Rock Paste
When I was a child, a small child, a boy, I wanted to make rock paste. This was really just part of my overall experimentalism, my personal belief system that considered the world a place ripe for change, for alchemy. In my backyard I was a prince, a scientist-prince. This made up for the more public front yard where I was not quite so welcome, where I was called sissy and little girl and worse. But, on the 25-foot cement patio in my back yard on Kenneth Street, I was Curie, Pasteur, Einstein.
Like most boys my age, at this particular time in the 1960s, I had a chemistry set. With it I could make no experiment work. This was probably because I mixed those colorful powders willy-nilly, with no guide. Reading the instructions was for more prosaic minds. And I really believed that I would stumble upon some combination that would engender something miraculous. Wasn’t this the way x-rays were invented, by accident? Yes, I saw it on John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade. I really didn’t see my complete ignorance of science as a drawback. I wanted to roll God’s dice anyway.
Anyway, I had a theory. My theory said that if I could pound the rocks and stones that I found in the yard, where they were abundant, pound them hard enough with a ball-peen hammer, steadily enough, I could pulverize them (the operative word here is pulverize) and produce a powder so fine that, when mixed with tap water, I would have rock paste. A paste made from rock dust. This seemed to me one of the finest ideas I had had up to that point in my young life.
I took my handful of stones and my hammer and sat on the patio near the faucet. It seemed to be important to be near my water source, as if, perhaps, I might have to add the water quickly before the rock dust changed back to rock. I began to pound on the stones, using the pavement as my mortar, one of my dad’s hammers as pestle.
The initial smashing was satisfying. The colorful rocks, as they crumbled, seemed to me to be the very building blocks of the Earth. And I was Lord of it.
But soon, friends, my girlish wrist grew tired. Very soon it grew tired. I looked at what I had crushed. It was far from fine. It was really just rock crumbles. I put a cupped handful of water into a plastic pail and added what I had crushed so far. It just looked silly. It was wet gravel. Wet gravel did not seem a particularly satisfying result to my experiment. And, here I confess: I have never really conducted a successful experiment. Through laziness, lack of focus, and just plain lack of knowledge, I could make nothing from nothing. I was no alchemist. I am no alchemist.
In college, after five years of mostly English and philosophy classes, I was called into my advisor’s office. It was there suggested that if a degree I sought, I had better take something other than English classes, namely the required phys ed, a language, biology, and zoology. I thanked my advisor for his wisdom and insight and shook his hand. I then went home and told my parents that I was through with college. They were disappointed of course. I wanted to tell them that I had made wet gravel instead of rock paste, but, what I really said was, I am going to be a bookseller and writer.
And this is what I became. My experiment with my own life is not finished yet, but it’s a safe bet I will no longer pursue the breaking apart of raw materials to try and effect some sort of magical, elemental change. I will only do this metaphorically, on the dreamy page, in my dreamy head. And, in experiments done metaphorically, friends, there are few who know what fails and what doesn’t.
Copyright © 2008 by Corey Mesler
