true tales

I found this short story in Paul Auster's True Tales of American Life, a collection of stories drawn from public submissions to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project in 1999:


Star and Chain

In 1961, during a visit to Provincetown, Massachusetts, I bought a hand-crafted one-of-a-kind Star of David on a chain. I wore it all the time. In 1981 the chain broke while I was swimming in the ocean off Atlantic City, and I lost it in the surf. In 1991, during Christmas vacation, my fifteen year old son and I were poking around in an antique shop in Lake Placid, new York, when a piece of jewelry caught his eye. He called me over to take a look. It was the Star of David that had been swallowed up by the ocean ten years before.

Steve Lacheen

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania