When I was seventeen years old, I read a beautiful passage in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude that made me fall in love with butterflies. Ever since I have clung to the creature as my personal seal. Over time my friends and family began giving me butterfly accessories as presents.
So recently, when I couldn’t find the beautiful butterfly necklace that my grandmother gave me for my eighteenth birthday, I panicked. While the necklace would be around forever (at least as long as I kept up with it), my grandmother would not. And so at once I had neither my grandmother nor the necklace that reminded me of her. I was also short something that symbolized my growth and individuality.
Something I have learned to appreciate over time is that jewelry’s value is not only monetary, but most importantly, personal. My butterfly necklace kept me close to my grandmother, and represented a time in my life when I began to recognize the value of great literature and the great education I was receiving. It was a reminder of my intellectual and emotional journey since high school.
When I mentioned my idea for this column to a friend of mine, she immediately reached for all of her bangles and rings, excitedly naming the people who had given her each one. A person asked me once what the two rings on my fingers “meant. ” It wasn’t the rings themselves that were of interest but rather the stories behind them.
Currently on my wrist I am wearing a little cloth bracelet that is popular in Brazil. When it falls off, it supposedly grants a person three wishes. Evidently they are very popular, judging from the number of comments I have received along the lines of, “Oh that’s one of those Brazilian bracelets, I had one when I was a young child, travelling through the Inhong Hills ”. In truth, I thought it was cool and unique when my friend first gave it to me. Maybe people would wonder what the Portugese inscription meant (apparently something about Jesus).
I remember wearing one of those WWJD bracelets in the eighth grade, not because I wanted to live each day of my life according to Jesus, but because everyone else in my timberland-wearing, ribbons-in-their-hair youth group I was blindly following had one. It lost any meaning it was intended to have and became a status symbol. “Did you see Julie? She got a new purple WWJD bracelet and it looks like shit. Oh my God, I can’t believe I just said shit at youth group. “
This is all just to say that jewelry, as a remnant of the past and a symbol of a person’s individuality, should not be used to make you one of many. In age an where technology has reduced us all to numbers or cogs in the machine, it is important to recognize that personal significance is much more distinguishing than outward appearance.
