I’m contemplating permanence because the amount and the nature of loss we experience in life is settling in with the weight of a wisdom. There’s an awful lot of it. It’s not just the people you knew or loved or who loved and raised you, but the people you never got to know (..."let me feel the lack."), the ones only your body claimed, and the parts of yourself you left behind in need. Or it’s the material ones, the elusive win, the broken tea-pot, the left-behind any-item.

Permanence is in the claiming, by how close we allow a thing to the heart.

Mary’s grandpa’s memorial was a place to grieve. I’m grieving is what I think. It feels like that kind of pain — like loss. Maybe. What else feels like this? Just grieving, it feels like, for this loss and some of my own — some of these are surprises in new gains, where loss is in the letting go of some old punitive belief.

All that and memories of Mary’s grandpa brought to mind something Andy said about his sister’s sudden marriage. He said he thought they decided to do it now to acknowledge the permanence they do have in the tenuousness engendered by the September 11 attacks.

At the memorial, Mary entreated us to select a polished rock from a basket by the door. They were the collection her grandpa had polished over the years; it was a hobby he enjoyed and something of his endeared to her. She wanted us to have a part of that. I took three: one round and red like Mars; another long and slender, with a translucency that made it look like smoke caught in glass; the last was a spherical agglomeration of the two.

As I sifted through the rocks in the basket, Mary’s uncle approached and told me his father had collected them during his many travels. He said, "There’s some of that strange rock from Arizona and the like, and some from the mountains — from all over — represented here."

I put the three I picked on the vanity table next to the strange little shell from that first trip to Port Townsend and that other little shell from the long hike toward Point of Arches, next to the pictures of all of us hiking, of Andrew and me, and that precious one of my grandma when she was twenty-three. I like that when I look at them, I have no idea where those rocks came from, just that they’ve always been.