There is always some impetus that drives or beckons a person to do what they do. For some people, that might be hunger, literal or metaphorical. For others it might be attention, or influence, or power. For some, perhaps wealth or comfort of living.
Me? I have always hoped to give something away that others truly want. Sadly, I am quite awful at giving gifts. However, I’ve tried to give other things. I spent my life as a professor trying to give away understanding of the nature of our world (some of my students might have wanted it!). I wrote (and still write) science fiction stories that I hope can bring joy or insight or wonder. Sadly, so far, it isn’t clear anyone wants them! My daughter tells me that it doesn’t matter if you sell your work for a lot of money, but rather if even one person reads and enjoys it, that counts. I agree. Her words sound like my uncle from some three decades earlier. He had spent his life trying to break into the country music industry, without success. In the end, he said “When I was young, I was terrified someone would steal my music. Later on, I just wished that someone would.”
Yeah, having just one person who truly wants my stories might be enough. The problem is, in the modern world where getting attention is the primary currency of life, if a story gets no traction, then that small fraction of people who might truly want to read it won’t ever even know that it exists. Even my grandchildren probably won’t read it unless it rises higher in their attention!
As I emerged from thoracic surgery after a cancer scare a couple of years ago, I realized that I would like to have something more tangible than stories to give my grandchildren. Not just money or stuff, but something with meaning. Like the beautiful wedding quilts with embroidered birds that my grandmother made for my brother and I with her own hands.
I came upon the idea of putting together sets of rocks and fossils, along with notes about the stories that each tells of the earth. I built six equivalent sets (optimistically preparing for grandchildren not yet born!), choosing mostly hand-sized samples rather than the tiny kiddie-set samples you can buy online or at stores. Samples ranged from quartz crystals that I collected in Arkansas on my first geology field trip as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas to dinosaur bones that Mary and I collected on a joint research project at a Cretaceous bone bed in South Dakota. We added a few items like trilobites on recent campervan trips and had to pick up some samples I’d left back at my old home place in Kansas (another campervan trip in July of 2024). I bought forty-two satchels in six different colors to hold the sets, reserving one last spot in each of the collections for a fossil fish from the world-famous Green River Formation—a fossil that I had never collected but had always longed to.
Thus, this past June, Mary and I stopped in southwest Wyoming near Kemmerer on a campervan trip to visit with family in Utah and paid real money for the privilege of breaking rocks with hammers for eight hours in the hot sun! It’s such a delight when a rock splits open to reveal a fish that lived millions of years ago that no human eye has ever seen!
We had to get six fossils of course, for the six sets, and I think we got samples that were reasonably equivalent. Here they are!
