F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Jimmy Ewing
On a fine summer day in 2004, I launched into adulthood. It was very exciting.
Unfortunately, the launch didn’t take me far—six houses down from my parents, but it was magical, and for the next 21 years I had everything I needed, right there, except one important thing: a woman, and there was precious few loitering about in my parents’ yard. The neighbor girls were cute, but they spent so much time with us growing up that they smelled like OUR house. Have you ever tried to smooch with a girl who smells like your parents’ house?
Me neither.
Sadly, the girls my age wanted to date 30-year-old guys with nice cars and penthouse condos—not hang out in my crummy brick ranch in the suburbs with my smelly roommates and ride around in a pickup with cloth seats like a convicted felon. I lived stuck in the no-man’s land of a classic supply and demand curve. No supply. All the demand. Cloth seats.
Eventually, though, I re-covered my cloth seats in leather and found a live woman who smelled like her own house and agreed to date me. She was my age, tall, lovely, talented, and intelligent, with long blonde hair and a piece of shit Chevrolet that built character, which she had plenty of. As my friend and auto mechanic, John Willis, Jr., would say: I was “IN BIDNESS.”
About six months later, an incredible thing happened to me; I was the proud recipient of a substantial tax refund. It turns out—I was broker than I had calculated. I hurried down the street to tell my mom the good news and wax philosophical about how I would spend it. My first impulse was “buy a boat,” which is still usually my first impulse. Then it hit me; I wanted to get married at some point, didn’t I? Maybe this was a sign from the universe to start thinking about a ring.
I said, “Maybe, she could be THE ONE!”
My Dad slowly disappeared behind his newspaper like a highly literate turtle, his nose and his eyes sinking almost imperceptibly beneath the upper edge of the newsprint until I could see nothing but the top of his head.
So, Mom and I went jewelry shopping, but I knew nothing about diamonds, and I could feel a familiar twinge of sickness and euphoria beginning to radiate from the part of my brain that is usually the first to discover how stupid I am.
A few weeks later, we settled upon a diamond. Unfortunately, it had recently come to my attention that my lovely girlfriend was unlikely to be “the one.” We had turned a corner in our relationship, and the end of the street looked like a rough neighborhood. I flipped the toggle on the ejector seat she sat unwittingly astride, and I said to my mother, “Do you remember that diamond we found?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I won’t be needing it after all.”
The newspaper clutched in my Dad’s hands in the living room underwent a furious transformation of some kind, but the house was otherwise silent.
Mom said, “Well, are you ever going to have this amount of cash lying around again?”
With a mortgage that ate up about 98% of my income, that was a “no.”
She continued, “Well, you do know for sure you want to get married at some point, right? If you buy the diamond, you’re prepared. Why don’t you just stick it in your gun safe? When the right woman comes along, you’ll be ready!”
She always gave me good advice, so I turned over a sweaty wad of $100 bills to my jeweler, bought a diamond I didn’t want, that my mom had selected, and then drove home feeling sullied and unusual.
I stuck it in a cheap white gold setting just so it wasn’t rolling around loose in my safe and attempted to forget about the whole thing and boats, too.
Anyway, I was A Man on An Adventure! And I was ready.
One night soon after, I woke up on my couch in a mild panic, suffocated by a sense of very un-outdoorsman-like dread. I had thought of a horrible thing: what if the girl I eventually married didn’t WANT a round diamond!? What THEN?
Mom laughed at the question and said, “Oh, that’s easy! Just don’t ask her.”
A couple of weeks later, my mom died. It was a Monday. There was my life before Monday and after. And that was all.
The girlfriend went the way of the dodo not long after, through no fault of her own. Then I put my dog down, broke up with another girlfriend, and as my final talent, got all tangled up in the Great 2008 Financial Crash, and found myself without the job that I hated but had provided me with money, which I used to buy food and ammunition.
It was a shit show.
Every now and then, late at night, I would go downstairs to my workshop, open up my safe, and hold that ring in my hand, tilting it back and forth under the naked lightbulb overhead. It was shiny and small, and I would stand there and wonder what my wife looked like, and where she was, and if things would ever get better.
