Badass Habits

he heard us honk and holler, unwilling to take his eyes off the ground for even a second. After about ten minutes of trying, and failing, to find a parking place in the midst of the melee, I was about to give up and head back home when we got a text from my brother that read: "Found it!" To which I replied, "I don't believe you," to which he replied with a picture of himself standing in the middle of the street, each arm around a tourist he'd talked into posing with him, proudly holding Jenny's pendant in his front teeth. I later learned it had been kicked off the sidewalk into someone's driveway and that he found it anyway. My jaw hit the floor and has remained there ever since, but Jenny just shook her head and said, "I'm telling you, he's a crow. He finds shit all the time."

 

Steve used to have a job in the diamond business as a sorter. He'd spend his days in a room called "the pit" with a handful of other sorters, categorizing large piles of not-so-large diamonds according to the three Cs-cut, carat, color-by holding each one up to a light with a pair of tweezers and looking at it through a loupe. While inspecting a diamond, it wasn't uncommon to accidentally tweeze it a bit too hard and send it ricocheting across the room-doink!-where it would land somewhere on the not-so-clean linoleum floor, on a shelf, or perhaps in someone's hair. There was no telling how many precious stones had gone missing in the pit over the years, and finding them became a perpetual Easter egg hunt, one that Steve participated in with vigor every time he put down his tweezers, for the two years that he worked there.

 

This is how, in the basement of a diamond wholesaler on Forty-Seventh Street in New York City, Steve became the Patron Saint of Lost Shiny Things. His impressive résumé went on to boast of a diamond earring discovered on the floor of a crowded deli; a tennis bracelet spotted next to an ATM machine; countless coins, chains, keys, watches, preciou