Cup XXXVI: Stories in Stone, Told by the Unlucky

Tea: Earl Grey Smokey

Music: Endusk, "Moth" and "Four"

Time: Night, and ages ago

Today, while watching a frightened black Labrador puppy being cajoled into a new -- and better -- life, I broke off a bit of yellow-gray rock.

It is full of fossils -- delicate ridged shells, narrower than the nail of one of my little toes. This part of the world is haunted by the stone ghosts -- the tiny and the titanic -- of an ancient sea.

I wasn't here the day this particular fossil bed was laid down. But most likely, something happened to flood the seafloor with mud, burying everything in its path. Over time, rock replaced bone and shell and exoskeleton.

We learn about the life of the past from the lives lost by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A chunk of the universe falls to Earth, and it's exit dinosaurs, stage left. A volcano in Idaho lets go, and a herd of rhinoceroses in Nebraska never knows what hit it. A sabre-toothed cat moves in on a mastodon, stuck in a sticky black trap, and both of them sink out of sight.

Like the gastropods and gorgosaurs, the tiny horses and giant beavers, none of us -- save, perhaps, those whose ends come at their own hands or at the state's -- knows the day or hour of our personal extinction events. The difference is that we know it will come.

This is both a shadow and an advantage. We can live each day in fear that it will be our last, and so not begin anything anew, or live so that if any day were our last, we would have begun something to last beyond ourselves.

My father was fond of a quote attributed to Martin Luther. As he and others have told it, someone asked Luther, "What would you do if you knew the world was going to end tomorrow?"

Luther's reply: "I would plant a tree."

I don't know if I could do that. But I do know that each of us has a chance to do something good and lasting each day. That means me, yeah -- so that if Yellowstone pops tomorrow, I can combine a sense of accomplishment with my futile screaming and running.

Here ends the pontification. Here follows tonight's story:

Sabine Baring-Gould, "H.P."