When I was 5 years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to be a geologist--or an anthropologist--but I thought I'd prefer being a geologist because they studied rocks and anthropologists had to touch bones. Whenever any adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd tell them the same. And I always got the same response: laughter, and "do you even know what a geologist is?" I did, and they had inadvertently given me the ground for my aspirations.
A little before my pronouncement, First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, where my dad was pastor, had put a gravel parking lot across the street from the church in the yard between our house and the Lancasters’. From that time on, until they paved it when I was around 9 and we moved to a new house, I went out there almost every day with my Mason jars and sat in the gravel and collected fossils and pretty rocks. Our driveway right next to the parking lot was made of ground-up seashells, and sometimes I wandered over there too. I studied the ground everywhere I’d go, and if a rock caught my eye, I’d plop down, pick it up, and start digging for more. It was hard to stop--one rock led to another rock. It was a vast field of possibilities.
I rolled round pebbles, worn smooth and shining in shades of yellow, black, white, gray, and brown, around and around in my hands, feeling the shape and the coolness of each stone. Over and over, I fingered ridges of miniature wave-like patterns in tiny pebbles. I brushed my fingers over the rough bumpy textures of snake scales imprinted on fragments of stones, as snakes slithered in my imagination. I delighted to touch tiny stones composed of layers like a cake, or the sides of exposed hillsides, wondering over each layer and what history lay within it.
As I held a tiny pebble in my hand and traced the snail’s markings, I felt the snail in the wet mud, and oh, to feel so small and vulnerable in the world, zinging through space on a small planet in the vast Milky Way galaxy in the endless universe, to be at the beginning, and then to die. What ancient river was the snail — Sara — crawling in, and what happened? Did she just stop and die of old age? Did she get stuck or lost? Did the world suddenly freeze, or a big flood come? Was her family nearby, and what happened to them? What was her life like before? How old was she? How long did she live? What exactly was she? And how were these rocks shaped? How did they come to be gravel?
Every rock told a story, spoke of eons of evolution and development, of ages long lost when dinosaurs ruled the earth and flying reptilian birds soared in the skies, when ape-like people with sloping foreheads and heavy brows made fire by rubbing sticks together and lived in caves and dug holes in the ground and wore furs. I could see them all—pictures from story books—and they came alive in my hands as I held the rocks, fingering them with great care and wonder and awe, loving the feel of ridges in the stone, the striations and variations of colors, exploring the evidence of snails and snakes and water creatures rubbing their tiny bodies in wet clay to die and be frozen there forever. I saw ancient ancestors learning how to make homes and tools and cook food—even discovering what food was—clothing themselves, feeling their way in the world when it was new and just forming and nothing was set in stone—no people in little houses in little towns going to churches and schools and driving around in steel cars to grocery stores and doctors and pharmacists. No dentists. No books—until they created them—and discovering writing and language and art—making it all up as they went along. The bones and the blood, the mud and the guts, filling my heart and my mind with the everlasting richness of life until I thought I would explode or die or myself turn into fossil on the spot.
Someone would come by—a teenager like Bonnie Guins or Gale Guice—and ask me what I was doing and laugh and tease me, “What are you doing that for?” If I was lucky they’d play ball with me—softball or football and eventually basketball when we got a goal. I’d take my little bat, hand-carved by my father when he was a boy and with his initials in it—and stand in the gravel parking lot, and Bonnie would throw me the ball right down our makeshift plate—a sweater or coat or book or something—and I’d whack the ball to my dad’s church across the street—over the street, over the parking spaces on the other side of the street, over the sidewalk, over the churchyard, all the way to the tall cedar trees lining the outside of the church—classic redbrick, white trim, steeple, all-American church—and that was a home run when I got it. If my Dad came out and saw me, or my Mom, they’d holler at me to stop that because I might break a window, but I never did, just almost did and felt the scare searing through me. The teenagers would bore of playing ball with me long before I did—I was like one of those dogs who wants you to throw the ball for hours.
