Friday, May 8, 2009

A la Recherche du Cardin Perdu

A few months ago John and I went down to New York for a friend's wedding party. I had just bought this fantastic vintage Pierre Cardin cross pendant specifically for the party. It was in a case of old jewelry at a flea market, yet completely on its own in terms of coolness- the Avon baubles around it certainly didn't have secret disco cocaine compartments, accessible by a simple tug. This was an anomoly, and I can't even imagine how it ended up here in Maine, but I was so happy it did.
Everybody at the party (who noticed it) loved it, and I loved that, and it was a great party and a great evening. Until the next morning when we woke up and I could only find half my necklace. Uggh! The secret bottom stash was missing! Nowhere in my bag, nowhere in John's pockets, nowhere in the hotel room. We'd shared a car back from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and didn't know the car service, let alone even really who we shared it with. This was all bad. I called every car service in Dumbo and then every Gypsy cab driver but it just seemed in vain. Resigned to disappointment we went to get breakfast (first asking the front desk if anyone had dropped a piece of metal off for me (no), and walking around in Chinatown we thought we should probably look on the sidewalk, or the gutter, around where we were let off, or the general area, since we couldn't remember exactly- it was raining the night before and we had the car stop mistakenly 6 diagonal blocks away from our hotel. I think what compounded my awful feeling of sadness was that I felt responsible- like I had taken this poor pendant from its content life with its Avon friends and brought it back to the dark nightlife of New York (and I didn't even know if it was from here in the first place). But just when I thought blocks and blocks of mucky fishy Chinatown gutters were going to be angrily ingrained in my memories, there were the two little missing pieces. Run over by delivery trucks, torqued, bent, and wet, they were a vision of happiness- I couldn't believe it- at this point I felt like I had found a long lost kitty cat. Crazy. It's never going anywhere again.


4 comments:

Frood said...

That is exquisite! What a fabulously dazzling piece. Onya for not giving up. And what a lovely reconciliation!

moodboard said...

The necklace was just testing your love, it will never stray again;)

First Taste said...

I know just what you were feeling...It's that heart-bottoming-out-why-oh-why but you were so lucky to have found the missing piece!..yes, this was a country girl lost in the big city....sullied she returns home to her Avon friends...LOVE the piece!

g/d said...

I know this feeling...I once lost a beautiful little piece of scroll paper that belonged inside an old necklace that had been given to me by a relative. I cried, and then, a week later, there was the scrap of paper, under the booth in the greasy diner where I had worn the necklace a week earlier. There was no reason in the world I should be reunited with it, and I think it made me cry again to find it. My necklace, however cool, is nowhere near the coolness of this one, and I am happy for you across the miles that you found the missing pieces.