That’s how I remember the back half of my 20s, a decade that ran over my chest like a Sherman Tank and left me maimed and bleeding, lying out there in the street at the intersection of 29 and 30, which had turned out to be a bad neighborhood in its own right.
No job, no dog, no girlfriend, no mom. No clue. Dwindling money. Almost 30. I didn’t know what to do, so I went fishing. I bought a bass boat with the last few scraps of American money I could pull together from my severance package, high-fived in God’s general direction, swore off women altogether, and bought an entire sleeve of Skoal Fine Cut Wintergreen as a sign of my general derision for womankind.
Right about that time, I met The One. The Real One. She walked into a party where I was wearing a short-sleeved, button-up “Ranger Trail” fishing shirt that said, “I don’t know about women,” and eating a grilled cheese sandwich. In that moment, I became acutely aware of my fishing shirt, and I reckoned it must be dawn, because it had been righteous fucking dark for years up until that point.
She was leggy and tall and blonde and didn’t know any better than to like me and didn’t seem to notice that I was unemployed, really leaning into beer and Mexican food, and had grown my hair out, which was never a good look for me at all. Haircuts cost the same as a bulk five-pack of Zoom Pumpkinseed Lizards (which is still a great bait for a farm pond), and a 30-rack of Natural Lite worked out to about 60 cents apiece.
I skipped some haircuts. But I had a diamond.
My mother did not live long enough to meet that imaginary woman she prayed for and wondered about and hoped would look after me well, and truly, all those years ago, and who, against all odds, turned out to be real. But fortunately, my wife happened to love round-cut diamonds.
Or if she didn’t—I wouldn’t know.
I never asked.
Women are highly selective creatures. Nothing against your mom—we love her— but the odds that she’ll steer you in the right direction when it comes to jewelry for your lady are slim. Instead, reach out to Gunderson’s Jewelers and let them guide you through the process of buying the perfect piece for the occasion. As men, it’s important that we be able to trust our proctologist, our butcher, and our jeweler. The FE crew has not only relied on Gunderson’s guidance for multiple personal purchases, but we also spend time with them off the clock and count them as friends.
The post A Diamond At Dawn appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
On a fine summer day in 2004, I launched into adulthood. It was very exciting.
Unfortunately, the launch didn’t take me far—six houses down from my parents, but it was magical, and for the next 21 years I had everything I needed, right there, except one important thing: a woman, and there was precious few loitering about in my parents’ yard. The neighbor girls were cute, but they spent so much time with us growing up that they smelled like OUR house. Have you ever tried to smooch with a girl who smells like your parents’ house?
Me neither.
Sadly, the girls my age wanted to date 30-year-old guys with nice cars and penthouse condos—not hang out in my crummy brick ranch in the suburbs with my smelly roommates and ride around in a pickup with cloth seats like a convicted felon. I lived stuck in the no-man’s land of a classic supply and demand curve. No supply. All the demand. Cloth seats.
Eventually, though, I re-covered my cloth seats in leather and found a live woman who smelled like her own house and agreed to date me. She was my age, tall, lovely, talented, and intelligent, with long blonde hair and a piece of shit Chevrolet that built character, which she had plenty of. As my friend and auto mechanic, John Willis, Jr., would say: I was “IN BIDNESS.”
About six months later, an incredible thing happened to me; I was the proud recipient of a substantial tax refund. It turns out—I was broker than I had calculated. I hurried down the street to tell my mom the good news and wax philosophical about how I would spend it. My first impulse was “buy a boat,” which is still usually my first impulse. Then it hit me; I wanted to get married at some point, didn’t I? Maybe this was a sign from the universe to start thinking about a ring.
I said, “Maybe, she could be THE ONE!”
Rough Seas Ahead
My Dad slowly disappeared behind his newspaper like a highly literate turtle, his nose and his eyes sinking almost imperceptibly beneath the upper edge of the newsprint until I could see nothing but the top of his head.
So, Mom and I went jewelry shopping, but I knew nothing about diamonds, and I could feel a familiar twinge of sickness and euphoria beginning to radiate from the part of my brain that is usually the first to discover how stupid I am.
