Last week as I was falling asleep to Radiolab, the podcast, and I was listening to a story about a woman who was biking cross country and she met a guy who changed her life forever.
She was an only child and so she had a rather lonely childhood. She carried along stones of all shapes and sizes. These, oddly enough, became her best friends. She would talk to them, wash them, carry them everywhere. Seventh grade came along and sitting in her geology class she felt her world fall apart. Her teacher drew a vertical line on the board, wrote rocks on one side and everything else on the other.
Her life companions were left alone on one side and across the boarder was everything else that is alive. She eventually made peace with the cruel reality but in the back of her mind she always wished it was somehow a lie.
The man she met during that trip stopped on the side of the road to look at some stones and she was unbelievably intrigued because only she would do such a thing. He explained that those rocks were special because they were from the bottom of the sea. When the shells of plankton fall down to the ocean floor they collect and turn into hard sediment rocks. It was then and there when those ends were tied. She asked for the explanation a few more times and just rejoiced in these news.
She knows rocks are not alive and she is not crazy, but she feels better about her lonely childhood and her lifeless friends.
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