The Pebble from Wallsend

If I searched for it I could find it, but I never do, I find it at times unplanned. That is one of the roles of a keepsake. I have several others. But this was the first one that went from an object to a keepsake. 

It is a pebble, the size of my thumbnail, made of translucent quartz.  A flat eccentric oval.  Running from one side to the other is a thin strata of dull red.

I found the pebble on the bank of the River Tyne, near to Wallsend.  I had left home for the first time and was working as a Community Service Volunteer, my year off before University.  Eighteen-year-olds in the 1980s did not spend their gap year on round the world trips.   The north-east of England was far enough for a Derbyshire lad.

The pebble, like me, was a stranger, far away from its bedrock.  It had either been washed down by waters of the River Tyne from the distant hills of the Pennines, or perhaps fallen from a foreign ship's cargo.  And there it was on a small river-side beach next to the used condoms floating in the murky waters of the industrial River Tyne.  Yet I connected with the pebble.

Since that day I have collected other things from faraway places: a smooth branch from a beach at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, later lost on a railway platform in Germany; a chalk egg-like pebble from Lulworth Cove, Dorset; black and crumbling, volcanic rock, plucked from the slopes of Mount Etna, Sicily; an ice fractured stone from the Grosse Glockner, Austria; and a pine branch, white and smooth, shorn of its bark, from the dank forests of Capel Hermon, Wales.

But they do not mean much to me.  That is the curious thing.  These objects are just connections to a time and place and perhaps the pensive mood that comes with being solitary. 

As I grow older there are other things that remind me of memories I do not want to be reminded of - a dead friend, a dead son, and a trust betrayed.   I secrete them in appropriate places so I can elect to find them or avoid them.  I do not wish to let them have unbidden access to my now. 

I prefer to let the memories flash upon my inward eye, then I can hold them in view as long as I wish to.  But when I find the keepsake the pain of remembrance can be too much. 

I question why I keep such things; and why I cannot throw them away.  And then I have to return them, with care and attention, to their secure place. 

Now I ruthlessly rid myself of keepsakes; I throw objects away before they can become the harbringers of memories that discomfort me.   

I now live life and make new memories.  No longer do I stoop to collect trifles to be my memories' keeper.

Nick Luft

16 December 2005