One of my favorite things to do is to look around pawn shops. You never know what you might find. It can be something you have been looking for and didn’t know it until you saw it. It is one of the things I like to do when I get a chance.

Saturday, I went into a pawn shop in Las Vegas and a bracelet caught my eye. It had Morenci turquoise and a strong simple silver band. The design was balanced, delicate yet elegant in its simplicity.

It was tarnished pretty bad, almost black in color. Where it came from, I don’t know, but I asked to see it. It had been there for some time it looked like. I bargained with the broker for it and got a good price.

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I put it in my pocket and walked around to other stores a little bit, and then packed it away to bring home. When I got home I put it on the kitchen table with the other junk I brought back and my daughter picked it up.

She looked at it. “Where did you get the bracelet? I like it. Did you get it for me?”

She put it on, and smiling with that look of mischief in her eye which said, “I have taken it on already and now it’s mine, Dad.”

She held it up to the light and said, “Hey, look—your name is on the back.” I came over and took a really good look at it and there was my name.

It came back to me, through the haze of time and space. I remembered it was 1974 and I made a living selling handmade Indian jewelry.

Those were good and bad times. When you make jewelry, you just produce it, but then you try to make it good, making sure it is pleasing to the eye. I was young and wanted to become a well-known silversmith.

My uncle Bruce Harvey was quite good and my aunt gave me some of his tools. The stamps in particular were well made and the patterns looked good stamped into the silver.

There was a silversmith by the name of Jimmie Harold. He was an old man but he was friendly. He knew my Uncle Bruce.

They had worked together in Tucson after the war in the curio shops there, making all sorts of jewelry over the years. They carried their hand bags to work, a collection of tools used every day. Sitting there making buckles, bracelets, bolo ties, spoons, forks, concho belts and all sorts of rings.

Jimmie Harold told me about how they worked for this shop and that one over the years. By the time I moved to Tucson, Uncle Bruce was gone. He had been hit by a car crossing the road in front of the Veterans’ Hospital.

He was a skinny guy, from Shiprock originally, and wore a back brace to support him. When we were kids, he showed us his bullet wounds, scars from the South Pacific that left their marks on his back. As long as I can remember. I always saw him in a good mood, easy going and never getting angry. A gentle person.

These things came to mind as I looked at that bracelet. He told me that some of the things you make will go places you never will, so let it go and free yourself from it.

This bracelet I made at home sitting at the kitchen table with an odd collection of tools. The stones were good. I had traded work for the turquoise.

When you make jewelry all the time, you think on designs and try different things. Jimmie Harold used to come by and visit and show me pieces he made before. He took them to Bahti’s and the Kaibab Shop in Tucson.

He would let me look at them and say try to make it. The challenge was to make something like it if I could. I tried, and he always shared his designs and how he made them with me afterward.

I remember telling him I didn’t have the silver for a concho and he later brought me some 16 gauge sterling silver plate to make a concho. I learned a lot from him.

It got to a point where I would dream about designs and loved the feel of silver in my hands. Taking the time to make things even, straight, simple and neat.

As time went on, I moved back to Toadlena and worked from there, selling at Canyon De Chelly and the Grand Canyon.

I had Morenci, three good matched stones, all of a deep turquoise color, hard stones to last a long time. I fashioned the bracelet and made sure the welds were solid. I made two bracelets that day and a collection of rings. I went to Canyon De Chelly and I remember sitting there.

A woman from I don’t know where came up. I can’t even remember her name or face, just that she picked it up and thought on it and bought it, putting it in her purse.

I remember not wanting to sell it but that was the purpose of it being made—to provide for food, gas and things needed for everyday life. The bracelet turned out all right and I felt pride in having made it. I thought of keeping it because I liked the design and color of the stone.

I stood there at the kitchen table. This piece of jewelry was going to end up on my work bench, to take out the scratches and polish the stone and eventually to sell again at a good price.

This bracelet was gone for a long time and to walk into a pawn shop in a city miles away, by chance, to find a case with tarnished jewelry sitting in a corner…where the stories of those Navajo silversmiths and their lives were etched in the jewelry there, forever set in the designs and effort to make those things.

This is what they say from years ago. I had put the memory of it out of my mind. It touched me, to stand there and to look at my daughter who was not yet even a twinkle in my eye then.

How strange it is that what was once given up should come back years later.

I looked at my daughter and told her, “Put it on the bench in my dungeon and I will polish it for you and then you can have it.”

She just said, “No, I will wear it this way; it looks old.”

Then she went downstairs and I could hear her say, “Look what Dad got for me…”

Johnny Rustywire is Folded Rocks Clan People on his mother’s side, and born for Tsinahbiltnii, the Mountain People Clan on his father’s side. He comes from Toadlena-Two Gray Hills, New Mexico, where the mountain is cracked and the water flows. He is a father of six and grandfather of 12. He attended Indian boarding schools and grew up on the Navajo Reservation, and has been married to the same woman for 40 years, a Ute from Fort Duchesne, Utah.