The Rocks I Still Carry

The Rocks I Still Carry

I pick up rocks.

I’ve done it for as long as I can remember.

Not just any rocks. They have to catch my attention somehow. Maybe there’s an unusual pattern in them, or a color, or a shape that makes me stop. Sometimes there is nothing particularly remarkable about the rock at all except for where I found it.

I have one from a beach in Iceland. Another reminds me of fishing with my friend Jarred in Japan.

They aren’t worth anything.

That isn’t the point.

The rock becomes attached to a place, a person, or a moment in my life. It becomes something physical I can hold that says: I was here. This happened.

I have always thought this was just something I did.

Recently, I realized it might be something much older.

It might have started with my grandma.

I don't remember nearly as much about my grandmother as I wish I did.

I was very young when she died. Too young to accumulate the kind of memories you get when someone is allowed to grow old alongside you. I don't have decades of conversations with her to look back on. I don't know what she would have thought about the man I became. I don't know what she would have said about the places I've traveled or the mistakes I've made or the things I've accomplished.

There should have been more.

There just wasn't.

But I do remember rocks.

After she died, I used to pick up rocks that I thought were special and bring them to her grave. I would place them on her grave marker because they were rocks I thought Grandma would like.

Some of them remained there for years.

I recently started thinking about that again because of conversations I've been having with ChatGPT about memory, photography, writing, and something we've come to call bearing witness.

I've been trying to understand why I feel such a strong need to document my life.

I take photographs constantly, but I've never really considered myself a photographer in the traditional sense. I'm not particularly interested in creating the technically perfect photograph. What matters to me is capturing something before it disappears.

A person.

A place.

A particular expression.

An ordinary afternoon that doesn't seem important until twenty years later when you'd give anything to stand inside it again.

I've saved photographs that probably wouldn't mean anything to another person because I know what was happening just outside the frame.

I've written things down because I don't want to forget how something felt.

I've kept little objects from places I've traveled.

And, of course, I still pick up rocks.

During these conversations, ChatGPT used a word that stuck with me.

Anchors.

Physical things that hold memories.

That immediately made sense to me.

But then I started wondering where that instinct came from.

So I asked my mom about Grandma.

Mom told me that Grandma and I started taking walks together before I was even three years old.

The world was still brand new to me then.

Apparently, we would walk around looking at things. Bugs. Rocks. Whatever happened to catch the attention of a little boy discovering the world.

My mom doesn't know exactly how the rock collecting started because she wasn't there.

Maybe Grandma noticed an interesting rock and pointed it out to me.

Maybe I found it first.

Maybe I picked one up and handed it to her.

Nobody remembers.

But eventually it became something we did.

We looked for treasures.

And Grandma carried my loot.

That particular detail stopped me.

She carried my loot.

I picture this tiny version of myself wandering around, constantly stopping because I'd discovered something fascinating, handing these completely ordinary objects to my grandmother as though I'd uncovered buried treasure.

And apparently she accepted them as though they mattered.

At that age, I wasn't thinking about symbolism.

I wasn't trying to preserve memories.

I didn't understand loss.

I certainly wasn't thinking about death.

I was simply discovering something and saying, in the only language a little boy really has:

Look at this.

And Grandma looked.

That may have been one of my earliest experiences of something I've spent much of my adult life trying to understand.

The discovery wasn't complete until I could share it with someone.

My mom also reminded me about a grave in the older part of the cemetery.

It had a homemade marker with colorful marbles embedded in it.

She couldn't remember whether Grandma discovered it first and showed it to me or whether I noticed it myself.

But apparently every time we walked through that part of the cemetery, I had to go see those marbles.

I would run my little fingers across them and look at all the different colors.

There's something strangely beautiful about that image now.

A little boy walking through a cemetery with his grandmother, too young to understand what a cemetery really meant, fascinated by colorful pieces of glass embedded in somebody's grave.

Somebody had made that marker.

Somebody had placed those marbles there.

Somebody had loved the person beneath it enough to make their resting place different.

I couldn't possibly have understood any of that.

I just knew it was beautiful and interesting.

So I stopped.

I looked.

I touched it.

And Grandma stopped with me.

Maybe that was the beginning.

Maybe before I knew anything about photography or writing or storytelling, Grandma was teaching me something incredibly simple:

Pay attention.

There are interesting things here.

Don't just walk past them.

Then she died.

And something changed.

I don't remember deciding to continue collecting rocks for her.

I just did.

The walks were over, but the ritual survived.

I'd find a rock that looked different or interesting and think:

Grandma would like this one.

Except now I couldn't hand it to her.

So I carried it to the cemetery.

