This year, we
missed spring training. Instead, we went
to the gem show. Rather than the Phoenix-Scottsdale
area, we went to Tucson.
I’m not sure how
it all began, but I think it was Aunt Jeri’s visit to Colorado last
summer. She must have let it slip that
Tucson was a hotbed for gemmary come the end of January and the beginning of
February. Nothing for it, but we must
go.
Go we did. Well, why not? What’s going down in Colorado the last week
of January? Mostly the temperature. Tucson offered some warmer weather. It made good on the offer, the temperature
being in the mid-seventies during our stay.
By contrast, when we stepped off the plane in Denver upon our return, we
immediately saw our exhaled breath. The mercury
said 27 degrees.
The gem show
apparently runs for two weeks. Two hours
was a plenty for me. The girls made two
days of it. One of Jeri’s friends had a
sales tax license, which entitled her and her guests to attend the wholesale
venue for dealers, jewelers, and such.
They spent five hours there and came home exhausted.
The wholesalers
dealt in bulk. You couldn’t just buy one
rock or one pearl or whatever. You had
to take stuff in bigger lots, like going to Sam’s Club instead of Safeway. Bob and I had a leisurely lunch at a favorite
local pub. Two other “gem-widowers” dined
with us. We were quite content with our
lot in life, especially when we got the blow-by-blow account of the day in the
wholesale mart.
The following
morning found us taking a jaunt into the desert. We had only to walk out of the R-V Park and
we were in the desert.
We were about a
week ahead of the spring green up. It
had rained quite a lot two weeks before we got there, but the greenery that
sometimes covers the desert floor was only just beginning to emerge. Some things were beginning to bloom.
It was a
pleasant walk. To appreciate it, all you
had to do was think about what it would be like taking a walk back in Colorado.
I had put it off
as long as I could. Attending the gem
show was something I had to do so I could say I had done it. We loaded up and headed downtown. Our goal was a sports stadium, maybe a former
home of some cactus league spring training facility.
The gem show was
set up in the parking lot. There were
huge tents and smaller tents. There were
row after row of pop up type sunshades protecting vendors of all kinds.
I saw all kinds
of rocks. I saw rocks I never knew even
existed. There were also jewelers
hawking their handiwork.
Among the vendors, there was one guy running a forklift. Some of the rocks were that big, crystal geodes
and the like, that it would take a forklift to move them. One vendor told us, when we asked, that many
of the geodes were from foreign countries and were quite expensive to
ship. If the thing doesn’t sell, they
rent storage and keep it in Tucson until next year.
Another fellow
had a golf cart for hire. He would take
you and your merchandise to the parking lot.
The real shoppers had wheeled luggage like you see in the airport
to carry their loot.
We were there
for two to three hours. We barely
scratched the surface of what there was to see. There were seventeen or eighteen similar
venues all around Tucson. I visited one
of them.
Jeri summed it up
best. She said, “Well, I can cross that
one off my bucket list—even if it never was on my bucket list in the first
place.” Ditto.
Perhaps the real
gem came when we got home. It was cold,
drizzly-icy. We rode the shuttle to the
parking lot on the west side of Tower Road.
I started scraping ice off the car windows. The Goodwife said I’d better let her do it
since she had on her winter coat and I only had on two light jackets.
We were four or
five miles down the road when she said, “Darn!
I lost an earring.” She wanted to
go right back to the parking lot to look for it. I said we wouldn’t even be able to find where
we parked the car.
She called the
parking lot, the phone number on our parking receipt. Together, we figured out the bus we had
ridden on. The bus driver remembered us
and where we parked. Another employee
went to the spot—and found the earring.
By then, we were
eight or ten miles down the road, but we turned around and went back, and sure
enough, there was the missing earring.
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