The Symbols Keep Finding Their People

A follow-up to “A Family Legacy of Symbolic Jewelry”

Last July, I wrote about arranging a display box and getting lost in thought about who would end up wearing each design. Who would feel drawn to this piece? What kind of person would resonate with that symbol? I said then that images seem to magically choose their person.

A year later, I have proof.

I didn’t plan to keep a list. The stories just kept arriving, the way they always have, in the middle of ordinary days at the counter or in an email I opened between other things. Four of them have stayed with me.

The son

A young man came in looking for gold. Not gold plate, not something similar, not something close enough. Gold. He knew exactly which design he wanted, and he wanted it in the best metal we make, because it was for his mother.

I’ve watched a lot of people choose a coin for someone else. Usually there’s some hesitation, some second-guessing about whether the other person will like it. There was none of that here. He already knew what she meant to him, and he already knew which symbol said it. My part was small. I just handed him the thing he had already decided on.

The twenty-fifth anniversary

A couple came back to upgrade.

They had worn the same design for years, and for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary they wanted it struck in gold. Same symbol. Same meaning. Better metal.

That one stopped me a little. We talk about our work as though the story ends when someone walks away with a coin, but this was a piece that had already been carried through twenty-five years of a marriage, and it was still the right one. They didn’t want a different symbol. They wanted the same one, made permanent in a way that matched how long they’d kept it.

The one that wore out

A man came in with a coin he’d been given as a teenager. The relief was soft. The edges were worn smooth. You could see where his thumb had been for years.

Honestly, a worn coin is one of my favorite things to hold. Bronze darkens where it’s left alone and brightens where it’s handled, so a piece that’s been carried for decades has a map on it. You can see the parts of the design he touched the most. That isn’t damage. That’s the record of a life spent with something.

He wanted another one. Of course he did.

The girl and the love magic

And then there’s my favorite, because it’s the one that sounds the most like a story my dad would have told.

A young girl gave a Love Magic coin to a young man. Years later, they’re married.

I don’t have an explanation for that, and I’m not going to try to build one. I’ll say what I said last year: often, discussing a coin reveals a more profound truth. Sometimes the coin gets there before the people do.

What I’m taking from all of this

My dad built this business as an artist and a craftsman, and he believed the symbols carried something real. I grew up around that belief, working the fairs, asking questions, listening to why people chose what they chose. It never occurred to me to doubt it, but it also never occurred to me that I’d be watching the second and third acts of those stories twenty and thirty years later.

That’s what this past year has actually been. Not new customers so much as returning ones. A gold upgrade for an anniversary. A replacement for a coin worn down to smooth. A son who knew his mother’s symbol. A marriage that started with a talisman and a nerve.

I’m not at the fairs as often now, and I’m handing more of the day-to-day off as I go back to teaching. But this is the part I don’t want to lose, and it’s the part I keep trying to pass along: the coin is the small piece of it. The conversation is the rest.

So if you’re wearing one of ours, I’d love to hear how you ended up with it. Who gave it to you, or who you gave it to, or what made you pick that symbol out of all the others? Send me the story. I collect them now, apparently.

And for the record, my position from last year stands. Everyone still deserves a unicorn.