The Ring

I wanted to wait and let Timon tell this story but he is super slack on blogging duties. So I get to tell it, and as sweet as it is, it's also funny.

I came home from a long shift at work last week and expected to find Timon sitting on the couch reading AFL news, as is the norm. But no! I found him sitting on the window sill in our bedroom with the window wide open (it's still freezing in New York) and his left arm straight up in the air. "Something bad has happened" he says - and I run through a variety of situations in my mind. He looked VERY concerned so you can imagine that my thoughts ran to the worst - death or serious injury. Well it turns out that, in the middle of the lovely business of preparing dinner for us both, Timon decided to greet me wearing the ring I bought him for his birthday. He normally wears this ring on a chain around his neck as I didn't size it in lieu of the surprise. He swears to this day that he didn't have to force the ring passed the knuckle. I'm not sure I believe it. Because there he was with the birthday ring wedged firmly on his left hand ring finger. "Why are you sitting in the window?" I asked. To drain the blood from his finger and lower his body temp apparently. It didn't work. Nor did butter, shampoo, oil or spit. Nor did twisting and pulling and pressing down the swollen flesh. In a fit of panic and resourcefulness Timon had google searched methods of removing a stuck on ring. The internet recommended wrapping the guilty finger in dental floss to suck in the skin and slip the ring over the top. Who has dental floss? Not us. So at 11pm on a freezing cold night we go down into the street to find floss. We queued in the corner deli behind a super stoned guy looking for munchies and asked the storeman for floss - he had no idea what we were talking about. Turns out, not so surprisingly, that milkbars do not sell floss. The next thing the internet recommended was heading on down to the nearest hospital/fire station. I wasn't quite sure if our insurance would cover that so we decided to tackle it ourselves in a less humiliating fashion.

We sat on the couch over the next two hours and slowly but surely carved the ring from Timon's finger using a combination of the blunt file on $2 nail clippers and a large serrated knife from IKEA. I held a teaspoon over Timon's knuckle after a few wayward carving motions left bloody streaks. As a team, with lots of grimacing and back patting, the ring came off and is somewhat salvageable. It was a pure stroke of luck that we cut through the metal on the exact opposite side to the heartfelt engraving on the inside. I'm not sure what the lesson is here because I never want Timon to stop being sweet and romantic. Maybe it has something to do with knowing the chubbiness of your own fingers.