the magic earrings live on

Long ago, when my now 33 year old daughter was four or five, my mom visited us. Like all good mom/grandmas with lots of money, she took us shopping.

I usually focussed on having my mom buy things for Rosie. Most single mothers, and I was a single mother for all but the first 18 months of Rosie's minority, have less cash than two-parent households. My mom was great understanding that I was always short.

I imagine mom would have bought me clothes on our shopping trips but I focussed on Rosie's needs.

Once, however, mom bought me a pair of Swaroski crystal teardrop earrings. The crystal is treated to reflect all the colors of the rainbow. Simple, relatively inexpensive for costume jewely. And maybe, just maybe, she bought them to facilitate Rosie giving me a gift.

My memory on why mom made the crystal tear drop earrings is fuzzy.

They are magic earrings. Many times I have lost one, sometimes for months at a stretch. And then the lost earring always reappears. 

Once, when I still lived in Mountain View, a swimming friend, Kay, and I went out to lunch together after swimming, showering, hair drying, dressing. Kay was interviewing a new, new to her, realtor. Kay was househunting, with a budget of up to one million dollars. In 2005, you could buy lots of very nice homes for a million bucks in Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View, although, and this surprised both Kay and I, it was a lot harder to find bargain one million dollar homes in MV than in any surrounding suburbs.

Kay wanted to be able to go on swimming in the MV pool. She didn't like any of the houses we looked at, and I went with her on just about all her househunting shopping trips. She looked hard in Palo Alto becaduse for a long time, she was determined to only buy a new house. There are not many new houses on the Peninsula and the most, which was not all that many, were in Palo Ato.

Kay is from Thailand. She was deeply superstitious about buying a 'used' house. She said she could never know for sure if someone had died in a house and she did not want a dead person's energy in any house she lived in.

Eh. Kay ended up buying a used house in Palo Alto. She shopped more than anyone I have ever known. I eventually met her daughter, a Brown grad, US citizen because Kay came to USA to have her first child so that child could enchor the future citizenship quests of the whole family. Kay is now an American citizen, sponsored by her anchor baby. Once born in America, that daughter grew up in Thailand, where Kay and her ex husband became multimillionaires running a chain of lumberyards.  One kid went to Brown, one to London School of Economics and one to STanford.

Kay's baby went to STanford and she had followed her baby to the peninsula. On her first day headed to Stanford, she got off at the wrong freeway stop, not the one closest to Stanford and saw a model townhome for sale. Kay pulled in with her rental car and bought the model home, with the proviso that all the rented model home furniture come with it. After all, Kay had no furniture in America.

Her daughter worked for an investment bank, her fluency in Chinese being a powerful skill, plus her Brown degree. That daughter got a $350K bonus in 2008! So I guess she was doing all right. The daughter was living in Hong Kong when I swam with Kay but assumed she would eventually live in the US and decided she wanted to own a house for the mortgage income tax deduction.  That chick must have been making some very big bucks if, as an American living and working abroad, she wouldn't have had to pay incoe taxes on a fairly large chunk of foreign income. I guess a $350K bonus took her over the top and she needed a deduction.

Kay would buy a more expensive home, although the townhome was very, very nice. As she househunted interminably, and I had fun keeping her company because it was the only way I was ever going to see multiple expensive hoes in Palo Alto, Los Altos, etc. As she shopped, Kay decided lot size was more important than buying a used house. She ended up buying a very large lot with a decent sized house with 3 bedrooms on a corner in Los Altos. Then she did a gut rehab of most of the house, mostly to give it a state of the art and very expensive kitchen. The whole house revolved around that spectacular kitchen. And the back yard was huge, large enough to plop down a couple more houses. Such lots are very rare anywhere in N. Cali except in the most expensive places.

And, and this was huge to Kay, since Los Altos had no public pool, Los Altos had an agreement with MV that allowed Los Altos residents to use the MV pool at MV resident rates. As a senior, it cost very little to swim in MV and Kay may have been rich but she was cheap. She cheated on getting the senior rate a few eyars early because the young lifeguards selling the swim tickets didn't know how old she looked. Black don't crack. Maybe Asians don't show their age as much as whites. Or maybe one race doesn't recognize the signs of aging in other races. All the young lifeguards in MV were white and sold Kay the very cheap senior rate before she was old enough.

How I run on.

Kay and I had lunch with a new realtor. Kay had first used the son of her bank officer, the bank officer who had preapproved her for a million dollar mortgage, which meant Kay could make offers as she househunted with no delay for mortgage processing. Kay, unfamiliar with American culture, thought she had to use the loan officer's son to keep the mortgage guarantee and we had gone out with the kid once. Just once.

Five minutes into that outing and I was signaling to kay behind the kid's back that she could do better. If Kay bought a million dollar house, the kid was going to make a lot of money, at least fifty grand but he was clueless. And lazy. He seemed to think his commission was a sure thing, easy money. and maybe life works that way for some lucky white boys but this kid was dumb. And cheap. Kay trusted my judgment because of my law degree. Also, I once was a bona fide realtor. And once a mortgage banker. But mostly, I had her reject that kid after assuring her that now that she had the mortgage guarantee, she would not lose it if she didnt use the loan officer's son. Or nephew, whoever that dope was. The kid complained about spending gas to drive us around, when he had insisted on driving us. You don't brumble about spending ten or twenty bucks on gas when you have a sure-thing buyer with a preapproved mortgage. Heck, you buy her lunch along with the gas.

So Kay had asked around and we had lunch with a mature, forty-something, African American British realtor. She was well mannered, smart and clearly knew the real estate business. She'd been selling hosues on the Peninsula for twenty years and her husband was a contractor, who, I believe, got the job to gut rehab Kay's new home.

Long story short:  I had both my earrings on when we arrived for lunch with that realtor. Half way thorugh lunch, I realized one earring was missing. I stood up and shook to shake off the earrings. Kay and the realtor looked, even on their hands and knees on the floor.  I went through my swim bag microscopically. No earring.

then, about six months later, it turned up on a book shelf in my apartment.

A magic earring.

A couple weeks ago, and not for the first time since I moved to Berkeley, I lost one of my tear drop crystal earrings again. This time, I didn't even look for it, nor did I fret. I reminded myself it was one of my magic earrings and it would turn up.

And it did. Today.

Magic earrings. Lovely.