PYRITE

Pyrite -- cheerful and warm, I keep a piece on my desk and pick it up or look at it often. My friend Zenaida, who teaches classes at Paxton Gate in San Francisco, gave me the piece pictured here. Recently I went to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History where visitors are encouraged to touch the near boulder of pyrite on display, which seems to have become buffed along the top from people laying their hands on it, like some kind of healing stone. While there, an elderly woman and I chatted briefly and agreed, pyrite's got it.