On the Road Agan 2015 Interim #6

I have for years whenever I left the house worn two necklaces. One necklace has been very visible. At least once a semester one of my more courageous students would ask where I got the stone from and surprisingly, store clerks frequently comment on it. Whenever I have time I am glad to share the story of where the stone came from and why, I somewhat compulsively, wear it all of the time ( the short story is that the stone comes from the B.C. beach where I found my son - he wasn't lost, I just didn't know where he was; the long story involves two separate trips across the country, a man named Reg and some angels).

The other necklace has been far less visible. In fact, I suspect that most of the people who know me, never knew that I had a small red necklace fairly high around my neck, well under my beard. I got the small, irregularly shaped meteorite at the International Rainbow Gathering at Maniwaki, Quebec in 2004 from a elder of the Quebec Family. His long dreads were gray, his skin dark and his English was limited. Every day for the twelve or so days I was there he and I met somewhere on the trails and shared a few words about the weather, the food or the numbers of eagles that had been seen flying overhead. Somehow this temporary connection became very important to me. Certainly on more than one occasion, when it was getting towards dusk and we had not met, I went and looked for him. Just before I left to return back to Ontario, he gave me two stones, meteorites from a field in Mexico. One of the stones is just smaller than a tennis ball. It sits amongst my other treasures on my grandmother's wicker trunk. The other stone was much smaller. When he gave it to me, he told me to always wear it around my neck.

The stone is very irregular in shape. It took numerous tries for me to find a way to tie my macrame knots so that I would not lose the stone. As the strings became worn from the constant rubbing against my neck, I have re-made the necklace three times in the past 11 years.

This past weekend that necklace fell off of my neck while I was at a Pow Wow. I don't have a clue where it happened. I didn't even bother to go back to look for it. The grass was too long, there were lots of people there and I had wandered around the grounds for over two hours. It is not the first time that it has become undone (or more likely it was never done up properly in the first place) but every other time I have felt it become lose or heard it fall. In the past few week this coming undone has happened more than a few times. It is almost as if it was telling me it was times to let go.

I keep on telling myself that the person found it, liked it and that they will wear it for while before it gets passed on to someone else. I keep on reminding myself that eleven years is a long time to own a stone, and that it was well past time that I gave up at least one of my compulsions or obsessions. I know in my mind that no one ever really owns a stone - that they are lent to us for awhile before they must be returned to where they came from or at least passed on to someone else. But I miss wearing it. I miss knowing that it is there, around my neck, hidden from the world like some ancient good luck charm only visible to the Gods.

Perhaps most of all, I am afraid that losing the stone means that I will forget about that magical Gathering and my somewhat tenuous connection to the elder with the grey dreads .