OK! So the long wait for this entry is because I started a new summer job and it has been eating my time and making me tired. In a good way. I’m helping administer COVID-19 tests at the airport, and it’s twelve hour shifts, mostly on my feet (yep, ow, been a long time since my hairdresser and security days), and I get home in time at night to eat some toast, bathe and soak my feet, and fall into bed… so I can be up at 5:00 AM to be at work by 6:45 AM and work till 7:00 PM. Long days but short weeks– a fine trade off. And a long-needed paycheck. So no complaints.
Best part? I am working with some great people.
Many are undergrad students and recent grads who are so driven and passionate about learning and work, of the type I haven’t seen in my own classroom in years… we have shift leads who actually say they will take care of the occasional problem client so we don’t have to… the older site manager guys are already calling me “Murph”… and I already can be my wacky magical self with these folks…
They know I’m an anthropology doc, so there are lots of questions and chat during the slow times of world travel, languages, cultural practices, classes… and magic.
Well, Greg mentioned that he lived in and taught in China for many years. That was interesting enough. Then he started talking about how an archaeological dig there uncovered the oldest example of Chinese pictographs, found on divination bones — the type that you throw in a fire and when they crack from the heat, you read the pattern for your fortune. I chimed in, oh, folks here in the American South read bones too, sortilege-style, African derivation. Is this the sort of thing you study as an anthropologist? Thomas asked. Yeah, I said, I do it too. You read bones? Thomas asked. Oh, I read tarot cards, I said, but I know lots of folks who do read bones… Cool, they said.
Good sign number one…
Later, as I was at the sanitizing station (cleaning the protective plex after clients leave is part of the job), word shot through than an anthro prof was working there. Ragan said that she was an anthro major, possibly forensics (bones again!)… Collum mentioned his social activist organizing work, his own sociological studies, and wondered if sociology/anthropology and the stuff we have to read to do our work is sometimes misery porn. I laughed — grad school will hone your critical eye, I said. When he asked what I studied and did I told him, and somehow the chat with Greg earlier about bones came up again, including mentioning of bone sortilege in the South – Collum smiled. My mother is from the Mississippi Delta, he said, she told us about that stuff all the time growing up. He then said, maybe you know this — I’ve been trying to find a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Hoodoo in America. Do you know how to find it?… I said interlibrary loan is your friend, but Go Tell My Horse and Mules and Men will certainly give you lots of information to… And I told him about my taking Miss Cat’s course…
Good sign number two…
Later on, as chat of ancestry came up to pass the time, folks naturally asked if I was Irish. Yep, and Italian and Greek, I said. Greg asked, where in Italy are your ancestors from? My great-grandparents were from Montella, which is about forty miles inland from Naples, so technically we’re Neapolitan. Greg said he was Sicilian. Yep, the food jokes started. And the mafia jokes. And I said, yeah, maybe there’s some Neapolitan/Sicilian vendetta I’m supposed to hit you with that I don’t know about. Greg smiled and said, nah, I’ll just throw the malocchio at you… So good to laugh at your job on the first day…
OK! I got my signs. I can totally be myself at work. And these folks think it’s all so interesting. And there’s much to observe with hundreds of people coming and going, perfect for an anthropologist. Danny, a young African-American fellow who is gregarious and tends to dance in slow times, was extra weary from double shifting two jobs and not sleeping one morning. The custodian, another young African-American man walked up to him to talk and… advise? It’s how it looked. I asked Danny later what he said, just hello? He said the custodian noticed his slightly scuffed shoes and walked right up with info on how to care for shoes like his and to keep them clean. Ah… I said, realizing that I think I know what that talk was really about…
When the afternoon slows down, the site manager lets us pass the time as we like — many are reading, doing homework, a young man in pilot training is running a simulator on his phone… no one is playing video games, interestingly. A week in, I brought in Miss Cat Yronwode’s Throwing the Bones for staff to look through for fun. Greg read about the Chinese bone burning. Thomas was stunned at how much information Miss Cat crammed into ninety-six pages. Well, that’s her publishing genius, I said. She has enough information in books and on the web to make an archive as big as the moon — but she keeps her books to ninety-six pages and under ten bucks so they are accessible, you know, like when you would use to walk into the drugstore… Thomas said, ah, like those old pamphlets? Yeah! I said. Some of those she’s actually re-releasing and annotating through her publishing company too. You can write a five hundred page, fifty dollar compendium with what she’s learned and shared… but you can also get it in an accessible, practical, and affordable way too… Local stores? He asked. Some, I said, and her company. And Amazon…
So! I can not only be me at work, but I can work on what I do here, too. There’s a refreshing “that sounds pretty cool” from these young folks, and lots of questions about cultural history and folk religion and just other unusual stuff. It’s fun to be around such inquisitive minds again… and then as the line picks up, we spread out and explain COVID saliva tests to folks again for a couple of hours…
And you’d better believe I have pepper in my shoes and my cimaruta on when I’m there… I’ll be tending to my feet in a whole other way now…
Rose in the Retort 