After A Decade, Aggie Reunited With Ring

By Kaley Markos '19

How long is too long to hold onto the hope that a missing Aggie Ring will return to you? For Mary-Margaret Austin ’90, her answer may now be very different than it once was. 

Known to most as “Meg,” Austin is a proud member of the Class of 1990 and holds a degree in elementary education. On a seemingly normal day in 2006, she was spending an afternoon at her Richardson, Texas, home.

Austin removed her Aggie Ring, setting it on an outdoor table so that she could enjoy some time in the pool. To her dismay, when she returned to retrieve her Ring, it was no longer where she left it. The search began.

Austin had not left her home that day and knew that her Ring had to be somewhere in its vicinity. The more she looked, the more drastic her searching became. At first, it was looking through the grass, clothes pockets, and house drawers. She then turned to her husband, who dove to the bottom of the pool to check the drain, helped deconstruct several pieces of furniture, and obtained a metal detector to search the entire backyard. As the day wore on, Austin was increasingly sure her Ring would turn up. That single day of searching turned into years of hoping, and after three years had passed, she finally resigned herself to the fact that she might never see her Ring again and gave up looking.

Over a decade later, during another seemingly ordinary day in Austin’s life, she received a phone call.

The caller was Alex Stauffer ’17, who just days before was planning a Pokémon Go raid a mere two miles away from the Austins’ home. While waiting in the local park for a few friends to arrive, something shiny caught her eye. Buried in the mud, Stauffer uncovered what she initially thought was a wedding ring, only to realize it was an Aggie Ring, just like the one on her own finger.
After finding a name under the encrusted dirt on the Ring, Stauffer contacted The Association of Former Students, in a desire to reunite the Ring with its owner after 11 long years.

A lost item and a heartbroken owner: Two things that were finally connected again via a phone call between Austin and Stauffer. As soon as she heard the words, “I think I found your Aggie Ring” were uttered, Austin wasted no time. The two agreed to meet up just 10 minutes later and without even bothering to change her clothes, Austin raced out the door.

Although the two had never met before, Austin said, “There was crying and hugging” followed by “more crying and hugging.” The moment Austin’s Ring once again occupied its rightful spot on her finger, she said, “It just felt right.” Eleven years of emotion, a missing treasure she thought she would never see again, and the unlikeliest of circumstances led to that special piece of Aggie gold returning to its home.

To this day, the puzzle of how Austin’s Ring made its way to the local park remains incomplete. Despite its close proximity to the Austin family, they have never visited the location. The only suspect in the Ring’s mysterious disappearance seems to be a squirrel or bird that may have picked up the shiny treasure.

Stauffer and Austin have remained acquainted and even became Facebook friends. The connection grew when they discovered that Stauffer and one of Austin’s sons attended high school together. Additionally, Austin has also been a substitute teacher for one of Stauffer’s younger brothers. The connections seemed to keep forming, leading Austin to remark that "the Aggie Network is alive and well.”

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