Then I’d go back to sorting through fossils. I collected all the fossils and rocks I liked in quart-sized mason jars, and lined them up on shelves in the garage. I would take them down sometimes and pour them out and fondle them, contemplating the lives they recorded, worlds unknown and faraway, but present right in my hands at that moment. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to hold them and study them and why those girls who I admired so and who could play ball so well couldn’t see this treasure. How could people just park their cars over all of this and walk on it and see without seeing? Why didn't everyone want to be a geologist?
My friend Donna Harris, who lived way out in the country, miles down a gravel road, had even more rocks at her disposal than me, and they were bigger rocks. She got a rock tumbler one year for Christmas, and we’d gather up as many rocks as we could and polish them. I begged my parents for one of my own to no avail. They didn’t fully support my desires to be a geologist or an anthropologist, and now that I think of it were probably embarrassed that their eldest child spent hours and hours a day in full public view on Main Street of the small dairy town of Zachary, Louisiana, sitting in a gravel parking lot pouring over rocks, as if they were books. They were probably happy to ship me off to Donna’s in the country, where I wouldn’t be so visible to their peers and congregation and potential converts. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wanted to polish rocks, so I learned to break them up with a hammer on the sidewalk in our front yard and polish them with clear fingernail polish. They didn’t look as lovely as the ones on the rock polishing machine’s box, but they did look better than plain old dusty rocks, and were fun to make, if a little tedious. The smell of the fingernail polish, though, wore old, and I went back to pondering and collecting and admiring the rocks as they were in their natural state.
The sky was bright blue. Flying dinosaurs peered down at me, small and tiny in a sea of gravel. The moist Louisiana air smelled like fresh rain and low-lying muddy waters and sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and gardenias. Giant fish and squid swam through the marshes, as the snails and other creatures nestled down in the silt and mud. There was no time, and it was all time, and I sang in the time, spinning on the earth, flying through the universe, sitting in my place on the round ball of the earth, safe, no predators to pounce on me and eat me, only teenagers and parents to ridicule me, but I didn’t care, who could care when there was all this world to explore and such a rich history and so many rocks that I would never count them all, even in that small space. I could collect and collect to no end, and the whole universe and all of history was at my finger tips and under my small body and holding me up in time without end.
A little before my pronouncement, First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, where my dad was pastor, had put a gravel parking lot across the street from the church in the yard between our house and the Lancasters’. From that time on, until they paved it when I was around 9 and we moved to a new house, I went out there almost every day with my Mason jars and sat in the gravel and collected fossils and pretty rocks. Our driveway right next to the parking lot was made of ground-up seashells, and sometimes I wandered over there too. I studied the ground everywhere I’d go, and if a rock caught my eye, I’d plop down, pick it up, and start digging for more. It was hard to stop--one rock led to another rock. It was a vast field of possibilities.
I rolled round pebbles, worn smooth and shining in shades of yellow, black, white, gray, and brown, around and around in my hands, feeling the shape and the coolness of each stone. Over and over, I fingered ridges of miniature wave-like patterns in tiny pebbles. I brushed my fingers over the rough bumpy textures of snake scales imprinted on fragments of stones, as snakes slithered in my imagination. I delighted to touch tiny stones composed of layers like a cake, or the sides of exposed hillsides, wondering over each layer and what history lay within it.
As I held a tiny pebble in my hand and traced the snail’s markings, I felt the snail in the wet mud, and oh, to feel so small and vulnerable in the world, zinging through space on a small planet in the vast Milky Way galaxy in the endless universe, to be at the beginning, and then to die. What ancient river was the snail — Sara — crawling in, and what happened? Did she just stop and die of old age? Did she get stuck or lost? Did the world suddenly freeze, or a big flood come? Was her family nearby, and what happened to them? What was her life like before? How old was she? How long did she live? What exactly was she? And how were these rocks shaped? How did they come to be gravel?
