As some of you know, I spent the waning months of the year 1999 very sick and was in the hospital for the better part of a week in December of that year. (Ultimate – and questionable – diagnosis: mono.) I first got sick in October and did not get “well” until taking mass doses of steroids (which I am now allergic to) during and after that hospitalization.
I tell you this because I first met Tray in mid-December in the middle office of the Anthropology Department at Troy State. You see, I had missed a lot of classes that semester, and missed all of my final exams when I was in the hospital. Additionally, I was in the process of applying to graduate schools which required getting letters of recommendation and the like. So, even though I was still recovering I was on campus taking care of things and was sitting in the middle office resting when he came in. And I looked, well, not well. He had just come back to Troy, and had been hired as an adjunct instructor to teach multiple sections of Introduction to Anthropology. We were briefly introduced that day, but I can tell you that I didn’t make much of an impression because when we later re-met he didn’t remember me – or barely remembered me, anyway.
So, in the world of archaeology (particularly when you use students as the bulk of your work force), you do fieldwork over the holiday breaks – summers, mostly, but also Christmas and Spring Break. Because I’d been so sick, my mom was not very thrilled about the prospect of me working over Christmas break, but we were working on an industrial park in Greenville, Alabama. The Phase I survey of the park was my field school, and remains the most difficult survey I have ever worked on (thickness of the vegetation, the swamp crossings, the afternoon lightening storms). That Christmas, we were back doing some Phase II excavations at an old house site that we’d found during the survey. Actually, the house had still been standing at the time of the survey, but the landowner bulldozed it on the mistaken belief that if he had an historic house on his property he couldn’t sell it for the industrial park. (The maps and plans I drew of it during the survey are the only surviving records of it.) All this is my way of saying that I really, really wanted to work on the project.
However, after all that time being out of commission because of being sick, on that first day in the field, I forgot the first rule of working with Mac (our boss). Nobody shows up until 30 minutes after the official start time. We were supposed to be there at 8 I believe, and I actually got there 15 minutes early because I was driving down from Selma. So, of course, no one else got there until 830. Except for Tray. And his dog, Minx. I saw them up the hill when I pulled in and drove up to them. I got out and reintroduced myself. We spent the morning talking until everyone else got there and then spent the next two weeks getting to know each other, talking off and on during the day. At the end of the two weeks, he asked me out to dinner for Friday night (which was January 7). Well, classes weren’t supposed to start back until January 10 on Monday. As such, I was not intending to move back to my dorm until Sunday night, but because he asked me out, I drove home and got my stuff and moved back into the dorm three days early so that I could go out on a date with him Friday night.
Ten years later and here we are. We both rang in Y2K at home with our families that year. I was in Selma with my mom and grandmother, and he was on Spring Creek. After our first date though, we have spent almost every day of the subsequent decade together. The New Year 2010 didn’t just capstone the decade from 2000-2009, it also marks ten years of Us. It’s been a good decade.
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