Kumpangi, Lost & Found.

In the Time of Spirits: Thrice Found Wedding Ring
Michael Sedano

I have been depressed in recent years over losing my wedding ring. I retrace my steps a thousand times, visualizing the last time I had it seven years ago. Where is it now?  

I dream my wedding ring of silver and gold lies under tons of landfill, that ten thousand years from now, an archaelogical dig finds it, reads the hallmark, "Sterling Brooks 18K". 

Before the Ring.

She didn't want an engagement ring--whirlwind courtship--but a wedding band was de rigueur. We shopped rings, two lovebirds. With Barbara's J.W. Robinson employee discount, we wanted to fall in love with a commercial ring, but like the ticky-tacky song they all looked just the same. We'd have to compromise and settle for what the trays held.

Michael Sedano 1968 at International Peace Shrine above Gaviota.
Foto: Barbara Sedano.

Barbara learned of a new jeweler who'd just set up shop in Montecito. He made rings. 

George Brooks' shop occupied a spot in a millionaire's neighborhood. That boded ill for economy-minded lovebirds, ni modo. We would look inside having driven so far. The stuff in Brooks' windows wasn't jewelry but sculpture in precious metals and jewels. My expectations sank as I walked into the barren shop.

I drew what I considered a female and male version of a serpentine design. Brooks looked at the gold dots on mine and told me they'll fall off. They did. Sergio Flores fixed them when he resized the ring.

My ring, I paid $60. Barbara's, $40. I think George Brooks charged us for materials only. 

Kumpangi

Hwaak-ni, Republic of Korea, sprang up as an organized settlement when the U.S. Army installed the world's highest HAWK missile site on a near-by mountain peak. Down in the valley, the valley's so low, the Army installed the Admin Area, a base camp housing 75 soldiers. The Admin Area had jobs that attracted people to the rugged remoteness. Encontre muy buen trabajo, y tambien con el GI, the slickie boys would sing if they'd been Chicanos.

Mae Bong mountain upper left, partial view of Admin Area B 7/5

Houseboys came to this place at the end of the road to work and to steal anything not locked up. Five dollars a month from five GIs, earns $300 a year. They wash, iron, and polish, keep the barrack swept, and hate GIs. A damned good job in a country with a $90 per capita income. 

"Me House Man, no House Boy!" When I lost my ring, I figured good will and human kindness would have nothing to do with finding my wedding band before it left the Ville.

I looked up that per capita income before I left the States for Korea. That's why I figured a $25 reward would be compelling. My only hope of finding the ring 6000 miles from George Brooks' studio, lay in offering half a year's salary. 

Miss Park, the Mess Hall lady, spoke enough English to understand. She wrote the placard, scandalized that I knew there was no chance of recovery, except at a price. What a price, taksan too muchie. She discouraged offering anything, people are nice. She wrote the words in Korean for me and refused a fee. $25.00 reward. Lost Kumpangi.


Familia Legend of Great-Grampa's Gold Ring

I came in from digging the soil to shower and realized my left hand was bare. I'd left the ring out there. I couldn't find it. 

For a week, I sit cross-legged on the earth, planting suspended, hand-sifting every square foot of the seedbed, over and over. Grab two handsful of dirt. Open the hand and let the soil sift through anxious fingers, sensing stones and pebbles immediately recognizing them as not the ring. Like winnowing chaff, toss handsful of earth into the air where it turns to dust and choking powder and no ring. Fashion a wire mesh screen and rack, sift the entire plot, one shovelful at a time. No ring.

Abandoning hope, my vision fashions a history of repeated tellings of the story of great-grampa's ring, out there in the back. The garden passes through generations of Sedano descendants, the story of the silver and gold ring handed down from generation to generation until years later, a little girl is digging the earth and uncovers the ring. She pulls it from the earth, holds it triumphantly, the instant compressing all those generations of stories retold into this circle of sky. She knows how the story of grampa's lost ring ends.

Landfill Miracle of the Spirits in Plague-time.

