How I wanted a tumbling rock polisher when I was a kid. For those of you who weren’t into learning toys, this is one that revolves around the promise of shiny rocks. Oh, how I loved shiny rocks as a kid. Ok, I still love them. They feel good to the touch. I like the shapes, the weight, the patterns. (See my entry on fractals for a trend in my nature-loving nature.)
A friend asked my why I wanted a rock tumbler.
“I want to make the rocks I like smooth,” I said.
She looked at me with the “go on” look.
“You know,” I said, “don’t you just pick up rocks you like when you’re walking?”
My friend looked at me blankly.
“Pretty rocks with interesting shapes?”
“No,” she said flatly.
But lots of us do. My uncle is my rock-loving role model. He lined the roads and paths at his cabin in the woods with beautiful white rocks from the pit nearby. (This is the cabin where I went to write The Hard Way.) Those rocks must be quartz, I’m sure. But, I’ll admit that I have a very limited knowledge of these things. I’ll ask my uncle what they are. He knows everything about nature. Things I want to know. He hears a bird whistle, he knows what it is. He sees a leaf blowing in the wind and he knows the tree from whence in came and what the wind is saying about the weather we’ll be having for the next ten hours. My uncle is wise, and he has a rock tumbler.
I know, it seems so very ignorant to love rocks and how they look and feel but have little motivation to know what they’re made of. But lots of people like art and don’t know who painted it with what technique. So there.
I was such a cute and charming kid, so I don’t know how my parents ever said no to me, but I asked for a rock tumbler and my mother told me it was not going to happen. I don’t think she exactly told me it was stupid, but that was the sense I got. A piece of equipment that would take the rocks I found and polish them to a shine . . . what wouldn’t be great about that?
Flash forward to last week. I was shopping with my mother and I moaned about the rock tumbler for the last time. She convinced me to buy it. I had spent my youth trying to convince her buy that thing and in one turn around the store she had that it sold. I’m a sucker for me.
I brought the tumbler home and set it up. Well, there’s not much to it. It’s a motor with a rotation unit that holds a canister. There are gem stones included, two bags of sand of differing grit, and a final polishing sand. There is also jewelry hardware that you can glue the gems to when you’re finished. Not quite what I expected, but exciting nonetheless.
I put it together and read the instructions. The rocks are to tumble continuously for 9 days with the first grit sand and 10 to 14 days with the second grit. I don’t know how long to polish, because I stopped reading I was laughing so hard. It is a stupid crappy toy. I want polished stones now! I’ve waited decades to get the equipment, and now I want to put rocks in one end and have polished little baubles poop out the other. Now!
Being short-sighted and dim-witted, which was established earlier when I wrote “so there” as a defense of ignorance, I didn’t quite think through the mechanics of rock tumbling. Sure, I was a kid when I developed the fixation on having a rock tumbler and didn’t know any better. But I have no such excuse now.
As you can see, it is indeed a good learning toy. I was reminded of my lessons in erosion. I was reminded that patience is a virtue I must cultivate. I was reminded to think things through lest I end up with a rock polisher in my basement that is churning away so loudly that I can hear the whine of it even though I’m 2 floors away.
In a cosmic twist of the fate of my ignorance, I was charged by my pay-work to research rotordynamics and vibration in mechanical engineering. So, now I’ve learned a little something new on top of the reminders of what I already knew.
Ok, so it’s not that crappy. My sister’s kids like it. And that was a secondary excuse for buying it. But for me and my expectations, I’ll say it, my mom was right. In the end, I am reminded of one of the terrific things about me. I’ll admit when someone else is right. How about that for a final analysis? I’ll be sure to learn something about humility in the next 24 hours. Damn.
Last night’s SNL starred Justin Timberlake. My friends have been shoving his music in my ears for some weeks now. I make fun of it, mostly just to tease my friends. But there are some things worthy of a little ribbing in his music. “Would ya date me on the regular,” being one lyric I like to groan about (although I’ve been saying ‘the regular’ on the regular because I think it’s funny). And the idea of bringing back the sexy is ludicrous. Sexy didn’t go anywhere. Well, maybe it did. JT’s new CD is very Michael Jackson, before Jackson got creepy, which was sooo very long ago. So, for that brand of music, the sexy went into deep cover.
