I have a plastic bag filled with stuff that I can’t throw out and has been with me on successive moves – you know what I mean; everybody has a bag or box like this one. I have my last high school ID card, my old high school graduation invitation, old name cards of my fellow high school classmates, and my sister’s old high school graduation invitation. I have a 32K memory card for an obsolete Smith Corona word processor, which got stolen six years ago after I graduated from college and was moving out of my dorm. I have an address book five years too old and clipped pictures from the defunct Dallas Times Herald. I have a photo of Mike Nesmith and a photo of my high school friend Traci and myself, in front of the MonkeeMobile, autographed by Mickey Dolenz, during a boat show in 1987 at the Dallas Infomart. I was fourteen and Traci was fifteen, and we were all crazy for the Monkees. I have various photographs, all taken in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, over several years, of various people, some of them babies who are school-age now. I have a photocopy of my green card, back when I was a baby. I have my last military dependent ID card. I have three business cards from the best pizza place in Salida, Colorado, my National Junior Honor Society card, my National Honor Society card, and three forms of currency from the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Philippines. I have a fourteen-year old, red, plastic admit bracelet from the Schlitterbahn, a water amusement park in New Braunfels TX. I have an old devotional card that my ex-boyfriend gave me when he wasn’t my ex, and I have a “DON’T PANIC!” button that originally came with my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game, which I gave to a friend when I gave away my Apple IIe. I have a plaster, gilded clown face glued on a printed cardboard square, which fell out of a piñata after a Filipino wedding in the Philippines, and the print reads, “CLOWN, A little boy will be your first pride and joy” – I was ten at the time.
But the oldest, and most valued of all of the things in that plastic bag is a little card of pressed flowers and a drawing of two little girls, one giving a heart, the other giving flowers, with the words written in elementary school cursive, “For a Best friend.” Mary Wegryzyn gave me this card when I was ten, just before I left Guam forever, and Mary Wegryzyn was my best friend. Both Kim and Sarah of these stories are aspects of Mary, who was half-Asian, half white, and didn’t go to the church that I went to. What was cool about Mary was that her parents were civilians, she owned a microwave oven (in a time when microwave ovens were both huge and expensive) and made this yummy rice-and-chicken casserole with it, she owned a hamster and a gerbil with evil red eyes, and was a tomboy like I was. I think that part of the reason why most of my friends these days are not Filipino is because my first best friend was not Filipino, even on an island in which there was a large Filipino population.
What is scary is that I don’t have a photo of Mary, and as I get older, my memories of Mary, what she looked like, and what we did together, get fainter and fainter. As of this writing, it has been almost twenty years since I saw Mary, and the only sign that she ever existed is this pressed-flower card that she gave me, a week or two before my family moved away to go to Texas. I don’t remember how we met, except that it was at school, and we became friends almost immediately. I arrived at Guam for the second half of first grade, and I left after finishing fourth grade, and, as far as I know, Mary had been my best friend for all of those years. When I wrote “Sacramentals,” I wasn’t consciously thinking about Mary; I was trying to prepare for the very last story “Bahala Na” while contrasting Ellen’s reactions to her Filipino culture with Sarah’s. When I finished writing, I realized that I was re-creating a friendship that was faint in my memory and that the reason why I kept Mary’s card all those years is because it was a sacramental of Mary Wegryzyn, my childhood best friend. In keeping the card and writing the story, I keep my remembrance of Mary alive and the hope that Mary remembers me, too.
© 2000 Rufel F. Ramos