The Mighty

(a long one, but stay with me, this is a goody)

A few months ago, I wrote about the day Mother discovered that I'd been carrying rocks to school for weeks in my big Snoopy backpack. It's the story that I go to when I need to laugh about something. Thanks to Ash, I recently uncovered even more repressed memories about that event.

Remember those two best friends from seminary my parents have?

We just went to Acadia together. They babysat me a lot between the ages of 6-9. Including the day that I first brought rocks to school for a unit on rocks. I loved rocks when I was little. And that science unit was akin to that day in middle school we finally played ping pong in gym class-- a day when Nerdy Wee Me could finally shine doing something I loved. I brought rocks of all shapes and sizes to school and won the 'strangest shape' category (for one shaped like a needle and one shaped like an egg).

The thing was though, I didn't always have a well edited rock collection. Because I was 7 and living in Taipei. The tricky part about growing up in a city, especially one as dense and developed as Taipei, was that we could never quite follow along the science units the way the textbooks intended. I turned up empty handed for our units on digging for earthworms, fishing for water-based plants, and picking mulberry leaves (to feed the silkworms). Rock collection posed a similar challenge. But I had my intrepid babysitters. And they had a plan. They took me to a construction site by a busy night market in Taipei. I don't actually remember much of the trip, but I must have loved it. It combined the bustle and fun of night markets with rocks. But as my babysitters told the story later on, it was an apparently humiliating experience. Just a couple of years ago, before they were in seminary, they were both highly successful lawyers who had gone to good schools. But there they were that night, people walking past in every direction, shopping, eating, going out, while they knelt in the darkness, picking rocks into a flimsy plastic bag, Wee Me in tow, praying to God that they wouldn't bump into a single person they knew. Greater love has only one other than this.

A random story for a lonely Saturday night? Perhaps. But I was just clearing out the carry-on suitcase I borrowed from Mother for this trip. I packed pretty light for a week and recycled many outfits (as Amy can attest) and yet, the suitcase always felt oddly heavy. Tonight, I figured out why. I uncovered rocks in the front pocket. Rocks that Mother had picked up in Maine but never unpacked. Rocks that I brought to Boston, then California, then Washington, then back again, lifting up countless times to the overhead compartment, hurting my back each time, and wondering why the suitcase felt as heavy as rocks.