Chapter 5. Crinoids!

Beth’s father and mother were doctors. They moved to Memphis to work at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and began attending our church. They had kids the age of my older brother and sister and maybe one or two older than that, and Beth. She was just a year older than I was, so she was in my Sabbath School class at church and in my classroom at school.

I didn’t play with Beth at recess, but at least she was friendly. One day she brought a rock to school. It was a small cylinder about three-eights of an inch long and a quarter inch across. It looked like a stack of flat rings with a hole through the center. I was enthralled. A real fossil. In my own hands! Then, as I was admiring it, Beth told me I could have it.

“What? Really?”

“Sure. I can find more of them in my driveway at home.”

I couldn’t believe it. She had fossils in her driveway. What an exotic house! I could hardly wait for the next time we were invited for Sabbath lunch. As soon as we could be excused from the table, Beth took me outside to mine the driveway. In less than five minutes we found another fossil. We found six that afternoon. In addition to the kind of fossil she had brought to school, we found another one, horn-shaped with longitudinal ridges. This was marvelous beyond words. After sundown worship, when the kids played hide-and-seek, Beth and I hid together. I hated to go home.

I wanted to know what kind of fossils we had found. I looked in the encyclopedia but didn’t find anything that looked just like what we had found. I asked adults, but no one knew anything about fossils. Then Mr. Holmes told me it was a crinoid. He showed me a picture in a book. No wonder I didn’t recognize it. The books all showed crinoids as long stalks with what looked like a flower on top and a broad base. It was a sea creature related to sea anemones. The pieces I had were very short sections of the stem. I was thrilled. I had a fossil that actually had a name.

Searching Beth’s driveway for fossils did lead to one major disappointment. When she first brought the fossil to school, I had hoped that after seeing them in her driveway and knowing what to look for, I might be able to find fossils in the gravel in the alley behind our house or at the Holmes’ house in the country south of town. But when we searched her driveway, I realized right away that something was different about this gravel. It didn’t look like any other gravel I had seen around Memphis.

I already knew any large rocks in Memphis had to have been transported in by truck or train or barge. I had visited a gravel pit near my cousin Ricky’s house. The largest rocks were smaller than my fist and the color was the same as the red gravel roads that ran through the Mississippi countryside south of town. Even along the banks of the Mississippi River which I explored when we went skiing with my Uncle Alex, there were no large rocks and no fossils. And there was a lot of reddish color.

The gravel in Beth’s driveway was tan to white. The pieces had a different shape from anything I had seen anywhere else in Memphis. Maybe it came from over near Little Rock, Arkansas or from up toward Nashville where I had seen gray and white rocks. For sure Beth’s gravel did not come from Memphis.

I had been collecting rocks since I was old enough to pick them up. This was perhaps the first time I gave much thought to rocks as part of a system instead of as individual specimens.