When my wife and her two brothers were young, they thought the magic stones came up thirsty, searching raindrops.

These were not stupid children, although one of them was dimwitted enough to marry me. As a fine citizen journalist, let me describe the stones. They were sometimes square but more often slightly rectangular, incised -- ribbed -- with smaller rectangles. They looked a lot like some Aztec shaman had conjured them, and they seemed to rise in the winter rains.

They lived way out in the middle of no fucking where, a mile from a hard road. 'Hard road' is what we hicks use in place of 'paved.' In the same sense we say 'supper' rather than 'dinner.' Dinner is lunch and supper's the last meal of the day. This was long ago, I could still hear and we had never met.

My in-laws -- we have a very tentative relationship given my taste for flesh on the side, opiates and mayhem in general -- probably loved a cloudy day in December. They could probably please one another, because the three kids would be itching to go fetch the magic stones. North Carolina turns into Seattle in the winter; grey days follow grey days and rain falls on fallen rain.

I guess the magic stones did their magic, because those three kids became: a clinical pyschologist, a rocket scientist, a mechanical engineer. Wait: One is gay, one's married to the Mexican daughter of an Amtrak train porter and the engineer is married to a reprobate named me. Batting a thousand, I'd say.

But those magic stones.

The kids had to be grown before they realized that the winter rains only moved dirt around and allowed them to see more clearly what they were walking on. One Christmas, my wife was delighted, because she had scientific evidence of the nature of the magic stones. They were sedimetary and rather recent, probably Upper Paleolithic. They were from the Churchland platon along the Yadkin River near a spot called Horseshoe Neck in North Carolina. And she had formal documents of proof of the magic stones and their origin!

Her parents were dazzled by her brilliance. How on earth did she discover this?

"Oh, Guy just sent one of them to a geologist friend of his to be analized."
The ensuing silence was nice, but not as nice as the sighs afterward.

Even the deaf can hear smiles fading.