The Better and The Worse

By J. Trace Kirkwood

Day Five -- May 27, 2008

I think the modern world is sloppy with the meaning of words. Maybe it is not sloppiness but, instead, carelessness. "Love" is used more carelessly than any other word in the English language. I'm careless with it most of the time. I knew a man in Mayfield, Kentucky, who used to say that man had no true love for anything that wasn't living. I think about that when I say things like "I love biscuits and gravy" or "I love to nap while watching golf on summer Sunday afternoons."

Does drowsing on the couch really stir man's deepest emotion?

While it may seem that dozing off while the cicadas buzz outside and Jim Nance quietly marvels at Tiger Woods' hooded four iron swing may bring great happiness it is not "love." It makes me happy, very happy.

The true definition of this great word was demonstrated to me over the course of the past few weeks and really driven home on the fourth night of our travels in North Carolina.

First, however, we spent the day digging for jewels. I guess there is some parallel between man's greedy search for something of value and his search for the emotion that is the only real value in our lives. And, just like the search for riches, often times the quest for love is right there in front of us the entire time.

In the morning of our fourth day in Carolina, we drove down to Franklin to go to one of the several sapphire and ruby mines in the area. On the internet I learned about "salted" and "unsalted" mines, but when I got there I learned that the locals call the salted ones "enhanced." Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the meaning, but I'll explain a little more.

A salted mine is one in which the proprietors bring gem laden dirt in from some other location, which almost guarantees that miners will find nice sized gems. Unsalted mines are the ones in which miners dig dirt out of a hillside and sift through it looking for treasure. I decided before we even left Kentucky that I was going to take the kids to an "unsalted" mine and let them get the real experience of mining for jewels in an uncontrolled environment.

Going to a salted mine is like participating in a modern day school field day where every kid gets a ribbon. There's no challenge.

My grittiness landed us at Mason's Mine, which is 10 miles out some winding road northwest of Franklin. I shelled out $75 for all of us to mine, and as I handed my fold of dead presidents (and one Treasury Secretary) I thought about how many cut sapphires I could buy for that amount, but what would be the fun of going to a jewelry store and buying the glittering stones from a glass and metal case. No, by golly, I was going to dig through the Carolina mud looking for the stones.

Only, I had no idea for what I was looking. I quickly realized that these things were not going to glitter in the sunlight like a pile of jewels in a pirate movie.

The process is much more difficult.

First, we had to hike back to this open pit mine carved out by years of digging into the hillside. We had to fill pickle buckets full of dirt, which we carried back across a rickety bridge to flumes running with cold creek water. After digging, lifting, hauling, and sifting, I thought, "I've just paid seventy-five bucks to work my butt off."

At the flume we sifted through mounds of dirt by letting the water dissolve it away through the bottom of a screen framed with wood. Sifting left a variety of stones in the bottom of the screen, and while many looked impressive, most were completely worthless.

It wasn't until I sifted through the last of my second pickle bucket that I found my first sapphire. I didn't know what it was, but one of the guys who works at the mine identified it for me. A blue bolt of greed surged through my body and energized my hands like I had just downed a quart of Dr. Pepper and a box of Vivarin. nothing was going to keep me from finding every sapphire in the Tarheel state.

After several hours of sifting through the dirt, I found six sapphires about the size of the kidney stone that tied up my right kidney just a few weeks before. Their total value is untold. It's untold because I don't want to come across as a sucker. Sylvia found seven stones and Dana found three or four. Parkman found a couple. If I had to add up our total haul, I'd guess that we took 75 cents worth of jewels out of the ground.

Once I saw one, I could spot them on my own.

All day I kept find a type of mica in the screens that was golden and was soft and flaky. It looked and felt like gold, except that it was very light. An older lady sitting next to me convinced herself that it was gold and that the mine was a scam. She thought the men running it had us paying to screen out gold, which was tossed on the ground, and they would collect it after everyone left. She crammed her pockets with probably a pound and a half of the stuff.

I told the mine owner about the lady and he laughed. He asked me, "do you think if there was that much gold here, I'd be living like this?"

I had a great time that day. I enjoyed the challenge of no knowing if I would actually find anything or not. So much of American entertainment is rigged these days. It's as if we have no tolerance of failure and that we cannot face any kind of disappointment.

I wanted my kids to learn that the fun is in the quest and that any further reward only adds to it.

We drove back to Franklin, hungry, tired, and dirty. We found a restaurant downtown called the Motor Company Grill. It was a 1950s throwback diner full of manufactured ambiance. The hamburgers were o.k., but not good enough to ever lure me back there for a meal.

While we were waiting for our food, an older couple from Louisiana pulled up in the parking lot. The woman was driving, and when they got out of the car I recognized the purposeless walk and distant look in the old man's eyes. It was apparent that he suffered from some form of dementia. He stood at the back fender of the car and waited for his wife to take him by the arm and lead him across the parking lot.

See, I can spot that lost look very easily these days. My mother suffers from dementia that is most likely Alzheimer's Disease, so I've become accustomed to the distant look in her eyes and the lack of purpose in her movement.

The older couple took a seat in the booth across from ours. She sat down beside her ailing husband, almost like a couple of teenagers on a date. She pulled a folded up piece of paper from her pocket and started doing puzzles with her husband. One of the puzzles was to fold up a twenty dollar bill until it showed an image that looked like the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center on one side and said "Usama" on the other. She meticulously showed him how to fold the bill and then discussed the amazing coincidence of the trick.

The lady was performing a remarkable act of love. Love is unselfish. She took her time to do silly little tricks to keep her life's love's mind in gear. That is what has to be done with dementia sufferers, and it is a hard thing to do. It was a beautiful selfless act performed without any kind of fanfare in the booth of a cheesy diner in some no name part of the country.

I quit worrying about the $75 I spent to mine sapphires and quit worrying about the dirt on my clothes and under my finger nails. I thought about how my father lays out my mother's medication every morning and how he makes sure she takes it at the appointed time every day and night. I thought of how Dana tended to me when I was so sick with pain and fever earlier in the month.

I thought about the seriousness of the marriage vows, "for better or for worse and in sickness and in health." Love is the only beacon to navigate people through the those things in life. So many things in life are like the tiny jewels that lurk in those buckets of Carolina clay. They're there, but you have to learn how to identify them to find them. In love and life the real gems -- the things of real value -- are the gentle touch of a loving wife's hand, a spouse playing goofy games to hold onto her lover's mind, or a husband carefully placing medication in a tray for a fading wife.

Incredibly, a double rainbow arched through the clearing sky over Franklin while we sat in that diner.