The thing about the world’s visible gold is that it’s been around for so long, melted down so often and reshaped into something else and then something else again, and again, that we really don’t know if some portion of the bauble we’re wearing wasn’t once worn by King Tut, right? Or Cleopatra. Or Mr. T. Or Marie Antoinette. Or some upwardly-mobile Viking, or Liberace. Fascinating, right?

But why do we give it such value? It’s merely an elemental metal that became a vein or a bunch of nuggets or sandy dust in a river because of some very hot earthly occurrences. (I think.) It’s got to be an awful lot of hard work to hack it from rock or sluice it from a river. And I suppose that even though when found and the gold is pretty pure, someone still has to clean it up because probably very few want a wedding ring with even just a tiny piece of mountain in it.

But it’s metal, for heaven’s sake, just plain old metal. Sure, it’s beautiful and comes in different shades, and it truly is gorgeous when gripping some nice big diamonds or surrounding a bunch of pearls or emeralds and all. And there are rumors that there are great stacks of bars of the stuff representing our paper dollars, somewhere in Kentucky I think, right? And I’ve also heard that we exchange some of those gold bars for oil or countries or other important stuff, just like the savages of yore exchanged trinkets for things like Manhattan Island.

Poor old silver gets short shrift when it comes to precious metal value. I mean it’s just a metal too, but compared to gold, it gets a lot less attention. Everyone lusts after gold, but often only like after silver. Also coming from rock, I guess silver is just as hard to get at, and it really is very pretty when it’s fashioned into baubly stuff. And of course it’s beneficial when it’s shoved into holes in our teeth, and we like it a lot when it comes to our realm in the shape of coins, but it just can’t measure up to its golden cousin when it comes to value. Silver also requires some tedious maintenance. A week before Thanksgiving, no one spends hours polishing up one’s gold flatware the way one has to polish up one’s silver flatware. So I just don’t bother with either. (I don’t actually have an “either.”) I use my every-day for Thanksgiving meals and all other meals, although I will, on special occasions, break out my best every-day “china” which differs from my second-best every-day “china” since my first-best has flowers on it.

We have dear friends who live in Mysore, India, and when they lived in the US, they prepared the most fabulous meals for us which my husband “Mongo” and I would dive into like starving wolves. But their dessert delicacy always made me feel a little weird. It was a delicious, chilled and very sweet fruit concoction with remarkable syrup poured over it. But the guilty part comes when we’d watch our friends lay the thinnest, (I mean thinner than onionskin) strips of pure silver over it all. The taste of ice cold silver is remarkable, like no other. It actually tastes, well, cold and silvery. Like molten icicles, like sugared waterfalls in winter. But you know, I have kind of a problem noshing on something that’s taken 87 trillion years to create, something that had to have a whole lot of explosions and earthquakes and melted rocks and things to turn it into the shiny hard stuff it is today. Ah, but then everything on earth (including even me) has taken at least that long to create so maybe I shouldn’t obsess about it. Still, eating that silver was such an eccentric thing to do. Eerie, like dining on ruby and diamond stew or something. Pretty decadent.

In the 1950s it was utterly forbidden for women to ever wear gold and silver jewelry together on any body part. If we did we were subjected to horrified stares from our peers, looks of such disgust, glares translated to; “how could you? It simply isn’t done! What a gaffe. We are no longer friends.” Those tormenting childhood memories don’t easily fade. Today I still can’t comfortably wear those two metals together. I won’t even wear glasses frames that show even a speck of gold if my earrings are silver. How asinine is that?

One thing I’m wondering about. Lately there have been many ads encouraging us to buy a lot of gold bars and stash them somewhere for emergencies, like for example when the world blows to smithereens because of stupid human dust-ups. I could never quite understand how any of us could get to a demolished supermarket with a chunk of gold in our hands expecting to purchase a loaf of bread when everyone knows that melted down cash registers just cannot swipe gold bars.

I don’t know a heck of a lot about the history of gold, but it intrigues me to know that primitive people knew how to mine it and then could fashion it into beautiful ornamentation to wear around their necks, in, on or from their ears, through their noses, on their heads, fingers, toes; everywhere. Mummies have been found with it in some form or other, buried with or on them so they’d have some currency, clout or glitz in the afterworld. Hey. Maybe they were on to something. If pots of gold can give me standing and power in the Great Beyond, then I’d best get me some, ‘cause I sure don’t have much status on this globe. Got any you can spare?

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.