the christmas tree shop of horror
a quick story about how i got here, here being, of course, the nichest comedian on the internet (who is also a deathways historian)
i went to undergrad for teaching. it seemed to me the easiest, achievable, respectable goal, and i clung to it like my whole personality was distilled from Dead Poets Society, which it was.
but by my first semester of education courses i knew i was in trouble. it was so, so, so boring, and i was 18 and living on my own for the first time. the last thing i wanted was boredom.
i dropped it very quickly and embraced the other thing i was good at, which was writing. it seemed both Important and something on which i could coast, since i was already good at it and it didn’t require much effort. so i declared an english major, and assumed i’d be poor for the rest of my life.
i wasn’t an exceptionally dedicated student, or even a very bright one, but somehow by my junior year i had finished all of my major and general education requirements, except for the final components of my thesis work, which i couldn’t begin until my senior year. and so i did what any other liberal arts student with a seemingly asexually replicating student loan does: i studied abroad.
i’m a half breed, split right down the middle: my mother’s entire family is irish, pretty much as far back as ireland goes, with the exception of a few brits mucking up an otherwise quality family tree. my great-grandmother came to the US in the late 1920s. on my father’s side we are italian, as far back as italy goes, no exceptions, and my great-grandparents came here in the 1930s. it was a very boring, very expected 23 & me result.
in 2008, i was leaning more into my italian side, and so in august i flew to florence, italy. i had planned to do an entire immersion in the italian language, but when we arrived and confirmed classes, something else entirely caught my eye: we could take archaeological studies.
the archaeological survey lab was run by a pair of italian archaeologists. truly i remember nothing about the man, except for noticing immediately that he was in love with the other professor, a woman called simone, who our entire class called archaeology barbie behind her back.
archaeology barbie was an utterly perfect human specimen. she was petite, and thin, with shimmery blonde hair and naturally straight, little white teeth. her eyes were beautiful and grey and she was sharp and quick witted. but the best thing about her was that somehow she always had a bit of dirt or dust right on her tits, which was the furthest thing that stuck out from her. it was that minute detail that earned her the nickname, because, as a classmate pointed out, that would be the exact detail that barbie makers would give her to show she worked in the field. a little bit of dirt in an interesting place. we all secretly thought that she put it there in the morning as part of her routine, as it was always there, even on her non-field days and this was further supported by empirical evidence: i ran into her once outside a cafe on the weekend, and she was done up for a date and missing her tit dust; i checked.
in that class i was sat next to a friend who was also my roommate; our friendship wouldn’t survive the ordeal but that’s neither here nor there. in any case, for our final for the course, we were given a piece from barbie’s recent etruscan grave dig in its in situ packaging (meaning it was wrapped at the site and preserved in the earth it was encased in). our project was to stabilise it - get it out of the dirt, clean it up, carefully glue it back together if it was broken. follow the steps of museum curators with about 1/100 of the experience, classic italian education stuff.
my friend opened hers and immediately groaned. she had been quick to take one and rip the paper open, and found it was a glazed piece, which she didn’t want to do. (there was glazed pottery and clay pottery, and on the whole, clay was easier - no delicate paintwork to accidentally ruin and fail the course for). she begged me to switch with her, and i hadn’t opened mine yet, and even though she was a pain in the ass, she was also cute, so i agreed.
unfortunately for her, the piece she’d given me was perfect: an entirely intact bowl made for a child with little drawings on the side and, underneath, under the fluted bottom: a 2,000 year old fingerprint from the person who dipped the bowl into the glaze. it was perfectly formed, with all the little swirls on their finger visible in the paint. i remember lining it up with mine, seeing if they had bigger hands than me (yes, everyone does. well. everyone except donald trump) and how they must have been holding the bowl when they did it. even archaeology barbie was surprised and delighted.
of course, about ten minutes later i chipped off quite a bit of glaze by accident and then severely messed up how old the object was in my presentation about the artefact, so all in all, i somehow managed a lackluster day in archaeological preservation.
when i got back to the US, i added an ancient art history major and took an internship with the city’s archaeology department. i emailed back and forth with its director, a woman called dr. ellen [surname redacted by the government]. i couldn’t believe she’d accepted my application and that i’d be allowed to help her catalogue the entire city’s collection. i got extra indiana-jonsed up for my first day and - this is an unfortunate carbon dating of myself here - printed directions to get to the lab. (okay, look. i’m not that old but cell phone internet was still not really a thing in 2009.)
the lab was in the basement of the old, derelict police building at the corner of the city’s north end - not the nice corner. the basement flooded semi-annually and there was mould on the walls in the entryway. everything was cold all the time, with seeming disregard of the temperature outside. there was no one else in the building, no other tenants or offices, but ellen was only ever given access to the basement, so the entire scene felt a lot like a weird british sitcom about a group of haphazard ghosts from across time that become unlikely friends.
i wasn’t the only intern - there were a few others - and like our british sitcom versions we were all over the place. the oldest of us was a graduate student who took everything incredibly seriously. i don’t remember too much about her, except that i’d realised at some point about halfway through my internship that i’d never seen her smile at all. that trend held up the entire semester. it wasn’t until she got drunk in ellen’s kitchen in the summer that i even ever saw her teeth. there was also a girl who didn’t go to school for archaeology but who just showed up at the lab randomly. she didn’t talk much, and we never knew much about her - not even ellen did - but she did pretty good work, and she always had really neat, bright coloured socks that never matched, so she was pretty ok in my book.
my favourite part of the lab was the back corner of the archive, where we stored - and i use this term very, very loosely - old gravestones and gravestone pieces that had been lost from their in situ position. mainly it was just a pile of stone pieces on shelving, but it felt very Important for me, a weirdo, to sit back there and do my journaling while i thought about my future career as a museums expert. i remember asking ellen once why we didn’t try to put the gravestones back, why we didn’t do more restoration work, and she said “i am the only person in my entire department and i make 60k a year”. i loved ellen, but i pouted for days at that reply, in part because i was a self-absorbed 20 year old who didn’t understand the world, and in part because to me 60k sounded like quite a lot of money, especially for someone who had a cool single adult life like ellen.
ellen wasn’t chastising me, by the way. that’s just how she was. she had a blunt-ness that i grew to adore, because she could see things exactly how they were, and she was confident about it. she also didn’t care if it offended other people - the facts were the facts. i interviewed her for my college paper as part of my practicum, and i remember being very excited about it. i asked her what the future of archaeology looked like, thinking about how it would play into that Very Important Ideaology. but ellen barely looked up from the artefact she was cleaning in the lab. she snorted before asking me if i’d ever seen the inside of a christmas tree shop. when i said yes, she said: “the future of archaeology is going to look exactly like that.”
anyway, that’s why i became a historian, and not an archaeologist. you can lead a horse to a grant-funded dig site, but you can’t make them care about all the trash you find and have to catalogue there. because while i don’t feel like spending my summers baking in the sun and wearing very uncool hats, i was completely unable to shake my affection for gravestones. what can i say? you always remember your first real love.