It turned out that the security woman had looked at the X-ray of my bag and seen something worrying in the side pocket. I unzipped the pocket and found that the thing worrying her was a rock that I’d picked up while walking in the Mojave desert.
Fortunately I did not end up being interrogated in a small room by uniformed men with small mustaches. And when I showed the rock to the security woman who’d pulled me over, she seemed to find the situation, and me, rather quaint and charming, and she let me go on my way with my rock. But I couldn’t help worrying that maybe a stricter woman or man might have taken it more seriously and accused me of trying to steal part of America, like it was the Elgin Marbles or something.
I think this is the rock in question but I’m not 100 per cent sure. I really need a cataloguing system.
This year the inamorata and I were walking in the Saguaro National Park, in Arizona, on the Broadway Trailhead, a very dramatic-looking but incredibly safe- feeling bit of walking territory with people just going for an afternoon stroll or exercising their dogs,
And we saw a man heading towards us who was jogging rather than walking and he had something in his hand and he slowed when he got near and he said, far more to the inamorata than to me, ‘It’s turquoise and copper. I collect pieces to give to people,’ and he handed her a very small rock he was carrying, perhaps just a pebble, that looked, and stills looks, like this
To my untutored eyes it didn’t look much like either turquoise or copper but it was a nice little gift. We had no problems at all at airport security.
And the two weeks later in Sheffield, England we saw some of the Ruskin Collection, and it turns out, and I did sort of know this anyway, that John Ruskin was quite a collector of rocks, displayed in the museum like this:
They seem to have a very adequate cataloguing system
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