Every rock told a story, spoke of eons of evolution and development, of ages long lost when dinosaurs ruled the earth and flying reptilian birds soared in the skies, when ape-like people with sloping foreheads and heavy brows made fire by rubbing sticks together and lived in caves and dug holes in the ground and wore furs. I could see them all—pictures from story books—and they came alive in my hands as I held the rocks, fingering them with great care and wonder and awe, loving the feel of ridges in the stone, the striations and variations of colors, exploring the evidence of snails and snakes and water creatures rubbing their tiny bodies in wet clay to die and be frozen there forever. I saw ancient ancestors learning how to make homes and tools and cook food—even discovering what food was—clothing themselves, feeling their way in the world when it was new and just forming and nothing was set in stone—no people in little houses in little towns going to churches and schools and driving around in steel cars to grocery stores and doctors and pharmacists. No dentists. No books—until they created them—and discovering writing and language and art—making it all up as they went along. The bones and the blood, the mud and the guts, filling my heart and my mind with the everlasting richness of life until I thought I would explode or die or myself turn into fossil on the spot.
Someone would come by—a teenager like Bonnie Guins or Gale Guice—and ask me what I was doing and laugh and tease me, “What are you doing that for?” If I was lucky they’d play ball with me—softball or football and eventually basketball when we got a goal. I’d take my little bat, hand-carved by my father when he was a boy and with his initials in it—and stand in the gravel parking lot, and Bonnie would throw me the ball right down our makeshift plate—a sweater or coat or book or something—and I’d whack the ball to my dad’s church across the street—over the street, over the parking spaces on the other side of the street, over the sidewalk, over the churchyard, all the way to the tall cedar trees lining the outside of the church—classic redbrick, white trim, steeple, all-American church—and that was a home run when I got it. If my Dad came out and saw me, or my Mom, they’d holler at me to stop that because I might break a window, but I never did, just almost did and felt the scare searing through me. The teenagers would bore of playing ball with me long before I did—I was like one of those dogs who wants you to throw the ball for hours.
Then I’d go back to sorting through fossils. I collected all the fossils and rocks I liked in quart-sized mason jars, and lined them up on shelves in the garage. I would take them down sometimes and pour them out and fondle them, contemplating the lives they recorded, worlds unknown and faraway, but present right in my hands at that moment. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to hold them and study them and why those girls who I admired so and who could play ball so well couldn’t see this treasure. How could people just park their cars over all of this and walk on it and see without seeing? Why didn't everyone want to be a geologist?
My friend Donna Harris, who lived way out in the country, miles down a gravel road, had even more rocks at her disposal than me, and they were bigger rocks. She got a rock tumbler one year for Christmas, and we’d gather up as many rocks as we could and polish them. I begged my parents for one of my own to no avail. They didn’t fully support my desires to be a geologist or an anthropologist, and now that I think of it were probably embarrassed that their eldest child spent hours and hours a day in full public view on Main Street of the small dairy town of Zachary, Louisiana, sitting in a gravel parking lot pouring over rocks, as if they were books. They were probably happy to ship me off to Donna’s in the country, where I wouldn’t be so visible to their peers and congregation and potential converts. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wanted to polish rocks, so I learned to break them up with a hammer on the sidewalk in our front yard and polish them with clear fingernail polish. They didn’t look as lovely as the ones on the rock polishing machine’s box, but they did look better than plain old dusty rocks, and were fun to make, if a little tedious. The smell of the fingernail polish, though, wore old, and I went back to pondering and collecting and admiring the rocks as they were in their natural state.
The sky was bright blue. Flying dinosaurs peered down at me, small and tiny in a sea of gravel. The moist Louisiana air smelled like fresh rain and low-lying muddy waters and sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and gardenias. Giant fish and squid swam through the marshes, as the snails and other creatures nestled down in the silt and mud. There was no time, and it was all time, and I sang in the time, spinning on the earth, flying through the universe, sitting in my place on the round ball of the earth, safe, no predators to pounce on me and eat me, only teenagers and parents to ridicule me, but I didn’t care, who could care when there was all this world to explore and such a rich history and so many rocks that I would never count them all, even in that small space. I could collect and collect to no end, and the whole universe and all of history was at my finger tips and under my small body and holding me up in time without end.
