Display Case Taxonomy Reorganized to Prioritize Objects That Are 'Just Really Pretty to Hold'

"Nobody is moving the banded agate," Dolores Wyeth said, with her hand flat on the shelf it has occupied since 2011. "My thumb knows where it is in the dark. That is provenance too."

Item: the Trophy Case Re-Sort, tabled at the March meeting of the Ridgeline Rock & Lapidary Club, carried at the April meeting over one abstention. Cost: four hours of volunteer labor, one roll of painter's tape, and the retirement of the club's hand-typed classification cards, which had sorted the case by hardness, habit, and county since 1998, on a system borrowed from Otis Vale's standards board. Promise: a case that reflects what members actually do with specimens. Result: a shelf labeled, in Inez Fenn's handwriting, "keep, holds nice."

The dispute began, as these do, with a toothpick. Leonard Ash had been rotating a piece of petrified wood during the business portion and was asked twice to set it down. He set it down on the wrong shelf. The re-sort then found its floor argument: if a specimen can be misplaced by a man holding it against instructions, the taxonomy was describing the case and not the collection.

Inez recorded the sentence that changed the room. "We have been sorting these for twenty years," she said, "and not one of the cards has ever mentioned that the Siderite is the only thing here anyone reaches for."

Mr. Vale, present as a guest, ruled the motion in order and then ruled, twice, that it was not. His written objection reads in full: "A standard that cannot be audited is a preference." The objection is filed with the minutes as Item 9b, where it will be quoted annually.

Top shelf: objects that are, in the committee's phrasing, just really pretty to hold. Second shelf: objects that are pretty to hold but require explanation. Third shelf: the scientifically interesting, which several members agreed were interesting in the way a distant cousin is interesting. Fourth shelf: the labeled specimens nobody has argued about since the cards were typed, kept out of politeness.

The cards are in a shoebox under the case. The specimen labels stay face-up, so the case now explains two systems at once: what a thing is, and why it stayed. Dolores's agate holds its old position and a new index card reading only "D.W." Leonard's petrified wood went to the second shelf, where it is explained constantly.

Item: cost of the re-sort, four hours and one friendship. Result: the club's membership chairman has begun quietly moving specimens from the fourth shelf to his coat pocket, on the stated grounds that a shelf is a worse place for something to be than a coat.

Which leaves one specimen unaccounted for. It is not in the case. It is a plain piece of quartz, milky, unlabelled, of no county, kept in the chairman's jacket pocket because it is pleasant to hold, and it has no card, no shelf, and no argument against it.