Rock Therapy

It was the summer before second grade and we were living at the Jersey Shore. My mother painted seascapes in a men’s dress shirts and rolled up jeans. My father worked at the Silica Sand Company; where giant mounds of sand turned into wall-sized sheets of clear glass. My sister played jacks with Trudy Golday and Susan Pettibone. I spent most of my time alone, controlling the weather.

I kept small rocks in my mother's old prescription bottles and lined them up in the narrow wedge between my bottom bunk and the wall. There were seven bottles of varying sizes, and forty-nine stones. These could summon the sun, stop the rain, and generally keep the beach from blowing away. I would, as magic law required, touch the top of each bottle before I went to sleep, and do the same thing right when I woke up every morning. I never forgot.

Every few days I would take the stones out to our gravel driveway for cleaning, rearranging and evaluation. Often the odd few had lost their power, and would be thrown into the bay and replaced.

Early one afternoon, a real estate agent came to speak with my mother about renting out our house for the winter. I was in the driveway looking for new stones. I held them in the folded bottom half of my t-shirt, belly exposed, deeply concentrating. The agent was pale and pear-shaped -- covered in a thin layer of sweat. He looked as though he had recently been boiled. Within moments of getting out of his car he was less than half an inch from my face, shouting, "Oh! I see we have a little rock collector here!"

I was thunderstruck. Breathless. I couldn't think of what to say and finally whispered, "I do not collect rocks." Those were the last words I spoke for the next 24 hours. I gathered my prescription bottles and buried them behind our house. I locked the door to my room and refused move from my bed. That night my uncle and cousins came for dinner. Each in their turn: Aunt Emma, Uncle Jimmy, Cynthia, Georgia, Little Jimmy, my parents, my sister, came upstairs one at a time. Each like a horse whisperer with a feral mare; convinced they could pry me from my misery and my bed. All failed. No one, not even my famously intuitive mother, could figure out what had made me so upset. Even I didn't know.

I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I thought I was very special - an alchemist, a seer, marked by God to help out with the weather - but in fact the rest of the world just saw a kid collecting rocks. The shame was new, overwhelming, and unconquerable. I wanted to go downstairs for spaghetti and meatballs, but the longer I stayed in my room the more disconnected I felt from this world that had rejected me.

That is a solar plexus memory. The feeling, however, has grown familiar. I feel a spasm of that shame every time I hear the words Mood Disorder. I don't believe the fiction that we're all a bunch of geniuses with too much brainpower to hold in one skull, but I believe we're engaged in a struggle with more heft and rigor than the word "mood" can possibly describe. Disorder? Okay, I've learned to live with that one. When I'm walking through the West Village in my pajamas and talking to strangers about how atoms travel, we can safely say something's "out of order." But is it that I'm not in the mood to wear street clothes and shoes? This from dictonary.com:

mood
–noun
1. a state or quality of feeling at a particular time: What's the boss' mood today?
2. a distinctive emotional quality or character: The mood of the music was almost funereal.
3. a prevailing emotional tone or general attitude: the country's mood.
4. a frame of mind disposed or receptive, as to some activity or thing: I'm not in the mood to see a movie.
5. a state of sullenness, gloom, or bad temper.


It puts me in a bad mood, reading those definitions. I'll tell you a few things about mood: The boss is in the mood to talk to God. The mood of the music was almost funereal but she couldn't hear it because she couldn't get out of bed. The country's mood is uncertain, but the country is nodding and smiling and serving up meds. I'm not in the mood to see a movie, or to watch Oprah squint with pity at the bipolar travails of Sinead O'Connor. I am sullen, gloomy, and in a bad temper. But I do not collect rocks.

And tomorrow's going to be partly sunny.