A few weeks later, we settled upon a diamond. Unfortunately, it had recently come to my attention that my lovely girlfriend was unlikely to be “the one.” We had turned a corner in our relationship, and the end of the street looked like a rough neighborhood. I flipped the toggle on the ejector seat she sat unwittingly astride, and I said to my mother, “Do you remember that diamond we found?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I won’t be needing it after all.”
The newspaper clutched in my Dad’s hands in the living room underwent a furious transformation of some kind, but the house was otherwise silent.
Mom said, “Well, are you ever going to have this amount of cash lying around again?”
With a mortgage that ate up about 98% of my income, that was a “no.”
She continued, “Well, you do know for sure you want to get married at some point, right? If you buy the diamond, you’re prepared. Why don’t you just stick it in your gun safe? When the right woman comes along, you’ll be ready!”
A Mother’s Intuition
She always gave me good advice, so I turned over a sweaty wad of $100 bills to my jeweler, bought a diamond I didn’t want, that my mom had selected, and then drove home feeling sullied and unusual.
I stuck it in a cheap white gold setting just so it wasn’t rolling around loose in my safe and attempted to forget about the whole thing and boats, too.
Anyway, I was A Man on An Adventure! And I was ready.
One night soon after, I woke up on my couch in a mild panic, suffocated by a sense of very un-outdoorsman-like dread. I had thought of a horrible thing: what if the girl I eventually married didn’t WANT a round diamond!? What THEN?
Mom laughed at the question and said, “Oh, that’s easy! Just don’t ask her.”
A couple of weeks later, my mom died. It was a Monday. There was my life before Monday and after. And that was all.
The girlfriend went the way of the dodo not long after, through no fault of her own. Then I put my dog down, broke up with another girlfriend, and as my final talent, got all tangled up in the Great 2008 Financial Crash, and found myself without the job that I hated but had provided me with money, which I used to buy food and ammunition.
It was a shit show.
Every now and then, late at night, I would go downstairs to my workshop, open up my safe, and hold that ring in my hand, tilting it back and forth under the naked lightbulb overhead. It was shiny and small, and I would stand there and wonder what my wife looked like, and where she was, and if things would ever get better.
Dawn of a New Day
That’s how I remember the back half of my 20s, a decade that ran over my chest like a Sherman Tank and left me maimed and bleeding, lying out there in the street at the intersection of 29 and 30, which had turned out to be a bad neighborhood in its own right.
No job, no dog, no girlfriend, no mom. No clue. Dwindling money. Almost 30. I didn’t know what to do, so I went fishing. I bought a bass boat with the last few scraps of American money I could pull together from my severance package, high-fived in God’s general direction, swore off women altogether, and bought an entire sleeve of Skoal Fine Cut Wintergreen as a sign of my general derision for womankind.
Right about that time, I met The One. The Real One. She walked into a party where I was wearing a short-sleeved, button-up “Ranger Trail” fishing shirt that said, “I don’t know about women,” and eating a grilled cheese sandwich. In that moment, I became acutely aware of my fishing shirt, and I reckoned it must be dawn, because it had been righteous fucking dark for years up until that point.
She was leggy and tall and blonde and didn’t know any better than to like me and didn’t seem to notice that I was unemployed, really leaning into beer and Mexican food, and had grown my hair out, which was never a good look for me at all. Haircuts cost the same as a bulk five-pack of Zoom Pumpkinseed Lizards (which is still a great bait for a farm pond), and a 30-rack of Natural Lite worked out to about 60 cents apiece.
I skipped some haircuts. But I had a diamond.
My mother did not live long enough to meet that imaginary woman she prayed for and wondered about and hoped would look after me well, and truly, all those years ago, and who, against all odds, turned out to be real. But fortunately, my wife happened to love round-cut diamonds.
Or if she didn’t—I wouldn’t know.
I never asked.
Editor’s Note:
Women are highly selective creatures. Nothing against your mom—we love her— but the odds that she’ll steer you in the right direction when it comes to jewelry for your lady are slim. Instead, reach out to Gunderson’s Jewelers and let them guide you through the process of buying the perfect piece for the occasion. As men, it’s important that we be able to trust our proctologist, our butcher, and our jeweler. The FE crew has not only relied on Gunderson’s guidance for multiple personal purchases, but we also spend time with them off the clock and count them as friends.
The post A Diamond At Dawn appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
