My first Locket and Fathers post may be read here. Please also fol­low me on Twit­ter @jewelhistory.

Vic­to­rian sil­ver AEI locket, circa 1890

Good morn­ing. It’s about 5:50 am now — I’ve risen a lit­tle early to get some work done and see our fif­teen year old off to ten­nis camp. It’s just the two of us today, my hus­band took our Joel to ori­en­ta­tion at SUNY Bing­ham­ton. He leaves for his first semes­ter next month. Our eldest, Josh, is in Chi­ang Mai, Thai­land; he’s on a whirl­wind trip to Asia before set­tling down in his fan­tas­tic new job in NYC. And as for me, well, I’m do a bit of migrat­ing too. As I’ve writ­ten before, this has been a year of tran­si­tion and July finds me mov­ing on and into new roles I hadn’t expected.

I’ve recently become an Alzheimer’s ambas­sador to Con­gress­man Gary Ackerman’s office in New York. This is a very new role for me. This week I met with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from his office to dis­cuss new Alzheimer’s leg­is­la­tion com­ing up in Con­gress that we were ask­ing Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ack­er­man to sup­port and cospon­sor. I went to the meet­ing armed with my dad’s story, some impor­tant Alzheimer’s facts and infor­ma­tion, and a wear­ing a sil­ver Vic­to­rian locket with his pic­ture in it. The locket bears the let­ters, AEI. They are not my father’s ini­tials. They stand for amity, eter­nity, infin­ity, a Latin expres­sion mean­ing “now and always.” This par­tic­u­lar type of locket is fast becom­ing scarce on the mar­ket and I recently found mine on Ebay. When this locket was first pro­duced, sen­ti­men­tal­ity in jew­elry was pop­u­lar, it stood in the stead of express­ing your feel­ings openly, as we freely — and some­times slop­pily — do now.

The Congressman’s office staff was very wel­com­ing and lis­tened closely. In that moment, much of the pent up frus­tra­tions I’d felt for the last seven years, from the time my dad was diag­nosed, was exchanged for pos­i­tive action. This felt amaz­ingly good. When we parted com­pany, I was told that the Con­gress­man would con­sider cospon­sor­ing the two bills, the Alzheimer’s Break­through Act and the Health Out­comes, Plan­ning and Edu­ca­tion for Alzheimer’s Act. Later in the day, and much sooner than I had expected, I received an email con­grat­u­lat­ing me on my first-time lob­by­ing efforts and that the Con­gress­man had agreed to cospon­sor the bills. Me, a lob­by­ist? Wow, that one I hadn’t seen com­ing. Well, ok. I’ve been a lawyer, writer, author, speaker, spokesper­son, and jew­elry expert on tele­vi­sion. Why not this too? I’d like to think my dad would whole­heart­edly approve, he was always one to say, “live your life, no one else can live it for you.” I can’t help but wish he knew how his exam­ple has inspired this stage of my life. Ah, there you go — sloppy sen­ti­ment. I guess it’s a day to put a smile on my face, dry my tears, and slip on my locket…and then, just get on with it

P.S. In case you were won­der­ing: I wear my locket on a sleek, black leather cord.

Have a great weekend.