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By Dan Goss Anderson
(Tourmaline specimen from "Minerals of the U.S.A.")
When I was a kid my father would tell me I had rocks in my head. He meant I was crazy. I would tell him there was a UFO outside my bedroom window, with blinking blue lights that were maybe the flashes of alien cameras. Or maybe there was a rattlesnake under my bed and I was too scared to take my afternoon nap.
“Ah!” he would exclaim, throwing his hands up in mock exasperation. “You’ve got rocks in your head. Go see if your mother needs help.”
My father’s phrase comes to mind each year at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, as I wander up and down the tent aisles, and in and out of the crowded hotel room displays. Aging hippies in turquoise-and-silver belts and bracelets dicker over the price of beads. A polite thirty-ish woman with a Minnesota accent allows me to handle a silver necklace I might give to a friend. Dark-haired men with vaguely Middle Eastern accents complain to each other and ignore me as I stroll past their rough displays of basketball-sized rocks.
Now, I’m not a jewelry or rock kind of guy, and I wouldn’t know a topaz from a tourmaline. I usually last only two or three hours at the Gem Show before my eyes have glazed over and I’m headed for my car. But every year, I go back.
Why? Because I’m drawn to the people, to the look I see in the eyes of the sellers, the buyers, the lookers. I see a guy entranced over a certain green stone and I take a second look at it myself. To me, it’s still just a pretty green rock. But to the guy, there’s some kind of magic there. I take yet another look.
I watch two women who talk animatedly as they hand back and forth a face-sized slice of a dark mineral with blue and pink streaks. When I saw it, only moments before, all I saw was a $650 price tag on a colored rock. But they are as excited as if they’ve just discovered proof of a loving God. The vendor, a heavy man in a Hawaiian shirt, nods at their chatter, and he takes their $650. After they move on with big smiles and their new colored rock, he fills in the empty spot on his display with yet another, similarly expensive rock, and resumes his seat on a folding chair.
Interesting. So I wander up and down the aisles. I listen to conversations about rings, or clunky bracelets, or crystals. I take second looks, third looks. I ask questions. I still don’t get it. I almost never buy anything, to the disappointment of the vendors who patiently address my ignorance, but I come back year after year, thinking maybe this year something will click.
These gem show people, I realize, have rocks in their heads. And I don’t. I guess I’m just a little jealous.
Dan Goss Anderson is a writer who lives and works in the shadow of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.
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