2018—JÓN Magazine
As I write this whilst bobbing on the ocean in a big ferry boat, I think of what the Great Salty One washes to land: boat parts, severed tree trunks, Big Gulp cups – that is, mostly shit we drop in it.
But there is one gift the sea bestows upon us that is not of our doing, a gift that nary a soul cares about other than myself when I was a child. How it gave me such delight. Pearly white. Smooth. The size of a pinky fingernail.
No, not baby whale teeth. Pebbles. Little round pebbles affectionately coined by me as sweeties.
Not just any pebble found on the beach qualified as a sweetie. There were the four C’s to consider:
Colour: Uniform translucent white like quartz
Cut: Smooth from years of erosion from wave action
Calibre: Sized large enough for a child to locate among other beach rocks, but small enough to easily lodge into her ear
Clink: If a pile of them is shook within a closed hand, it makes a sound like rocks clacking against each other (easiest of the criteria)
My sweeties… Yes, I was a little Gollum in the making. I was the discerning purveyor who determined if they passed the mustard - I mean muster. Was thinking about my favourite sandwich at that age – orange cheese and yellow mustard. (As you can see I had the finest of tastes.)
Sometimes my sister helped me out, presenting me one for my collection. I surveyed it between finger and thumb, examined the curvature and colouring. Fool, it had a yellow discolouration on a 0.8-inch section.
This skillful eye was honed over years of dawdling behind the rest of my family on pebbled west coast beaches.
Where a minute ago I was at my parents’ sides, I was now a furlong behind, clutching two maybe four sweeties in my tiny Cabbage Patch-sized hands.
‘Let’s go,’ they’d yell.
I could not go any faster. I knew the worth of these precious stones.
My sweetie collection was lovingly curated from the ages of three to 11. It spilled out of the tray in the living room that was dotted with unique, larger rocks my parents procured over the years (hm, I wonder where I got it from). My collection never reached hoarder status as my parents would surreptitiously fling handfuls into the yard, unnoticed by me. It’s not like I could tell if one was missing - they all looked the same. And they were a bunch of rocks. Dumb matter like the rest of us with no meaning besides the value we bestowed on it from one temporary moment to the next.
There are material items found in this life that have been allotted a disproportionate measure of value most people have accepted and bought into. It starts when someone says something like diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Well when have diamonds ever listened to you complain about people who don’t recycle or shared an evening snack of a whole loaf of cheese bread with you? The only reason people aren’t saying sweeties are forever is because I kept it to myself. What if the first people who saw diamonds, or jade, or peacocks did the same thing? What would that be like? For one thing, we wouldn’t be overrun with vicious urban bird gangs.
The mania, the belief that you’re important due to the sparkly lumps in your possession has become much like the roving peacocks: untameable and severed from the tethers that maintained its status as an object of beauty to appreciate in small doses. Now we are stuck with a giant diamond-encrusted peacock stomping through our streets, screeching and belching out jewels. Can it be stopped? Can we gather together as a people to bring down the beast we created? It’s possible we will prevail and save humanity, but it’s also possible we will develop a new fascination and hunger for something as equally unhealthy. Like pet sea anemones. Or kombucha.
Published by JÓN Magazine, issue 21.
Image Jakob Owens via Unsplash
