(Written on July 13, 2002;
updated on Dec. 11, 2025)
It was a pleasant, though somewhat sultry, summer night not long ago in old Charleston’s historic district, and we were all walking in the market area. The city in recent years has come alive with nightlife. People were out in droves, gawking at the sights, dining in restaurants, popping in and out of gift and souvenir shops, stopping for dessert and ice cream, window shopping, taking in the scene.
So were we: my brother and I were accompanying my sister and my niece and nephew visiting from the Seattle area. It is rare and a special time indeed when all three of us siblings are together for an outing.
Our goal was a curious and very busy shop in the market that my nephew likes go to to every time he comes to Charleston…It’s called Black Market Rock and Mineral Shop, I believe. What an interesting place. What a loaded name… Lots and lots of rocks and rock-made gifts and objects of curiosity. Imports. There are boxes of rocks and all sorts of eclectic gifts. Stuff you’ve never seen before. Like I say, it was packed with people. Curiosity, I guess, is part of it. Novelty. Never know what you’ll find in a place like that.
I was never a rockhound. I always liked those little open box sets with all the main types of stones and minerals represented. You probably remember them. They always contained pretty quartzes and crystals and fools gold…and this and that. I can’t remember the details. Fool’s gold always intrigued me, though, for both symbolic and literal reasons. But it’s been years since I even looked at rocks much.
So I was wandering around the store, picking up and examining various objects, including pieces of polished petrified wood, which I find quite amazing and beautiful. Ever since i visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona years ago, I have never forgotten how beautiful those rocks are. I was looking for just the right pattern in those little pieces of wood turned to rock. Special shapes and colors. Piece after piece. Nothing really struck me as too exceptional, aside from the extraordinary fact that what I was holding was once contained in ancient trees in what is now an austerely parched desert.
Mind-boggling. But I was looking for something I didn’t find on that table.
Then, at the next display shelf, the agates were arrayed before me, beaufiul and polished agates. Lots of spectacular colors — purples and crimson and lavenders. Their shiny surfaces gleamed in the store’s special lighting . I was absorbed in these agates, not knowing too much about them, but intrigued.
Then, I saw what I later discovered were geodes. Ordinary round rocks, incredibly hard, but cut in two and hollow with crystals inside. After the initial shock of seeing something so incredibly beautiful and strange, and which triggered long-ago memories of looking at these types of rocks when I was a child, I knew that one of them would be coming home with me that night.
Sure enough. There is was. It was different from the others. I peered into the narrow opening and there beheld a miniature cavern, the roof and sides of which were covered with the most delicate and sparkling crystals. They glittered in the light when I later used my flashlight to illumine the interior.
My nephew and the others were not too impressed with my purchase. Or they didn’t seem to be anyway.
“It’s a magic cave. It opens into another world,” I said to the 9-year-old boy, wondering what his reaction to my adult foolishness would be.
“Yeah, right,” he replied.
“Well, think what you want,” I said to myself, amused that one so young would not appreciate what I had just said and discovered.
But what on earth was I talking about? It’s not such a mystery, is it? All we have to do is look at something we’ve seen before and never thought too much about, and then examine it closely many years later in a rock shop, and discover to our delight and fascination, it does indeed become a portal for the imagination, a glimpse into another world, another reality that exists beyond the hard, material reality of the hardest rock crystals, which in reality harbor infinite space.
It’s 4 am as I write this, and I am staring at the opening to my geode’s little cavern. Where is my flashlight and magnifying glass? I think I’ll step inside my crystal cave tonight and see what happens.
Update 12/11/25:
* The rock shop is long gone.
- My present-day engineer-educated nephew, now 33, would probably say I still have rocks in my head, but so be it. I’m sure he has a vivid imagination action. After all, he started a band in high school and wrote some phenomenal songs. I only wish I had a more capacious imagination, but what I have is good enough until I figure out how to actually enter and journey through a crystal cave.
This is the geode. I’ve held on to it for 23 years. Another of my enduring, keepsake artifacts.
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