“I grew up in a household filled with minerals, books, and records. My father, Peter Megaw, is one of the largest squirrels – in every sense of the word – around, and in my case insanity didn’t skip a generation for I too fell in love with collecting. Collecting is and was something that I did with my Dad. We went to yard sales where I honed my “eye” looking for items that others felt they didn’t want that I could make into my own or another’s treasure. But the most important collecting activity for me in becoming a young mineral collector was when my Dad would come home from a trip to some faraway place and bring back a shoe box or banana box filled with minerals. After dinner, I would sit on the concrete steps leading down to my father’s office and we would unwrap the minerals from their toilet paper cocoons. It was like Christmas, but multiple times a year, and it wasn’t just because of the easily identified similarities to the holiday, but more because it was time that I got to spend with my father. I had my Dad all to myself for a couple of hours, talking about the minerals, learning the names, talking about where they came from, what made one better than the other, and if I was lucky my Dad would allow me to select a specimen for my “When I’m six” box. The specimens in that box were more than just the best specimens in my collection, waiting for me to be old enough to fully appreciate them, they were also representative of the moments with my father. The danburite became more than a clear pale-pink crystal, it was the adventure of mineral deals in distant Mexico. What I learned through all of this was how to handle minerals, how to treat minerals with respect, how to identify minerals on sight and how to use my nifty hand lens for the trickier ones. This time spent with my Dad morphed into something else: a love for the minerals themselves. The specimens had relationships with each other and with me, and by extension myself and other people’s collections. When I saw other people’s mineral collections, I saw specimens that were relatives to pieces in my own collection.”