Return to Articles                                                                                        Return to Home


Why Do You Pick Them Up?          By CMLMS Member Marvin Oesterle

“Honey, did you know that a blacksmith is working in our basement?” Hurrying toward the basement,
my wife gave me her adoring look. Or it may have been her disgusted look… I get them confused. Soon
the clatter ceased and she returned bearing the offending items in her hand.
“Somebody left some stones in their laundry again. Why do you pick up these plain white stones anyway?
Are you trying to test the warranty on our washer and dryer?” Ah Hah, I thought. She’s given me a
philosophical question that I can really sink my teeth into. (Also, she made me resolve to find those
warranty papers.)

“That is a genuine piece of quartz and you should have seen it sparkling in the sun. It was winking at me
and saying ‘Hey sailor, would you like to take me home!’”
She gave me another adoring look and said “Quartz is the most common mineral on the planet. Why
don’t you leave some for somebody else?”
Of course, she is right. Why DO we pick them up? Rocks can be beautiful or ugly, useful as money, an
obstruction, a raw material, or a tasty addition to dinner (salt). Why are some people “bitten by the rock
bug” and other people are not? -- And why do the opposites marry each other?
After several seconds of deep thought, I came up with an answer: We’re nuts. Not so much as to be
institutionalized, but we definitely qualify for “character” status – and we enjoy it! The USA cable
channel’s slogan is “Characters Wanted” and they have a project to show characters in all walks of life. So
we are not alone.
Sometimes I think that it is not so much the rocks but the people that are so interesting. – Naw, it’s the
rocks AND the people.
I once served on a board with the Chair of the Geology Department at MSU. I was forever bringing to our
meetings samples to identify or simply show off. Finally, he said “Don’t you have anything interesting?”
How could he say that about my treasures!
What he was telling me was that he was a fossil man. Fossils are what appealed most to him and all that
he cared about. I told him that I didn’t have the imagination or nerve to be a fossil man. I couldn’t look at
some faint shadows in a stone and solemnly proclaim that this was the remnant of a 150 million year old
dinosaur that died facing the south and eating a peanut butter sandwich. It takes supreme confidence
and a lot of “character” to be a paleontologist.
Or take the miner who digs a hole in the earth and then tunnels for perhaps miles digging at the walls
that are holding up the ceiling; that takes “character” and a certain amount of faith. Or the prospector
panning for gold in a cold mountain stream as he slowly loses feeling in his feet – “I’m going to be rich,
I’m going to be rich”. Or the flint-knapper who still is practicing a craft that was mastered tens of
thousands of years ago – “those Neanderthals aren’t going to beat me!” And there must be a psychiatric
term for the precision fetish of the faceter (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, perhaps?).
Yup, we’re characters all right. I don’t know why we pick them up but I wonder if Maytag knows what a
good job their washers do on cleaning up my quartz treasures. – Now, where’s that washer warranty?


Return to Articles                                                                                        Return to Home