Ring Transport: Origins, Part 1
Copyright November 2023 by Fit529 Dotcom
(Started 2011, mostly completed 2018, revised 2023)
== Disclaimers ==
Everyone is over age 18.
All names were changed to their exact opposite, randomized, forgotten, remembered, and changed again to their ancient Sumerian versions, transliterated to Persian, then to Hittite, then to Akkadian, then (aw, to hell with it) switched back to random American ones.
As far as you know, some of this text might sound really cool and poetic in another language.
== Sequence ==
This book is Part 1 of a series that includes:
# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 1
# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 2
# Ring Transport: Anna
# Ring Transport: Hard Escape
== Chapter: A Few Origin Story Notes ==
Divorcing at 51 meant moving out.
My initial studio apartment was soon too tiresome and geographically close to my old life to stay. I really needed to get some distance, emotionally and physically.
My dead-end purchasing manager job was easily ditched. I'd quit college early to take care of my wife Alicia and daughter, but our town was small and there weren't many job options for better money or fulfilling careers.
Once our daughter was off to college herself, my ex's interests and my own quickly diverged.
It was increasingly unpleasant to be together. Worse yet, she was right - my shortcomings were real, present, and obvious to me as well. Knowing about problems doesn't solve them, though, and it was too easy to fall back into bad habits despite Wanting to change.
I'd read once: Sometimes, to change inside, change your outside.
Or, more amusingly, "Sometimes to quit smoking you need to move to Japan."
I didn't quite go that far.
Moving 2k+ miles to Tacoma, Washington on a whim of 'it looks pretty there', I found a job at a small construction company as a project manager. This just required being organized, setting up meetings, tracking finances, and pushing paper around, which was pretty much the same kind of job I'd had before.
My new digs (after a few weeks at a homeless shelter) were a tiny studio apartment right next to my workplace, so I could actually walk down the street to work. Given it was a big city and commuting could be a vast time-suck, I figured I got lucky.
The good and bad balanced - I felt sorry for myself, and enjoyed a new start, in equal measure.
As I settled into my new life, I started running again, plus the TaeKwonDo dojang down the block had a special deal on both Yoga and TKD classes. I pleaded utter destitution (truth) and got a cut rate provided I helped out at their tiny-kid birthday parties on weekend afternoons.
I love helping teach there. The kids would bounce and defy gravity; they don't know what's impossible so they fall down a lot and laugh while they're doing it.
Frankly, the dojang parties were energizing to me, too, reinjecting some small amount of fun into an otherwise hum-drum dreary life.
During actual classes, I made some friends; it felt good to be seen as sort-of normal, to be social with people disconnected from my past life-failures like a dead end job and living in a small town where everyone remembered your wife's father's alcoholic tirades. The social and physical confidence that gave me was quietly but very slowly transformative.
I knew, they weren't actual friends - I didn't know how to have those, I'd been out of practice. Really, I didn't have a way to meet people. I didn't ever go to bars, much less go out to drink with coworkers, it seemed like a waste of money when canned beer was far cheaper and TV was more entertaining.
About a year after I moved, my wife texted me she was sending the last of my stuff, some boxes from the crawlspace, found during pre-sale cleaning. A notification arrived a week later, they were waiting at the post office.
This was actually wise. Anything left in the complex's hallway would disappear before the mailman left the building.
We'd agreed in the divorce to split house-sale proceeds 30/70. I'd accepted less because she had fewer job skills, far lower self-esteem, and no real experience at anything besides knitting, birdwatching, and watching low-IQ daytime TV.
Getting the six somewhat-heavy boxes lugged inside in several trips from my car, I opened them in my living room to discover they were things like my high school yearbooks, pictures of my family, and a couple of almost-sealed boxes that my mother had sent me when my father died, long ago.
Frankly, I didn't know what to do with it all. I didn't really want most of it, which is why I shoved it into the crawl space in the first place. Out of sight, out of mind. As I opened boxes, I sorted things into a set of trash bags and put the tiny remaining bit aside.
Losing my dad had been really painful, and when my mother died two years later, my ties to my past were abruptly constrained to more memories than memorabilia. My sister took care of closing up their house; some of the boxes had her handwriting on them, they'd been shuffled more times than any of them were worth.
Included were some of Dad's old trophies and papers from his high school and college days. I disposed of those.
Wrapped in cardboard was a full-sized but thin 1855 copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' that had been given to him directly by his great-grandfather.
I'd seen it before but not opened it myself. Checking out the front page, someone had scrawled a dedication in ornate cursive fountain pen. It read, "Tell him 'Great Power makes us happy' - find him - Burnham rd Phil-Penn." Under that was a calligraphic signature of 'W. Whitman'.
So, a signed copy? That had to be worth something.
The family story was that my great-grandfather had gotten it as a gift from a lady (NOT his wife), so it was a secret for years. Dad told me to Never Ever Lose It even though it was old and more of a pamphlet than a book. He said it was part of the family history, and to keep it in the family.
I read the whole thing, out loud to no one, filling my apartment with the sound of gentle flowing words that almost made me cry. My father had read that book to me when I was little. It had two emotions, a loving memory and a status of its own as deeply touching observations.
The book went carefully onto a shelf next to my other books and moved on.
[Later I learned the book would have bought a small house if auctioned. I was stupid.]
Opening the last, much smaller box, it didn't even have my wife's handwriting on it, just a pre-printed address label with no return address.
The box walls were like cardboard but made of plastic to look like cardboard. Inside was an inflated set of thin plastic stuffing to isolate a smaller padded-plastic envelope in the center.
I didn't remember putting this in the crawl space, but hey, there was a lot of crap down there. Opening the inside envelope, I found it contained a man's ring, gold, and kind-of plain.
Holding it, I felt it wasn't just heavy but warm to the touch, almost. Not wanting a wedding ring (baggage!) I put it on my other ring finger and slid it down, feeling the heft. Then, the whole task seemed tiring, so I decided to take a nap.
Woozily waking up, I saw it was dark outside, and realized slowly I'd laid down for a nap with my clothes on. Trying to move, my desperation to go pee overwhelmed my body's aching and inertia eventually, and I found it was 2:30 in the morning. I had slept since getting home with the boxes; luckily it was going to be Saturday and I knew I had few responsibilities so I could go back to sleep.
Hunger pangs followed a somewhat explosive and extensive bathroom visit, and I found myself eating 3 sandwiches, a bunch of lunch meat, 3 bowls of granola cereal (which for some reason I found myself pouring half-and-half over), and chugging a couple of glasses of water.
Drinking that much water made me pee again; after, I fell back to bed, dead tired, asleep fast.