I placed it on her grave.

I've been thinking about how remarkable that actually is.

As a child, I had somehow found a way to continue my relationship with someone who was no longer physically there using one of the only languages between us that I still remembered.

The location changed.

Grandma wasn't walking beside me anymore.

But I could still bring her treasures.

And some of those rocks stayed there.

Years passed.

Decades passed.

And some remained.

An ordinary rock picked up by a little boy became evidence.

This happened.

She existed.

I loved her.

She loved me.

We walked together.

And when she couldn't walk with me anymore, I still brought her things.

I told ChatGPT this story.

I told it about the rocks I still collect and the places they come from. I told it about Iceland and Japan. I told it about my photography and my strange compulsion to document eras of my life. We had already spent days talking about my desire to write and my realization that maybe I have spent much of my life trying to bear witness to things.

Then it pointed out something I hadn't seen.

The noticing came before the loss.

That changed everything for me.

I had begun to wonder whether my need to preserve things came from being afraid of losing them.

And I'm sure some of it does.

I've experienced enough loss to understand how quickly a person can become a memory and how suddenly an ordinary photograph can become priceless.

But Grandma taught me to notice things while she was still alive.

The rocks weren't originally about grief.

They were about wonder.

That means something to me.

Because maybe this part of me wasn't created by everything painful that happened afterward.

Maybe grief intensified it.

Maybe loss taught me why preservation mattered.

But grief wasn't there at the beginning.

Wonder was.

A little boy saw something interesting.

His grandmother stopped to look.

That was enough.

When I think about my life now, I can see the same behavior everywhere.

I travel halfway around the world and pick up a rock from a beach in Iceland.

I go fishing with Jarred in Japan and keep something from that experience.

I take photographs of ordinary moments because something inside me says they might not always be ordinary.

I document people.

I document places.

I write about moments that affected me because I don't want them to simply disappear into the enormous pile of forgotten days that eventually becomes a human life.

I've spent a lot of time wondering whether any of that matters.

Who am I bearing witness for?

If nobody ever reads what I write, what was the point?

If nobody ever sees the photograph, what did I preserve it for?

Maybe I've been asking the wrong question.

Because when I was two years old, Grandma didn't ask me what I intended to do with the rock.

She didn't ask whether anybody else would think it was special.

She didn't ask whether it had value.

I thought it mattered.

So she looked.

Maybe that's enough.

And maybe that explains something about the kind of writing I want to do now.

I don't necessarily want to tell people that my life is important.

I want to tell them:

Look at this.

Look at this ordinary thing I almost walked past.

Look at this person.

Look at what happened here.

Look at how beautiful this was before it disappeared.

Maybe you'll recognize something from your own life in it.

Maybe you won't.

But I was here.

And I saw it.

My mom ended her message by telling me something else.

She said she wished Grandma and I could have had more time and more adventures together.

"You were such a good team," she told me.

Grandma was crazy about me.

I was crazy about her.

And I was far too young when I had to let her go.

My mom called it what it was.

Unfair.

There isn't a beautiful explanation that fixes that.

I should have gotten more walks.

I should have gotten more stories.

I should remember the sound of her voice better than I do.

I should have been able to know her as an adult instead of reconstructing pieces of her through other people's memories.

But lately I've been learning that losing something doesn't mean everything about it disappears.

Sometimes people leave things inside us without either person realizing it is happening.

Not possessions.

Not even memories exactly.

Ways of seeing.

Maybe my grandmother gave me one.

She showed a little boy that the world was full of interesting things if he paid attention.

She stopped when I stopped.

She looked at what I showed her.

She carried my treasures.

And when she was gone, somehow I kept looking.

More than forty years later, I am still doing it.

The little boy grew up.

The walks got longer.

I've wandered far beyond that cemetery now.

I've stood on beaches in Iceland.

I've walked through Japan.

I've climbed mountains and crossed oceans and stood in places that the little boy walking beside his grandmother could never have imagined existed.

And everywhere I go, some part of me is still looking.

For a photograph.

For a story.

For an ordinary moment worth remembering.

Sometimes for nothing more complicated than a strange little rock lying on the ground.

Maybe I've been carrying Grandma with me all this time without realizing it.

Or maybe that's not quite right.

Maybe I'm still doing exactly what we always did.

We're looking for treasures.

Only now, when I find one, Grandma isn't there to carry my loot.

So I carry it myself.

And maybe writing is simply the newest version of that old ritual.

I find something in this enormous world that seems important.

I pick it up.

I carry it for a while.

And eventually I hold it out to someone else and say:

Look at this one.

Don't walk past it.

There's something here.