Diamond Polish Stage Achieves Optical Clarity; Owner Immediately Loses Interest in Specimen

"I'm done with it," Renata Quill said, and set the quartz on the felt tray under the club's overhead lamp, where the light went clean through it for the first time in nine weeks.

Thirty-six hours earlier the same stone had been opaque with scratches. The diamond stage, 3,000 mesh on a leather lap, took the last of them off, and with them went the reason anyone had cared. Under clarity, the inclusions surfaced: two healed fractures and a thread of something dark that Renata had, until that moment, described as character.

"There's a flaw in it," she said.

"There's always been a flaw in it," said Otis Vale, standards board. "You just couldn't see it until you ruined the surface."

Renata had the coarse-grit barrel loaded before the felt tray was back on the shelf: eight pieces of ordinary roadbed chert, the 60/90 silicon carbide and a tablespoon of water. The polished quartz went to the display case, then, three days later, to the drawer under the case, where it joined the specimen labels and a dead flashlight.

Inez Fenn, who keeps the monthly log, recorded the transaction under Lapidary Club Minutes and then paused over the column. The club's records show completions going back eleven years: pieces taken to final polish, dated, initialled, shelved. What they do not show is a rate for what happened next.

"Nobody's ever logged what people do with a finished stone," she told me. "We only log the finishing."

Otis Vale logged it anyway, in a memorandum, defining "completion" as the point at which the operator declares the specimen ready for display and before the operator declares the specimen no longer interesting. The memorandum runs four paragraphs and does not resolve anything, which Otis considers the mark of a durable standard.

At the meeting, Harold Loomis was asked why his housemate's tumbler runs more nights than hers. "Because she likes the noise of the early stages," he said. "The last stage is quiet. Quiet is when she goes looking for the next one." Harold, who has not joined the club, is the person the group quotes when someone invokes common sense, which draws from the standards desk the citation that common sense is not a grit stage and the sequence is coarse 60/90, medium 220, pre-polish 500, then diamond, in that order, for quartz at 7 on the Mohs scale.

Renata retrieved the stone on a Thursday. She held it against the window, turned it until the dark thread caught the light, and announced she had misjudged the fracture entirely, it was a bit, not a flaw, and it meant the piece had a history.

"It's the same rock," Harold said.

"It's a different rock," Renata said. "The other one was finished."

It went back in the case, face up, and the chert is still turning. Renata has asked Inez to keep a new column, tracking the specimens an owner has handled twice.