Fossils
Sunday morning I packed one of those paper grocery bags with blood oranges from my backyard tree, a handful of shelled walnuts in a plastic baggie, a few cans of good ginger ale, a bag of homemade corn chips, a package of fig cookies, and I stuck it in the back of my van. I told the boys to grab a garden trowel and a hammer and a chisel from the bamboo shed, and I piled those in the van, too, along with five gallons of water and two empty Avon boxes. The boys piled into the middle seat with a pile of comic books between them and the dog and the pig shared the floor beneath their feet. I wanted to leave the pig at home but I thought about the furniture and baskets of macadamia nuts drying in the sunroom and the toys, oh man the toys, covering every available surface.
And we hit the road! Hit it hard, rolled south with salsa music blasting from a tin radio, then east past San Diego, into the boulder crater mountains my boys call Moon Valley. I glanced in the rear view mirror and watched the boys reading, dog sleeping, and pig pressing his body against 10's legs and his snout against the side window, watching the rocks ribbon beside us and leaving a coat of thick drool along the window gasket.
I consulted a map as I drove, can of ginger ale between my legs. I bought the map at a junk shop in Escondido, from a comic book man with deep set eyes and thin fingers. He took a green ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and circled areas on the map.
"The best marine fossils are here. Mounds of 'em. You can scoop them up with a shovel. Nothing like it in the county." His breath smelled of coffee and alcohol and his eyes sunk deeper into his head as he looked at the map and wrote off-road directions along the side. "Now here you've got your petrified wood. Just grows right outta the ground like cabbage. You can only take twenty-five pounds a day, that's the law. Sometimes Border Patrol is out in that area so don't mess around with that."
I pulled the van off at Ocotillo Wells and dove south, into the remnants of an ancient sea bed and followed those hand-written descriptions for four miles across a desert wash caked with dried mud and drying spring grasses. I drove until I knew my van would drive no more in the soft sand. We opened to the cool dry air and hiked down a crusty ravine into the oyster beds of many millions of years ago. The comic book man was right. Fossils littered the ground in every direction, fossils of hard rock oysters and chevron shells and delicate brain coral, some dark split black, some opalized into a gemstone hint of pearl and glass. The boys used small trowels to dig for the best specimens and I sat on a flat piece of granite and watched them pick and dig, pick and dig. The dog lay on the tailgate of my van, curled into a tight ball. Frankie the pig followed the boys and his sharp red harness stood out among the dull rock and our earth tone clothes.
Oysters. Frozen in time. I held a fossil and ran my hands over the rocky ridges, the smooth underside, imagined myself under hundreds of feet of water, an oyster in some other world sea. I thought about The Man, too, thought about our Saturday together, how he returned my call and invited me to walk a labyrinth with him in an ancient meditation practice.
I dressed in torn jeans and an orange long-sleeved t-shirt and drove to the scrub forest of his town and met him at the stone circle. We walked the path, the snake path, outer circles turning to inner twists, following the simple sand space between rows of smooth white stones. I walked three feet in front of The Man, kept my eyes on the ground, let foot fall in front of foot, and centuries of fossil life fell from my arms, chest, mind. I turned to look at my friend, this man of heaven who kissed me and left me in turmoil. I stepped two labyrinth rungs over, let him pass, watched him move with reverence and attention.
I know you, I thought. I remember you. I remember you. And something broke inside of me, broke and spilled on the sand below my body. I don't know what it was, felt past-life heavy and useless. I jumped past the last maze hurdle, started running to my van, and didn't look back.
I'm alone this afternoon the way I'm always alone though I share a house with kids and birds and dog and now a pig. I'm alone like those stolen fossils laying in the coastal sun by my front door. I left a man in a maze. And a man left me this morning, left me and this world for some new journey. Somehow that's the way of my world.
1:06:45 PM 
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