The depression hits at unpredictable times. My left thumb reaches over to the fourth finger, rubs the bare skin below the knuckle frustrated it remembers what the ring used to feel like on the empty skin.

Where did the ring go? Did I drop it inside a paper cup of birthday party candies, worthless crap someone automatically tossed? Did the ring lie at the bottom of the trash bin until the truck took its contents to the landfill? Now, do tons of landfill cover my ring? 

I convince myself, my wedding ring now lies buried deep in the guts of urban trash, a fleck of golden detritus calling with despair matching my own. Never, never, never, never, never.

There's medical literature that argues no one dies and returns, they have "near death experience." Bunkum. I was on the Other Side and returned with ancestors' directive to Burn Sage. I do. I hear those ancestor voices, I know my familia occupies this space with me.

It is not my NDE that brings Spirits into my room, most Raza I know have a clear sense of spirit matters, la llorona, el cucui, angelito negro/blanco, family leyenda. We don't have to die and come back to know they're involved.

This time, my mother found my ring for me. 

I should have seen it coming. My Mom found me in deep despair over our national failure, but always lurking at the pits of emotion, the lost wedding ring. 

A wedding ring contains potent values, but not what the Monsignor pronounced about the endlessness of a cycle. That ring, sterling, Brooks, 18K, holds in its circumference joyous memory that I lived, that a vital Barbara lived, she who laughed and made jokes and didn't have any money to buy my ring so I paid George Brooks and he gave us a pair of small manila envelopes. 

We slid the rings onto our palms, shiny and ready for August 31. Brooks 18K hers read. Sterling Brooks 18K mine read. We looked forward to filling the ring with this lifetime of memories. And we did, we have, we are. That I alone remember now is how it is. So it goes.

Mom alerted me to good things happening a few weeks ago. She guided my hand underneath a chest into a remote corner at the furthest reach of my ringless fingers. I found a silver ring with a stone my mom fashioned in lapidary night school. I took that as a sign I would never have my ring, my mother offering, here is a replacement mi'jo. I heard her say that.

Mom's jasper cabochon snuggles comfortably in the crook of the little finger when the ring works its way around to rest there. Thank you, Mom. I will live wearing this silver band now. This is how it is.

Sunday afternoon, I feel my mother behind and next to me while I rummage through storage containers in the attic. Some of this is her stuff. I find the stylus from a blood glucose test kit, an emergency spare set aside has found its way into this grocery bag. 

I extract a dusty, blue vinyl zippered case. Inside I see four strands of beads and art deco hook earrings. I remember the day Mom's great-granddaughter visited, rejected the beads as not what the girl coveted. She wanted Mom's something exquisite made from silver and gold and pearls, not these Lapis, Amethyst, Red Garnet, and Green Jade strung beads. That day hurt my Mother profoundly, such bitter disappointment, seeing that child grown.

I zip closed the purse and take a handful of textile, some kind of purse. Empty. I pull it out and look into the worn grocery bag. 

My heart does not skip a beat. I am surprised but accept what I see. I am not exultantly shouting hosanna! and I realize my restraint. In the dim dusty recess, between nondescript bundles of stuff my Mom left behind, sits my silver and gold ring. My ring has come from the landfill to sit quietly triumphant, glowing out a satisfied quehubole in 18K gold and sterling silver made by George Brooks in 1968, lost in 1969, lost again in 2005, lost a third time around 2015.

My Mom never made a big deal about stuff, she took everything with equanimity, and I'm following her lead, she doesn't have to remind me.  Matter-of-factly, I slip on the ring and from now on, that's how it is.

Thanks for the ring. Mom.

My left thumb reaches for the fourth finger, finds the hard edge of the ring under the knuckle, back where it belongs. Lost. Found. Trust in the Spirits.

On August 31 Barbara and I observe the 52d anniversary of her putting that ring on my finger. It was supposed to be for the rest of my life. Thanks, Mom, that's the way it's going to be again.

Burn Sage.

The Silver & Gold Ring in 2020.

GOTV. Wear a mask. Social isolate like it means your life.

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