RIVER CITY JOURNAL: A THING OF BEAUTY FROM A ROCK PILE -- IN THE NICK OF TIME

The painter, who was putting a fresh coat of white latex on the doors of our house, made the mistake of mentioning the rocks piled on our patio.

I don't think there's anything that makes a house look tidy and trim like a good coat of paint on the most obvious parts. The g arage door is especially prominent, and its gleaming white surface is refreshing and ... well, clean.

My wife has long waged battle with architects who insist on putting two-car or even three-car garages on the front of otherwise good-looking houses.

All those double-wide doors, my wife says, make it look like we live in our garages.

Most of us don't live in our garages, of course, so why do we advertise them so prominently?

The answer is simple: Our most prized material possessions live in our garages.

But I don't want to talk about cars.

I like to talk about rocks.

Not that I know very much about the rock pile on our patio. I know there's a good-sized chunk of petrified wood there. And some thunderballs from Wyoming. And some flat rocks from fast-flowing streams in Colorado and Idaho and Oregon and Utah states that seem particularly suited for producing smooth flat rocks. And over there are some granite boulders that I'm told were brought from Canada to Northwest Missouri by glaciers. And, of course, there are any number of quartz-bedecked rocks mostly from the Ozarks, where anything that shines has high collector value.

But the piece de resistance in our rock pile is the large, elongated thunderball with a hole on top. The rock has a hole on the bottom too and some hollow spaces in between.

A couple of years ago, I arranged all the rocks around a small, irregular container that would hold water. I poked a piece of plastic pipe up through the big thunderball and put a submersible water pump under the rock. I perched the rock on the edge of my arrangement so water could artfully stream into the liquid pool below, making a splashing sound that would soothe our frayed nerves.

All went as planned -- which surprised the heck out of me.

With a switch inside the garage, I could create an instant fountain. What noble creatures we humans are. We don't drink the water from the fountain. We don't use the water to grow food. The water serves no useful purpose whatsoever except to make us feel good. That's what sets us humans apart from warthogs and mules: We spend enormous amounts of time and money to create things just because we can.

While the effect of my fountain neared all my expectations, it was, in fact, too much. Too much water. Too much splash. Too much ... .

Well, to be perfectly honest, the overall effect was of a dog next to a fire hydrant. Only bigger. Like a horse if horses used fire hydrants. I think you get my drift.

To clinch the whole thing, the water became a hotbed of algae, which, of course, turned the water green and ... .

Folks, I'm going to let you form your own mental picture of what my fountain had turned into. Let's just say "bladder infection" keeps flashing through my mind.

Early this spring, my wife and I were shopping when we saw a display of fountains. The one that made us stop was a simple arrangement of fake rocks topped by a round fake rock with water gurgling -- not streaming -- out of a hole and running off the sides into a small fake-rock pool.

We gave some serious thought to purchasing the fountain, but we didn't.

The very next Saturday, I was cleaning the leaves and other windblown debris from my patio fountain when a stroke of artistic genius struck. With a few adjustments and repositioning of rocks, I soon had a gurgling fountain bubbling up from the hole in the top of the big thunderball.

Like I told George, the painter: I don't have very many creative success stories, so I sure wanted him to see my fountain.

As water bounced up from the rock and shimmied down its sides, I told George the stories of our rocks, which we have gathered from every corner of the continent and at least two foreign countries.

I observed that collecting rocks is usually an inexpensive way to memorialize a special trip. Of course, I had to tell him about the 250-pound cross-section of a petrified tree our older son purchased on our only family vacation in the great Southwest. Then we went around the house to see the post rock younger son lugged from treeless Lincoln County in Kansas.

And ... . Well, you see what happens when someone asks about that pile of rocks.

I must say, talking about the rocks is much more fun when you don't have green water splashing all over your shoes.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.