Historical Stuff - rock collecting

Papa was obsessed with rock collecting. Whenever he came home from a walk, his pockets were sure to have some rocks in them. Some days his pockets were so full of rocks that suspenders would have helped keep his trousers up.

One day while we were walking from the car to the mall, we passed a half ton truck with rocks in the back. He immediately went to take some and I cautioned him that this would not be a good idea. It was difficult for him to understand why he couldn't take some of these rocks.

We kept a bucket or wooden flower pot near the front door and usually he would empty his pockets there. Sometimes the rocks came in the house and we often found little piles of them in various places. Occasionally he would show one of them to us as being rather special in either color, shape, or peculiar markings.

Usually the rocks were small in size but occasionally some rather large ones found their way to our house. It didn't take long before we needed to do something with all these rocks. Sometimes we would return them to an alleyway near our home from whence they first came, after he had gone to bed. We always left a few in the container knowing that he likely would not remember it had been full the day before.

During the summer of 2007, Stan transformed our back yard to accommodate his model train. As part of the 'new' look, he created a dry creek bed that utilized many of the rocks Papa had collected over the years and mentioned it many times to him, "these are the rocks you have collected!" We are unsure how much of it made any sense to him. He did like Stan's trains and often thrilled to tell others that he had given Stan his first train set when he was a child and "he is still playing with trains."