Barkerburgh

So when people go away, I usually ask them to bring me back a stone or pebble from someplace interesting.

Why? Funny story. So here goes.

Years ago, I used to ask for big, expensive presents, but that never worked.

Then I started to ask for water, maybe from a lake or stream, or an ocean. I had little glass vials with black lids that I got in bulk, and I would give one or two of them to someone for their trip. At one point I had water from either Tahiti or Tonga (I forget now), or maybe American Samoa. I had a tiny hotel shampoo bottle from Cancun with Isla de Mujeres beach water in it. And so on. The water always evaporated over the years, but it was voodoo mana anyway and it was the thought that counted.

Then somebody saw me giving an empty one to a friend who was going away and asked if I had any hash oil to sell him. Blank stare from me, subsequent explanation from him. Ah. Stopped giving people little glass vials with black lids.

So then I started asking for dirt or soil from exotic places. A waitress at a pub I liked to go to said she was going to visit her dying grandfather in Northern Ireland, so I asked her to bring me back some dirt.

She comes back, gives me a baggie of peaty, loamy dirt from somewhere in Northern Ireland near the border with the Irish Republic. It was cool. She told me, laughing, how she brought it through Customs in her fanny pack, which was never searched, which was a good thing because the fanny pack containing the loose brown substance in a baggie had a big green cannabis leaf stencilled on it.

Later, I found out that importing anything dirt-like from the island is illegal, and dangerous, for obvious reasons. So I threw the bag of Irish dirt in the freezer, as an eminently sensible precaution. Later I mixed it with raw bleach and flushed it.

So the next free souvenir idea I thought seemed to be the most safe. Rocks. I asked for rocks. And got them. One fellow brought me back bits of rubble from the restoration of the Registan mosque in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and pebbles from a streambed in the Tien Shan range of the Himalayas. They were on a day trip and he just reached into the stream and picked them up. Very cool.

Luisa brought me back a mysterious piece of stone from the Molise mountains of central Italy, that might once have been architecture, with fossils and weirdness. Very cool.

Now, as you all may know, my friend Anneli recently returned from a trip to Europe, visiting such interesting places as Stonehenge, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Moscow and Platform 9 3/4.

Stonewise, she brought me back a pebble from Red Square, a pebble from the Viking graves at Uppsala in Sweden and a pebble-like rock from the Suomenlinna Fortress in Helsinki.

Earlier in the year, she and her family brought me back interesting rocks from the shores of Lake Huron near Grand Bend.

Asking for stones turned out to be a good idea. A few pebbles are light in someone’s luggage. They don’t carry viruses and Customs aren’t going to do a full body cavity search if they find you carrying. And I get to take them out of the cool little box they came in (because nobody wants to give somebody just a handful of rocks…), and look at them, reminiscing about someplace I’ve never been under clouds I’ve never seen, feeling breezes that have never blown, imagining adventures I never had.

Win-win.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 12:57 pm and is filed under True Stories, You Can Pick Your Friends & You Can Pick Your Nose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.