July 14, 2021

Selections From My Windowsill #4
Bozeman, Montana
2021

A few years back I participated in a art exhibit and artists tour in the Gansu Province of China. One day on the tour we were invited to watch a film about Chinese beef production at a cattle farm followed by some art lab presentations by some of the touring artists. (Don’t ask me why we were on the cattle farm and why they thought showing us a film about their cattle business that we couldn’t understand was a good ide–it’s just one of the mysteries of touring with a Chinese art organization.) The film wasn’t very interesting (for one thing it was all in Chinese with no translation or subtitles) and the art methods presented weren’t in my bailiwick.

Ordinarily in such circumstances I would just tough it out and I tried to do so on that day. But the room was stifling hot so I finally snuck out and sat in the shade on the concrete stoop on a gravel parking lot. While sitting there, I noticed a plethora of these small pebble-sized wish rocks mixed in with the ordinary rocks in the gravel. (A wish rock is a rock with a line circling around it. If you find one, you get a wish granted. Or so the story goes.) So I entertained myself by searching for and collecting some of them. Each time I picked one up my wish was that no one would come out of the building and make me go back into the heat inside. My wish was granted–the only people who came out were just a few other folks looking for an escape from the heat and boredom as well.