I was in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History this past week, and obviously I’m not over my childhood fetish for rock-collecting because the Minerals and Fossils sections at the museum filled me with a deep hankering for a museum display of my own. Maybe a little smaller, with slightly less eerie museological lighting (though the spotlit chiaroscuro is kind of neat, like something a James Bond villain might have in his villa, next to the shark pool) and nicer shelves. But imagine how amazing a small version of this would be in a dark corner, or a boring corridor, or next to your bed. And just think how decor in North America would be instantly, collectively improved if every single gilt sunburst mirror were replaced with a nice rock. Or even a small boulder! Or a drawing in crayon for that matter, but I digress. You wouldn’t need specimens as nice as the ones in the Smithsonian collection, all of which are no doubt the bounty of iffy mining practices. A nice piece of rock from the local landscaping place, or even dug up in a garden, would be enough. My ecologically-minded boyfriend disapproves of my rock-collecting (“what if everyone took a nice rock off this beach!”), so I’m trying to limit myself somewhat, and as an aid I occasionally recite to myself Steven Wright’s line: “I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.” Recently I went and returned some some of my shells to the beach from whence they came. And I’m pretty sure they were collected by someone else about 7 minutes later.

When I was a child I was a member of something called Mineral of the Month Club. Our family was always quite broke so the subscription fee must have been pretty cheap. Every month a little box containing a small outcrop of crystals or a glittery piece of ore arrived in the mail, along with a little folded information sheet. You also got a sort of passport booklet when you joined, and you’d record each specimen as it arrived. There was also a little paper code number glued to each sample, which I’d spend ages soaking off  because it ruined the appearance and I wasn’t interested in categorization by number. I was more interested in arranging the rocks by various arbitrary criteria (little landscapes, colour), and anyway I’d memorized what each one was. Eventually the company folded. This was very sad at the time, but luckily there was a little Vancouver shop called Marshall’s Lapidary and I just started to spend most of my weekly allowance there. I later found out from Vancouver writer Michael Turner (you can read about it  somewhat obliquely in his novel The Pornographer’s Poem) that Marshall was a bit of a pervert with kids, and I’m now sorry he got my allowance. A few weeks ago on a strange whim I searched online for “Mineral of the Month Club” – I guess I was hoping to come upon some nostalgia or maybe a nerd forum – and discovered that the club has been resurrected. So I bought an online subscription for my nephew Sam for his birthday. When I excitedly emailed the company to explain that I’d been a member of something similar as a child, the new founders, an extremely nice lapidary-nerd couple from California, wrote back saying they hadn’t realized the club had any predecessors until people began to mention it to them. Maybe my nephew can now develop a little display in his bedroom, the way I did. Mine wasn’t on the wall, though; it was in a low, flat, compartmented vintage wooden cigar box my aunt found at a garage sale. I still have it. PS. For anyone who wants to cure themselves of or at least understand the urge to collect, Susan Stewart’s book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collectionis very helpful, if difficult. UPDATE: This is the most huckstery thing I’ve ever said on this blog, but mention this blog to Cheyenne at Mineral of the Month Club when you get your subscription, and she’ll give my nephew Sam another month free. And I will thank you here.

Tags: collection, crystals, deep hanker, fossils, lapidary, Mineral of the Month Club, minerals, museological displays, Museum of Natural History, On Longing, rock-collecting, rocks, seashells, shells, Smithsonian, specimen, Susan Stewart, vitrines, wall decoration

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