Rock Crazy

If you are rock crazy, you look down a lot.  It helps in Paris because you don’t step in the dog crap before the men on the green machines come and clean it up, and you don’t make eye contact with the fanny pinchers on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées  as often as other American women who are dazzled by the city.

I found my first fossil right before I started kindergarten on a forced march up to Timpanogos cave.  It is a tiny trilobite and I still have it.  But I sifted through a lot of rocks before I learned what I was looking at.  They just feel good in my hands.  And in my pockets.  And everywhere else.  You might think the best place a little girl would find rocks is in the dirt.  You would be dead wrong.  The flat roof of our carport was covered with pea gravel.  And to get up there, we had to take our “elevator”.   It was easier than climbing the crab apple tree and jumping on to the roof after all.

The ”elevator” was a broken wooden baby gate that mother tossed out in the yard.  We turned it on its side and one of us operated it as the elevator man.   The elevator man would put his (or her) feet on it and then slowly expand it calling out the passing floors until the roof top had been reached.  The others of us would run over the wood pile, climb the fence, edge along the fence to the last fence post, and then scramble to the top of the car port.

We could then sit on top of the car port and sort gravel into different colors, weights, sizes and hardness until mother called to us to come down immediately.  Pockets filled with beautiful bits of gravel, we would call to the elevator man, “Ground floor please”!  And he would lower the baby gate from full extension to the closed position, calling out floor numbers as we jumped from the roof to the fence post, ran along the fence, and over the woodpile, tumbling on to the grass, and rushing back to the elevator man.

I know of only two major incidents in my gravel sorting career.  The first was when mother came out into the yard and insisted we come down and then took away the elevator.  We threw crab apples at her!  She retreated into the house and called Dad at work.  He came home red faced and furious and stood in the yard yelling at us to come down at once!  He paddled us with the breadboard and sent us to bed with no lunch.

The second was when Dan, upon reaching the rooftop, noticed his shoe was bleeding.  He removed it to find he had picked up a nail in the woodpile.  He put his shoe back on with a terrible grimace and called to the elevator man, “Ground floor please”!  He ran across the car port roof, jumped to the fence post, ran across the fence, over the wood pile, tumbled to the grass, ran to the elevator man, removed his shoe which now full of blood because he still had the nail (and now two puncture holes) and screamed, “MOTHER”!

After that, we were banned from the roof, so we stole a few spoons from the drawer and began digging for bigger rocks along the fence line.  Besides, the “elevator” was broken.