![]() Stuffed brown leather chairs and creepy taxidermy, a hand-carved Anubis, and a human skeleton in a ball cap. Like a kid's kingdom 500-year-old pirate pistols and Revolutionary War muskets, framed strands of George Washington's hair, and a collection of penises of marble and wood. There's all manner of decaying archeological vestiges of family life and natural history in his house. This is more about believing, the searching, the discovering. That whole idea of God, gold and glory from the age of explorers was a lie, if you think about it. Like reading stories as a kid about explorers searching for Mayan gold that didn't exist. What's real, what's fake is hardly the point. There's a baby mummy in another room, in an antiquated stroller. He taught us how to read hieroglyphics, but I don't remember much anymore. My brother and I packed him up in our Rambler station wagon and here he is. ![]() "I inherited him from an Egyptologist I'd first met when I was a teenager. Ron Ratkevich and the living-room Pharaoh. He gave me Tourmaline crystals for Christmas." ![]() Shelly laughs, "I picked up a dead horned toad and brought him home.” She nods to Ron, and adds, “and he was so happy. Shelly's frank and funny and finishes his sentences. He's two years Ron's senior, and co-owns the shop. His son lives nearby, works in law enforcement. We're inside Ron's home, which he shares with his second wife, Sherry, who works for the Keefe Group, selling concessions in prisons. He's the kind of guy who would build an archeological site on his own property, which he is doing, by the way. Round specs, some girth and posture formed from years of fossil digging and squinting hunched over at minerals and the like. Kristofferson could play him sweetness opposes a surly exterior. In some cultures, he points out, the image of a penis is revered. But his inner-kid harbors mad fascinations for dinosaur bones, Arizona minerals, desert landscapes, Egyptian mummies, Native American folklore and even antiquated phallic apparatuses. I made him into a night light." The mummy's from the New Kingdom of Egypt, he tells me, an actual Pharaoh. "I watch TV next to a pharaoh," Ron says. You can put the story together with so few pieces to the story." "When I'm sitting on an archaeological site, I can hear the kids playing, smell the food cooking, hear the drums," he says. It's also about how 69-year-old Ron, who's a paleontologist, intuits truth. It starts with fascination, and then collecting, and then storytelling. The accumulations here and the actions that led to those accumulations, are the same. It's too haphazard, too untidy and irrational to be museum or university curated. Giant trilobite fossils, raptor limbs, and all manner of animal and human skulls, it goes on. Fossil limestones from North Africa and beyond, and minerals and rocks and precious stones from every Arizona mine and town you've ever heard of. Oyster fossils, dinosaur teeth, mammoth skin, ancient bronze and carved figures from Egypt and the world. The interior features the usual and unusual medley of gem, mineral and fossil ephemera, thousands of pieces-spangled geodes and strange aquatic formations. It's part museum, part relic, surrounded by piles of rocks and geodes and petrified wood, out on Kinney Road between Old Tucson and Ajo Way, an area no yet ruined by chicken-wire-and-spit development. (Well, it was once gussied up for the '84 Kris Kristofferson flick Flashpoint, a story that involved a jeep found in the desert filled with cash and a link to the JFK assignation. Could be a saloon from the Old Tucson set. It's too familiar to the Sonoran Desert, especially if you grew up here-a sun-bleached wooden façade, rocks and nostalgia, in forests of Palo Verde and ocotillo. There's likely no place on earth where it could exist except in the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. ![]() In small ways, The Tucson Mineral & Gem World really is like that. The deaths, the lives, the joys and the history of the hatreds, and the haunts. The mind would reel as a kid on a bike: All these things must live and breathe in the minerals and rocks and bones, from the borderlands, from the bloody slag heaps of copper mines. He'd share Native American fables and mourn all the River Yumans, Yavapais and Apaches murdered by Euro-Americans. Spinning yarns of the Mexican ghosts of the old Altar mine, and La Llorona and all those drowned children in the Santa Cruz River. I'd imagine some grizzled barker inside this place, showing the old Sonoran Desert-its florae and fauna, angry vinegaroons and alien rock sculptures. It'd spark in my gut like billboards for The Thing would from the backseat of our family VW van, as we rolled down I-10, heading on a cross-country drive with my siblings and pop. ![]() I used to pedal my racing bike past this same shop when I was a teenager. ![]()
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