October 28 -- 29, 2013
From
Memphis we make a beeline for the Mexican border, stopping only for a week in
Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to give six lectures at Henderson State University. I
know that three questions have sprung immediately into your head.
-- Do bees really
fly in a straight line?
-- Why is
the name of the state pronounced AR-kan-saw rather than Ar-KAN-sas?
-- And who in their right mind would
consent to give 6 public lectures in two days on 6 separate topics?
The first question
references not a fact but an assumption that nectar-laden bees return to their
home hive in a straight line, avoiding any temptation to slurp an extra bit of
sweet from a honeysuckle vine that is 7 degrees off course, or to zig fifty
yards to the right to share nectar gathering stories with a worker bee buddy in
a hive a couple of trees to the north. As best I can tell from a long and
arduous research session of three or four minutes on Google, the beeline
assumption has yet to be empirically tested.
The answer
to the second question is easy: Arkansas, derived from either a Sioux or Quapaw
word sounding something like /akakaze/ and meaning “people of the south wind,”
or perhaps “land of downriver people,” was pronounced both of the above ways,
and some others too, presumably, provoking both conflict and rancor among
citizens until the state legislature in 1881 passed a law that authorized only
the first pronunciation: AR-kan-saw. In 2007 the legislature revisited controversy
over the state name (presumably they passed other legislation in the interval
in-between these two initiatives) and decreed the possessive of Arkansas to be
Arkansas’s. Thank you Google. Go Razorbacks!
The third matter
remains a mystery, particularly to those of us without credentials in clinical
psychology. Not to mention the fact that that ‘right mind’ is so squishingly
imprecise a label that not being in it is a state that might convincingly be
ascribed to any of us at certain moments in our lives. This particular two-day
marathon of ‘not-in-ness’ in our lives came about in the following fashion:
Maryjane
Dunn, a former student of David’s from Nebraska, a former pilgrim with the two
of us on the long trek to Compostela, and a former collaborator with Linda on
four books having to do with pilgrimages and the Santiago de Compostela
medieval tradition, is currently teaching at Henderson State. Linda and I
thought we’d stop by for a brief visit on our way to Mexico, as we have done a
few times previously.
“As long as
you’re going to be in Arkadelphia,” says Maryjane, “would you be up to talking
with a couple of my classes?”
“Sure, why
not?” we answer. “Should be fun.”
“Uh ... and
uh ... maybe a public lecture? People in this part of Arkansas would love to
hear about the work you are doing. Any topic at all –Sephardic cooking,
Cervantes, the pilgrimage, the crypto-Jews, the Inquisition, the
American-European food exchange? I can probably wrangle a small speakers’ fee
for you.”
“Hey, Maryjane,
anything you like. Anything that you think would be useful to you or your
department. You pick the topic, whatever floats; just tell us what you’ve
decided.”
[Memo to
selves: never hand a carte blanche to an A-type personality without laying down
some very specific parameters. Remember that ‘one of the above’ and ‘all of the
above’ are very different instructions.]
Maryjane
went to work; and when we got to Arkadelphia, so did we. She had committed us
to every single one of those topics, some to Spanish language and culture
classes in Spanish, some to English and Religious Studies students in English,
and a large-hall public lecture in English on “When a religion goes
underground.” We guess it all went OK. We talked about tomatoes in the
Columbian Exchange class, and nobody threw any at us. Eyebrows went up when we
compared Spain’s “purity of blood” restrictions with Jim Crow in the South, and
when we suggested that medieval Christians were far less tolerant than medieval
Muslims, and that Muslims bathed frequently while Christians of that time bathed
only for their baptism and their laying out. The audience accepted the
proposition that the 3 religions each considered the deity a tribal god who
looked out for their parochial interests and protected them from all others;
but they visibly flinched when I said that to ask God to
bless OUR troops was pretty much the same thing. Still, nobody got out the tar
and feathers and we saw no crosses burning.
And, if
truth is to be told, despite the exhaustion we had one rousing good time, both
at Henderson, and in ‘leisure’ moments with Joe and Maryjane. We ate well,
hiked (MJ and I), knitted (MJ and Linda), fought about politics (all of the
above + Joe), shopped for wool (MJ and Linda), baked cookies, watched the Red
Sox triumph, swapped bibliography, gossiped about colleagues living and
deceased, met lots of interesting people, and even got to wash our laundry.
What more could migrant laborers ask?
D&L