I pulled this handmade, felt Christmas tree-skirt out of a textile-baling gaylord (large, industrial-strength, cardboard box, for moving on a pallet), right before it went out the donation bay of the thrift store, onto the truck that would take it to the warehouse, there to be compacted into a cube of fabric, which the recycler who buys would shred or otherwise render no longer fit to be a Christmas tree skirt.
"Look! A Christmas tree skirt!" I said to my coworker loading the truck.
"That's cute," he said. "Take it! Are you going to turn it into a skirt?"
"No," I said, "you know--it's for wrapping around the base of a Christmas tree."
I. No Picnic
My Black coworkers and I do not share the same General Fund of Knowledge (GFK).
The other day, a couple street people had set up a blanket and an umbrella (the kind for rain) under a tree across the alley.
"Oh, they're having a picnic," I said.
Mr. Furniture said, "Black people don't say picnic."
"I didn't know that," I said. "What does it mean?"
He gave me his signature wry look. "I can't believe you don't know that, San Francisco, radical as you are."
(Radical? I'm surprised he sees me that way--I'm just a white lady librarian. Though, really, librarianship is, quietly, quite radical.)
"Is it associated with . . . lynchings?" I said.
"Yeah!" Mr. Furniture said. "Pick-a-Nig."
Librarian-like, I looked up the history.
The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris University answers the question in the post "Blacks, Picnics and Lynchings" [includes disturbing picture]:
"Pic-a-Nig" is a well-known folk etymology among Black Americans. (Picnic's roots are French, for something like "Pick your food").
The museum's curator, Dr. David Pilgrim, writes:
"The lynching of blacks often occurred in picnic-like settings.
Phillip Dray, a historian, stated:
'Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers.
Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic.'"
So. We live in the same world but our experiences don't necessarily overlap.
II. Entertaining Angels, Unaware
I learn so much from and have a lot of love for my coworkers.
But I gotta say, it was a treat to meet up with someone who does share my GFK: my old friend Allan.
We met for tapas last night, for me to hand over the sheet music he will digitalize, and to catch up after Covid.
A librarian and an art historian (and an old person--he's 75), Allan knows a little bit about a lot of everything--from manga to Wagner. And what he doesn't know, he wants to learn and asks you questions about.
I can trust he can follow anything I say, and add to it.
It's like playing tennis with someone better than you, someone eager to both teach and learn new moves.
I was telling Allan about the people on the street at the store, and he asked,
"Do you think that putting sheet music into sleeves to preserve it [which he is going to do for the store] is a waste of time, when there are so many more important problems?"
"Oh my god, no!" I said. "Beauty matters! Preserving these fragile, physical things matters.
And not just to upper-class, economically privileged people:
Just today an old Black gent came in wearing a sparkly pin that read JAZZ on his hat. He asked if we had any sheet music, went through our pile of tattered stock, and found three undamaged old scores with cool covers, like these."
I told him, further, about Amina, the teenage girl in full hijab who'd asked me if I could mark down the price on some manga.
"This
is my favorite series," she'd told me--of a series marked "for older
teens". (That stuff is pretty wild... I wonder if her parents know.)
Allan commented, "You are entertaining angels unaware." [--Hebrews 13.2]
Indeed.
That's the thing: you can't assume, you can't know, who any individual really is or what that individual does or doesn't care about.
Don't assume poor people don't care about high-brow stuff––or the any other way round.
You can't know who cares about what.
That's the librarian's creed:
Serve, don't judge.
If Covid showed anything, it's that civilization can slide off the edge of the cliff in the blink of an eye, right? Libraries close, electricity fails, fires burn...
Poof! There goes the sheet music.
Take care of one another, and take care of things.
And here ends my sermon of the day. :)
(I really am going to try to write up some notes about BOOK's and the thrift store every day, to get a whole year's overview, like Shaun Bythell's bookseller's diaries.
I see his third has just come out--since I liked his second one so much (much more than the first one), I'm eager to read it.)
