THE CRYSTAL

I gave my daughter a cut-crystal orb. I don’t know when, years ago, I think, but it showed up on the kitchen counter not long ago and I recognized it. Your daughter doesn’t want it any more, I was told, and it turned out that was true: “I can keep it if you want,” she said. “I just have no use for it.”

Most of the things I consider precious have no use, exactly. Favourite paintings, some by friends and some from our years in Toronto when I thought I had a good eye, when I thought I was both investing and supporting. Some rocks from the beach at Brighton, soft-edged bits of flint (the sky that day full of clouds that were piled up like steam). A few little-used fountain pens. A signed green vinyl 45 of the 1979 Police single, Message In A Bottle.

So I was, and I remain, a bit mystified. I must have done something to piss her off, that’s my thought, and this return-to-sender moment was the price. Or maybe she just has a purer relationship with the world, and truly has no need of all the “stuff” that takes up space in my head and on my desk. She is more practical than I am, I know that already, and also more rational, smarter.

I bought it for her because if you find the perfect angle, light passes right through the faceted sphere. You can see clearly, despite all the complications and the hard-to-fathom angles involved. In its very minor way it was meant to suggest that persistence might bring clarity. That it’s okay to be distracted by the kaleidoscopic refractions and distractions, but what matters and what is true is still there, if only you are able to alter your angle of incidence, your perspective, by just a hair. Plus it catches the sun nicely if you sit in front of a window, and projects a slice of rainbow onto any nearby wall.

I brought it to my office and can see it from here, where I write. It was maybe ten bucks in a downtown store that bought it for five. I added some emotional equity when I gave it away, and it accumulated a surprising amount more when it came back to me, like a marble that skids away and then returns with wicked backspin.