A Travelling Girl

posted at 11:01 am
on Sep. 9, 2003

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My sister is in Portland, Ore.  The young sister.  The one who’s not a twin, who’s not not speaking to me.

Virginia.  Portland.  Even now I find that a little amazing.  She’s now lived in more places than I have: Calgary, Missoula, Santa Barbara, Swan Lake, Portland. (For the record, I’ve done Calgary, Los Angeles, Paris, Budapest.)

What’s more, she’s had a bunch of jobs, too, even though she’s still barely 20.  Her next one looks like it’s going to be part-time retail in a mall, at a store with accessories for tweens.  The name escapes me right now, but it’s something like Sparkly or Stickhead and the Web site when you visit it has a trail of stars that follow the arrow around and annoy you kind of like when you walk through a spider’s web across your path and you just can’t get it off your face.

I had hoped that Virginia would end up with a really good job, like my friend Aletta who got a job at the natural history museum.  Oh, sure, Aletta spent some of her time peeling bits of dead bats off of bat bones to make the skeletons to display, but she had some really interesting times, too, and it wasn’t a draining, numbing job that leave your brain smaller instead of larger.  I hope Virginia still ends up doing something that makes her brain and wallet both bigger.

Virginia, on the other hand, probably had different goals, goals like being able to pay for rent and gas and can insurance and have enough left over for food.

Also, a job in retail, while it might seem fairly unappealing to me, probably is a nice change for her from her last jobs.

This summer, in addition to working in a small town bar, a small town restaurant, and a small town general store, she spent about two weeks working at a fire camp.  Montana has been having some really bad wild fires, and those firefighters work up an appetite, and someone needs to feed them. 

That someone was Virginia, who put in 13 or more hours a day, with a half-day off every four days, serving breakfast and dinner to 500 firefighters.  She at first sounded pretty excited about the idea of being perhaps the only pretty girl that these guys had seen for a month, and as server she had a good reason to smile and speak to every single one of them.  She seemed pretty happy about that.

On the down side, along with the usual stories of food service awfulness that you can expect, she related one story about meat-loaf that I’m loathe to repeat ... oh, heck with it, you can always skip the rest of this journal.

So, the temperature in the kitchen where she worked got up to 130F, she tells me.  And one day, they’re making meat-loaf.  They’re running behind, and she’s helping the chefs, who are preparing this stuff.  They mix it all up, and set it pans, and bake it.  But before it’s baked, the mixture sits for a while.  And some of the juice, aka blood, runs off.  And it all collects in a big tray while the meat-loaf loaves wait to be baked.  So at some point they ask her to take the tray and dump it in the shower drain or off somewhere, or actually I don’t know why but she has to carry this tray of blood somewhere else.  And, being a Smith, what happens?

She spills it. Of course.  On herself.  Of course.  So she’s wearing shorts because it’s so hot in the kitchen, and the blood is warm, because it’s so hot in the kitchen, and so suddenly she has body temperature beef blood all over her legs and on her nice hiking shoes and she’s thinking, no fireman in the world is going to find this cute.  And she also thinks that changing jobs wouldn’t the worst idea. So now she’s in Portland.

Her shoe laces are still a little stiff.  Eck.

Anyway, working in a mall isn’t so bad, I guess.

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