A Random Memory

Today, I told my kids about an activity we loved during recess in elementary school in the 1970s.   The school had some stone and concrete walls outside, along the playground, stairs, and ramps.  The large stones embedded in the concrete were sandstone, a pretty soft sedimentary stone.  When you rub a sandstone rock with another stone, of sandstone or other material, it wears it away and produces fine rock dust.   Everyday at recess, a lot of the boys would select a good rubbing stone and get to work.  We found the dust pleasing to touch and to make little piles of.  We also enjoyed producing depressions and holes several inches deep in the stones embedded in the walls.  It was a tactile pleasure mostly.  It would get a little competitive to see who could produce the deepest hole or the biggest pile of rock dust.  I guess I might question my sanity if the activity hadn't been shared with many of my friends.  Well, we were crazy with youth I suppose.  What all this boils down to is that, when I tell my children we didn't used to have iPods and Gameboys and Nintendos, and they say "Wow.  What the heck did you do for entertainment?", I can literally say "we sat around and rubbed two rocks together."