What beats a royal flush?

A Peridot, of course!

First of all, you must pronounce the name of my birth month gemstone correctly to get the full import. It is pronounced thusly: pair-a-doe (a deer, a female deer), or pair-a-dough (as in the bread it will take to buy one). You would never want to be so gauche as to pronounce it pair-a-dot, as this will confirm your general lack of sophistication or your general distaste for the French language.

So, let’s mentally say it together…Peridot. See, you got it!

I don’t bring the gemstone up because I’m bucking for a birthday gift. As an aside, however, for my friend Robin: you only have 66 shopping days left to get me something! We’ll talk about pseudo-birthdays later…

I bring up my gemstone because I recently learned on the Science Channel that it is the only gem that has ever arrived on terra firm via a Pallisite, or for you non-science funky folks, a stony-iron meteorite.

Another aside: my good friend, Kathleen, said she was aware of this factoid and reminded me – appropriately so – that her birth month gemstone, the diamond, enjoys the status of being the only precious gem crushed from coal into its brilliant faceted state by Superman. I always knew she and I had an interesting cosmic connection!

In 1749, a meteorite landed in a desolate area of Siberia. Yet another connection, as my mother is Russian. The meteorite was peppered with luscious Peridot crystals large enough to be set into jewelry. Interestingly, I can remember my mother talking to me about what an unusual birth stone I had when I was in my single digits. Russians are notorious for weaving the most wonderful stories – elements of truth, and elements of the imagined – to teach us life lessons. I wish I had paid this particular story a little more attention, as there was more than a grain of truth to what she was telling me.

I’ve also found out that the Egyptians, whose jewelry making and glass shaping skills are still noted for their other-worldly craftsmanship, were fans of the Peridot and worked the stones as early as 1500 BC. Cleopatra was a devotee of the Peridot.  The Egyptians' arch-enemies, the Romans, were no less enthralled with the stone they referred to as the “evening emerald.” They called it thusly because the stone’s color didn’t darken at night and remained visible in lamplight. By any account, the ultimate romantic mood ring thing…

Eventually, during the 20th century, a Peridot from outer space was gem cut and faceted.

I also find it interesting that the Peridot is a volcanic stone, and one that cools within the Earth’s mantle before it is ejected in magma to form mountain ranges and other land masses. The fact that something could survive the intense heat and pressure of our planet’s Vulcan gyrations is way too cool.

I don’t think my parents could have picked a better birth stone for me if they’d tried. It’s almost as though the gem encompasses, encases so much of my personality. And it’s pretty weird that green has always been my favorite color. FYI: my eyes happen to be green.

So, I have 66 days to strike out and seek a hunk of geological space junk. I doubt I’ll be able to afford the ET version of the rock in question, but that fact can be overlooked. I’ll be happy with some cool green settled into a nice sterling set.

Vanna spins the karmic wheel of fortune

Oh, my. Look at the time. Or at least today’s date. I have been so wrapped up in work that a few weeks snuck up me and pulled the wool over my eyes. That’s a feat, considering I’m allergic to wool. But I did notice my right eye was a little touchy and swollen yesterday.

I have another inspiration from work and interviews for articles. As the saying goes, what goes around will keep going around until something interesting comes around. And it did a few weeks ago. I was interviewing Janie Hibler, award-winning cookbook author, about “The Berry Bible.” The conversation was a nice and smooth one, and had a good personal feel to it.

Toward the end, we were set to wrap things up. And that’s when all karmic hell broke loose in a mad spin. When you write for a newspaper, you need to get all those essential nuts and bolts in place: who, what when, where, why…and sometimes why not. So, in keeping with time-honored journalistic tradition, I asked Janie if she was a native of Oregon. Several days before the interview, I took a quick gander at her website and had made a mental note – which I prompted unnoted – that she grew up in Arcata, CA. As soon as the word “Oregon” spilled out of my mouth, I prepared to insert my left foot and acknowledged that I recalled she was from Arcata. 

Well, the floodgates opened. Turns out I spent several years in Arcata myself, and by our mutual recollections, she and I did time at that wonderful place together. My dad was a professor at Humboldt State College, today a university, and I mentioned that our family lived in Sunny Brae, still a subdivision even as we figuratively speak. I attended Sunny Brae Elementary, still an institution on the higher education food chain. Turns out her family lived in Jacoby Creek. That made me break out laughing as I recalled a little saying from my elementary school days: “Yay, yah Sunny Brae. Squeak, squeak Jacoby Creek.” Pretty silly sounding today to think that elementary schools already had rivalries set up.

I was always something of a rebel. When I was in the fourth grade, at my dad’s insistence, I turned our school band into an orchestra by playing a violin. That phase only lasted one year. I turned my attention to the piano.

If someone asked me where the happiest days of my childhood occurred, I wouldn’t even hesitate to answer: Arcata. We lived right across the street from a mighty redwood forest, and even as a kid I wandered off into the deep, dark woods to seek out some solitude. Back in my tree-climbing days, I just shimmied up the redwoods, sat on a branch and bounced. Pretty low-tech fun, to be sure.

The trees were ancient, the branches were – luckily -- sturdy, caring not a whit about the intruder who was raising such a ruckus. I recall one day going so deep into the woods that I lost track of time. This is a significant problem when one is surrounded by dark timber, and daylight is failing. I remember being scared to death I would never find my way out. Fortunately – and despite some pretty serious juvenile heart palpitations – I got out just as the proverbial night was falling.

I never told my parents about this. They would have killed me.

Our family also spent countless hours at Patrick’s Point, today a state park. It was a place to have some pretty unorganized, impromptu fun in those days, skittering down a path and finally arriving on the pebble laden beach. We collected driftwood and agates like they were going out of style. In fact, I actually am still in possession of some of that driftwood. It’s probably older than I am, although I continue to wear down and the wood is in a state of arrest. I’m just waiting for the right moment and project to let it float through my memory once again. There were also a multitude of Japanese fishing floats to be found, none of which followed me along to adulthood except in my mind.

It was a joyous and miraculous time to be a kid. It left a mark on me. To this day, I still have a necklace with an abalone shell pendant on it. That came to me in Arcata 53 years ago, and I still love it. The pendant is an elongated diamond shape, and interestingly I acquired a pair of abalone shell earrings here in the mountains of Colorado a number of years ago that have a cutout nearly the size of the pendant. Two things, in two spaces of time, joined at the hip.

As John Fogarty says, big wheel keeps on turnin…

So here I am, many years into the future, moving that karmic wheel back a few notches. As fate has it, there are a few Arcata ex-pats living in Portland, an area I visit regularly for business. We have talked about getting together, which is really going to be a riot when it actually happens.

I suspect it’s going to be a little scary, too, as we dredge up the memories of times in Humboldt Bay that would bring us together all these years later. But as I told Janie in an email, at least I know we didn’t date the same guys!