January 31st, 2020 @ 11:18 AM
Harrah’s Casino
Riverfront and Canal Boulevard, New Orleans, Louisiana
Rainy morning, but I didn’t care. I bundled up in my Carhartt and set off for old St Patrick to catch the morning mass in Latin. The man with the long but well trimmed beard sat in a pew near the back, sadly visiting alone. I walk up for communion, but I cross my hands over my heart. Father Garritt blessed me with a touch to my left elbow, saying, “Pax”, the Latin word for peace. I’m hardly turning into a closet Catholic. I’m not turning into a closet Episcopalian either. I just love the serenity of moments spent among people, performing a ritual.
I got a call from the United States Census Bureau, asking me to interview for an enumerator position in the Washington DC area. The foot troops of the annual count, enumerators go house to house, apartment to apartment, to document people who didn’t mail in their census surveys, as most Americans have done. However, since I am no longer rooted in Washington, I went online and changed my record to a New Orleans address. I also updated my selective service number now that I have learned it, the draft number never called: 63-0678307-4. I never served, but I put in for the draft and now I can work a Federal job.
Hopefully, I’ll be called in the New Orlean’s office next week because I am raring to go. I look forward to walking door to door under the palm fronds, knocking on the doors of shotgun shacks.
Once, the entire census was conducted by enumerators going door to door, filling out a line for each resident encountered. In 1940, an enumerator found Olive Samuli and Francis Samuli living with Aunt Olive’s father, Willi Hendrickson, who gave his age as sixty-eight years old. Olive and Francis were thirty-seven and thirty-nine respectively. Francis came from Finland. I never met Francis but I do remember visits from Olive, who quietly spoke Finnish to Aino, your great-grandmother. Check the inside cover of the copy of Elmer Gantry and the name of Aunt Olive can be found upon the protestors who confessed in writing to reading the banned book!
I haven’t found the record for 1930 although I have read it before today. Aino Hendrickson lived then in the household with Willy Hendrickson. I believe she had reported an age of twenty-four years. I have imagined the enumerator writing out the lines in almost perfect penmanship. He, sadly almost definitely a he, probably had to refuse a cup of coffee and a slice of triple berry pie. Every household in the tract had offered him coffee and pie and he needed to travel light. He might have taken with him a bottle of Vernor’s Ginger Ale because the family once had a license to produce and bottle it. Grandmother gave me a glass of ale to settle my stomach when upset.
A startup named Carvana sells used cars by the internet and then delivers the cars by flatbed tow trucks. I was asked to take a test of my ability to write custom queries to pull back precisely defined sets of data. The test had eleven challenges and I successfully programmed a solution for ten of them. I have to disagree with the refusal of the program to accept my last solution. It had all the right columns, but it required me to change a null into a zero-length string. I ran out of time, making me angry when the simulation stopped. I wanted a perfect score.
The recruiter has turned me over to the analyst recruiter and maybe I’ll hear word. I already see myself on a jet taking off from Louis Armstrong Airport, heading towards Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix doesn’t have the water I love in Muskegon, Grand Haven and Holland and I’ll see just the brown river passing through it as we come in for a landing to Sky Harbor, PHX. Heavens I love to fly, especially when I have been summoned.
Up in the Air Junior Birdman (I used to airplane you on my hands and knees, laying on my back. Yes, you could make the goggles with your hands!
The lyrics are from a campfire song, but the video comes from the film, To Hell and Back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1J8E9dnd5g
JUNIOR BIRDMAN
Camp Song
Chorus:
Up in the air junior birdman
Up in the air upside down
Up in the air junior birdman
Keep your noses off the ground
When you hear the grand announcement
that your wings are made of tin.
Then you know that Junior Birdman,
has turned his box tops in.*
For it takes: 5 box tops,
4 bottle bottoms,
3 coupons,
2 wrappers,
and one thin dime!
B-i-r-d, B-i-r-d, B-i-r-d-m-a-n
Birdman, Birdman, Birdman
Buzzzzzzzz!
* Alternate Verse
When you hear the doorbell ring (buzz, buzz)
When you see the badge of tin (tin, tin)
Then you know that junior birdman
Has turned his box tops in.
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