Stacking Rocks

Have you noticed the overwhelming (and often incorrect) avoidance of the word, "me?" As in, "______ and me." People won't say it. It's particularly apparent on bad TV (read: "The Bachelor").  "Me!" I shout over and over again while watching said bad TV. "It's okay to say me! Me is correct! Me is the word you're looking for! Take away the other person, what would you say? Would you say, 'The ball came to "I?"' No, you would not! That would sound ridiculous! So don't say, 'The ball came to _______ and I! PLEASE!!!"

Wil called me on it the other day. I correctly said "me" and he said, "You're supposed to say, I."

I about took his head off. (He is also a stickler for the proper use of "whom." I don't even know what to make of a boy who seems to have this down perfectly, and well, other things, not so much.)

While I was very, very busy gloating over my full understanding of this grammatical rule that seems to allude 90% of the population, I came upon these stacked rocks. They were on a boulder that was amongst other boulders, in a little rock garden part of an apartment building complex in a busy, hip, happening part of Portland. The rock garden is next to a restaurant and apparently people get their food and some come and sit there, play with the rocks, and someone(s) stacked them up all Zen-like. Because there are no accidents, I was sitting in the rock garden enjoying a lovely iced latte on a hot summer day, when the owner of the apartments/rock garden, drove up. I actually know the owner, he's a friend of STM's. He was stopping by to check on things, and we got to talking.

"I like the new rock garden," I said, "and I'm crazy about the stacked rocks, so cool!"

"Yea, very groovy," he said. He started telling me about how he might add one of those Little Free Libraries, or better yet, a rock exchange. "Leave a rock, take a rock, it could be really groovy!" he said, repeating his favorite word.

He then jumped to the subject of marriage (if you knew him, you'd know that jumping wildly from point to point in a conversation is very typical). "The thing about marriage is," he said, "there's no place for me or I."

"You're so right," I said. And I meant it. And I knew that whomever was spending their days stacking rocks was making a whole lot better use of their time than I was, worrying about other people's use of "me" or "I." They don't have a place in marriage, and their grammatical use shouldn't be taking up space in my brain.