The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, January 31st. It is the 29th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Alumni Hall, and the Grace of Allegiance
As you may know, this website is not the first business I’ve started. But even some of you who know about the ornaments might not know that the ornaments were also not the first business.
As I’ve written somewhere in these before, I grew up a block from a lake. Beach 21 was the nearest beach—an idyllic, sandy spot where we spent many a day, especially in my littlest years.
I don’t know how this started, but at some point in either preschool or the summer before first grade, I began to collect rocks off the bottom of the lake. I’d duck down, grab one or a handful, line them up on the dock, and bring them home. I may have learned this behavior from a brother or a cousin. I don’t really know how it started. But at some other point, again no later than the summer before first grade, I decided I would sell these rocks. I started Stu’s Rock Store.
There are quite a few stories from this five-year-old-run business. I enlisted at least one brother, and I think all three cousins in town, as labor, harvesting rocks at the lake. On a trip to Arizona over Columbus Day Weekend, I got my parents to buy me rocks (having paid for neither the travel expenses nor the retail price of my competitor-turned-supplier, my margin on those sold was a tidy 100%). The children of one of my dad’s coworkers once got rocks as gifts, though not after some brief confusion over the operating hours (I had a sign on the door to my bedroom that said the store was open from 10 AM to 2 PM, and though I rarely kept these hours myself, I still took some convincing to open the shop for the late-afternoon customer in this specific instance). I would hire and fire my dad and my brothers ruthlessly, putting pink slips and white slips (the white ones were hiring slips, as I evidently believed in the necessity of all things having an opposite) into the cardboard boxes my parents had finagled into mailboxes for an in-house postal system of my design and my sole, infrequent use (Barnaby, if I remember correctly, lived on Basement Boulevard). My dad turned a sample from work into a Stu’s Rock Store sign with a sliding feature that indicated whether it was open or closed. Somebody allegedly named Rocky Brickstone (never definitively proven to have been my dad writing under an alias) sent me mail three consecutive years congratulating the shop on being named Illinois’s best rock store, or having received some similar recognition. Most infamously, I held auctions, some silent, in which my family, not entirely forced and occasionally somewhat riled up, would bid as much as a few dollars for different rocks.
It was a good gig.
I was cleaning out files earlier this week—the Trader Joe’s bag next to the dresser was getting rather full of receipts—and I came across a rock.
Now, it wasn’t a rock from Stu’s Rock Store. We’ll get to what happened to those. But it was a rock I’ve evidently kept for a long time.
I was going through a box of things from college—things I’d hurriedly swept from my desk into this box at the end of junior year when I moved out of the dorm. There were practical things—a Waboba ball, which you can skip on water. There were humorous things—the fake ID I bought freshman year, which was not, as it turned out, of the same thickness as those of real Montanans. There were spiritual things—a scallop shell, I believe from that trip to Spain. There were sorrowful things—the obituary of a high school teammate.
And there was a rock.
I’m not positive where the rock came from. If I had to guess, it’s from the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, just north of the Indiana state line. The choir I was in back in college would go to these couple of cabins over there every spring for a Friday and a Saturday night: The Friday, Guys Night, consisting of drinking and games and drinking games and one time, freshman year, getting tapped on the shoulder in my sleeping bag and asked to join a senior and two alums who were smoking an Arabian tobacco in a bathroom (to find space, I stood in the tub, where thankfully no one was taking a bath); The Saturday, Formal, consisting of drinking and games and drinking games but with dates this time, and after a nice dinner at a mansion back in Mishawaka where we all wore our tuxes. This rock I found the other day looks like the rocks I remember from the sand beneath that cabin—flat and smooth and a rich brown.
But I may not remember correctly.
Wherever the rock’s origin, it’s sitting here right now now, next to the Waboba ball and the shell, next to some dirt from the family homestead and a jar from Navajo Nation, directly above the fake ID—which has been stashed away inside the desk. It’s flat. It’s smooth. It’s a rich brown. And every few hours I’ll notice it, and pick it up, and look at it, and it makes me happy. Not even the memories I’ve attached to it, so much as the rock itself.
There was a day in high school when I took Stu’s Rock Store’s old inventory back to the lake. It was spring, and I’d been tasked with cleaning out my closet, and the old plastic ice cream jug (one of those fat cylindrical ones where you can only buy vanilla or chocolate or strawberry but it’s half the unit price of Breyers) was eventually going to fall apart and it was going to be a lot harder to carry the rocks back to the lake, which was where they were eventually going to go. So I put my coat on, and I probably forgot gloves, and I walked down Richmond Lane and South Shore Drive to Beach 21, where I walked across the sandy snow—for it was not yet snowy sand, let alone just sand—and dumped/flung the rocks out onto the ice, where they would wait another week or two for spring to carry them home.
I get nostalgic. Violently nostalgic. My sentimentality and the emotion I attach to inanimate objects is significant, and it was particularly significant in childhood, when I was brought to tears by, among other things, our family changing our mailbox, and when I would routinely throw up during tornado watches (not even warnings, just watches) out of fears my stuffed animals would be scattered across McHenry County.
And yet dumping the rocks was not a sad exercise for me. Or if it was, it was accompanied by some joy. A sentimental joy, sure—I was happy for rocks, of all things—but a joy, still. The rocks had served me well. They were now going home.
I get the sense I’m not the only one who has a thing for rocks. I know not everybody does, and I know it’s a hallowed few who’ve won three straight awards from Rocky Brickstone (not to brag), but I get the sense there are others who notice a rock, and pick it up, and look at it, and are made happy by that rock. And I don’t know why that is for everyone, but I think this possibly Michiganian rock on my desk is giving me an idea of why it is for me.
Rocks are going to outlast you. They’ve outlasted a lot of people before you. And while, sure, they’re different from what they were, and they will be different from what they are, what they were before was hot, liquid rock, and what they’ll be is little, crushed-up rocks. It was all still rock. It will all still be rock. They’re gonna outlast you. And they’re still gonna be rocks.
But for that moment when they’re in your hand, or on your desk, or in your car (where two petrified woodchips—which a geologist friend gave me in 2016 at what I think was Lee’s Ferry, upstream of the Grand Canyon—sit beneath the radio), they’re a piece of the earth in your hand. Humble. Simple. Eternal. Or closer to it than we can fathom. Sitting on my desk is not a Michiganian rock, but a rock that was in Michigan before Michigan was Michigan, before the United States were states, making its way there maybe with the ice age, or perhaps before then, broken off from cliffs by millennia of intermittently beating waves. And there’s something joyful about that. The calm simplicity of a thing with such storied eons of a past. The tranquility of a mountain that once crashed into the sea.
We don’t think of this, of course, when we hold the rock. We don’t think of much at all when we really look at it. There isn’t much to think about, at its surface. The eternality of the rock doesn’t speak. The simplicity does.
Next week’s essay: On Neighbors
