Diamonds & Blue

Before tonight, I had never held a handful of loose diamonds or tasted Johnnie Walker Blue. And if I'd had to guess where such things would eventually occur, I certainly wouldn't have said, "Out in the countryside, in a ranch house owned by a retiree from the state's department of transportation, in the company of a quantity of Irish musicians and a very friendly sheltie." But that's where it happened, at a party held to wish my friend Alison bon voyage for her move to Ireland. The host is taking advantage of his post-retirement free time to pursue his hobby, jewelry design. He pulled a crumpled envelope out from behind the small bar in his small living room and shook the contents out amongst the beer bottles and the tray of cheese cubes: easily a hundred little red stones. "They're rubies," he said. "From Burma!"

I was going to post a photo of my hand full of diamonds here on this blog, but the photo wasn't taken. It wasn't taken because, while my friend Jeff was fiddling with my new Lomography Colorsplash camera, I dropped (!) a quarter-carat round-cut diamond onto my host's slightly glossy, champagne-colored carpet, which turns out to be perhaps the worst possible surface on which to drop a diamond. I cannot blame the Johnnie Walker for my dropping and losing a flawless quarter-carat diamond, because first off I'm on the clumsy side even before you add alcohol, and second, I was deprived of the opportunity to become pleasantly toasted on sixty-year-old scotch when I offered Alison a taste and she, thanking me profusely, grabbed my shot glass and necked it all. I forgive her: she was too bevvied to know what she was doing and in any case, since the whole party was for her, my excellent scotch might as well be for her too.

I spent several minutes on hands and knees patting the carpet in search of the diamond, without success. Our host, very merry and magnanimous: "Oh, get up off the floor. We'll find it later. Check out this one, it's harder to lose." I stood up, checked out the two-carat marquis-cut diamond he placed in the palm of my hand, then got back down for more futile patting of the carpet. I hesitate to imagine how many thousands of bucks I would now owe our host if Jeff had not used the Force to locate the lost diamond in a glossy, champagne-colored tuft partway under a leatherette footstool. Maybe the diamond jumped from my hand because it sensed that I don't particularly like diamonds. It felt rejected, and flounced away in a huff. Sorry! Sorry! Oh dear.