Tucson Gem and Mineral Show… again

My recent trip to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show with my daughter last week, prompted me to come home and hunt up the above photo from a previous trip to one of the worlds most amazing gem and mineral shows. I’m not quite sure if its 1991 or 1992. I went to work in a gemstone booth of a friend from GIA, (Gemological Institute of America) who’s family was in the jewelry business. I was living in Boston at the time. I was working at Neiman Marcus, with a side hustle of selling loose sapphires to small jewelers in New England. The guy in the photo, Mark Catanzaro, was my GIA classmate (1990) and the supplier of the sapphires I was peddling. I was 24 years old.

It’s funny how time flies and how your experiences meld together to form your thoughts and impressions and snap judgements.

I actually love this current time of life. Traveling with my daughter. Running my own business. I like being on the buying side too. Thinking of my customers, and their tastes and how my purchases will look and sell in my little back alley retail store next to Arrange’s classy collections of French influenced housewares. I’ll take the gray in my hair, and the random memories, and revel in a career that has twisted and branched and expanded and simplified, but somehow always comes back to life in Central Oregon surrounded by nature and rocks and the feeling of home.