of 1954 at a school in a small town in Ohio.
Honestly, I don't recall the school's name or the town.
But I wrote a letter to the school, telling them I'd found a ring from the 1954 graduating class bearing the initials "R-J-M."

A couple of weeks later I got a letter from the school telling me they had located and contacted a man named Robert J. Majors, who had graduated that year, and he confirmed that he had indeed lost his class ring several years earlier.

I sent the ring to Mr. Majors, and a few days later, I received a nice letter thanking me for the unexpected return.

He said he had lost the ring while in the Army stationed at Fort Gordon in Augusta, but didn't recall exactly how or when he lost it.
He also confirmed that he had, in fact, played on a baseball team for awhile while on the Army post.
But he didn't remember losing a glove, so apparently he had borrowed someone else's glove -- and that's when the ring got stuck, without him even noticing.

How it ended up beneath my parents' back porch is a mystery for the ages.
But it was a nice little serendipitous connection to someone I've never met.

That whole scenario popped back into my consciousness the other day when I read an article written by Bill Cahalan for the Fairmont Sentinel Online from Fairmont, Minnesota.
He wrote about how a man named Aaron Giles got back an identification bracelet he'd lost in a barn 28 years earlier.

It happened recently when a young woman working in a chicken processing plant in Fairmont, spotted a shiny object while cutting up a chicken.
There, stuck in the gizzard of the chicken, was an ID bracelet with a name and address on it.
With a little detective work the chicken processors were able to locate Aaron Giles, though he and his family had long since moved away from Fairmont.

They returned it to Aaron, who's now in his 30s.

Turns out, Aaron's dad had bought the ID bracelet for him when he was just 3 years old.

As for how it got into that chicken's gizzard.... well, it's for certain that chicken will never tell the story.... so there's another mystery for the ages.

Remember folks......
Whenever anything is lost.... if it's not perishable or degradable....
it's still out there somewhere! Just wait.

And be careful biting into chicken.

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