When Matthew Taylor found two expensive-looking rings at the bottom of a splash pad, there wasn’t much question what he would do with them.
For one thing, it was easy for him to empathize with the rings’ owner. Three weeks earlier – on his anniversary, in fact – his wedding ring had been lost to one of the Great Lakes.
“We were skipping balls across the top of the water, and my [ring] went flying off into Lake Huron,” Taylor told CTV Kitchener.
Taylor’s ring hasn’t been seen since. The Waterloo, Ont., man has found lost rings since then, though. He, his daughter and some family friends were at a splash pad Aug. 26 when his daughter told him she saw something in the water.
“I reached down and saw one ring, and then saw the second ring,” he said.
Scanning the crowd around the splash pad and surrounding plaza, Taylor didn’t see anybody who appeared to be looking for lost rings. He also realized that looking at strangers’ hands to see if they seemed to be missing rings could be misconstrued.
His next step was to email the plaza’s management, asking if they had a lost and found. He received a reply within minutes.
Cynthia Voisin, who sent the reply, knew exactly what had happened. Moments before she saw Taylor’s email, she had received multiple voice messages from “a very distraught woman” who had lost her wedding and engagement rings, and thought they might be on the plaza’s property.
“She was apologizing for crying on the phone. I could tell from her messages … she was very distressed. When somebody loses wedding rings, it’s awful,” Voisin said.
The messages came from Jennifer Agnew, who had been at the splash pad with her granddaughter earlier in the day. It wasn’t until she got home and was making dinner that she realized she had lost her rings.
“I went through all the feelings,” she said. “I never take them off, ever. I do dishes with them. I do laundry with them.”
Agnew and her son had searched through their house – including digging through recycling and compost bins – without finding the rings.
“When they weren’t there, my heart sank. I was absolutely devastated,” she said. “I was convinced they were gone.”
When the connection was made between the rings Agnew lost and the rings Taylor found, Agnew couldn’t believe it.
“It was just surreal. It’s still surreal. It’s a week later and I’m still like ‘Really? They made their way back to me?’” she said.
Voisin may have made the connection, but she credits Taylor’s selfless decision as the key to reuniting Agnew and her rings.
“The situation presented itself, and he did the right thing. He really took down the initiative to track down how he could get the rings back to the rightful owner,” she said.
Agnew agrees, describing Taylor’s actions as “an example that people are good.
“I genuinely, to the depth of my soul, believe in the good of humanity,” she said.
For his part, Taylor says he never considered any other course of action.
“We found somebody’s stuff,” he says. “You return it [because] it’s not yours. We didn’t really think about it all that much. They were beautiful rings, and I’m just glad they got back.”
With a report from CTV Kitchener’s Randy Steinman
