Stone

Today is my wife's 42nd birthday, and no, I'm not going to get in trouble for telling you that, she is a fanatic about all things related to her nativity.  Her birthday present this year was five tons of #57 bluestone gravel delivered by dump truck.  No, that is not a joke, and no, she is not upset in the least about it.  In fact, she was walking around for days telling people how she was almost as excited for that rock as she would have been for the kind of rock she wears on her finger.  That is where we are in our lives, solidly in our fifth decade.
We're aware of the fact that, while we haven't necessarily reached the point where we are starting to feel the crunch of old age and the need to weed out clutter, we are at a place where we want the stuff we get to be truly useful.  The desire for a truckload of gravel has been with Michele for a while now.  The edge of our driveway has a bit of a drop off into a nice bare spot that is mud when it rains and dirt any other time.  People use it to turn around before leaving, and she felt bad about how bumpy and nasty that could be, especially for the UPS and Fed-Ex guys who make nearly daily stops at our house, because we have taken to ordering a whole lot of stuff on-line.  Amazon Prime and Target.com both do free shipping on just about anything we need.  We're pretty busy, so we don't always have time to go browsing around big box stores like we did earlier in life.  We now order pretty mundane stuff, like dishwasher detergent and even toilet paper for delivery, shipping is free and prices are low, and we don't much care if we ruin the excitement of getting packages delivered for our kids.
The point is that the rocks are a gesture of practical hospitality.  It's not glamorous or flashy, but it is the sort of gift that both of us really crave about this point: tools, useful things.
She is probably going to laugh at me for going on about this in a blog, but that too has a dual purpose.  See, a lot times we have written each other little letters for birthdays or anniversaries. These letters aren't always necessarily about trying to out mush each other, a lot of them are just little remarks on where we are right now.
I noticed the other day that I had a few of them stashed somewhere and I didn't quite know what to do about that.  It seemed wrong to just toss them, I have too much of my grandfather in me for that, but there are these folded sheets of paper stuffed away somewhere and the question is what is going to come of that? It may be that someday one of our kids, sorting through our stuff, finds them and reads them and gets all emotional, or whatever.  But putting this sort of thing here, as long as I can avoid severely embarrassing Michele, means that it is around, out there in the matrix, it can be found without clutter, without degradable paper, without cluttering up some drawer.  It's here, it's useful, it's actually more permanent than stone.
All my Geek peeps out there will know that 42 is an important number.  In Douglas Adam's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is the answer to life, the universe and everything, which the most powerful computer in the universe spits out, a single number.  That idea is absurd, of course, like a lot of other things that make that book so great.  Life can be absurd and unpredictable, and it's always good to have a towel handy, which is the sort of thing that hopefully we have all learned by the time we're 42.
Happy Birthday Michele, enjoy your stones.