Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Working at the Botany Greenhouse



Since I posted pictures from the greenhouse I used to work at yesterday, I thought I’d blog about the job today. The alumni association asked me what my favorite memory from my undergrad days was, and honestly it was working at the greenhouse. We had a very entertaining boss (let’s call him “Mo”) who was originally from Iran. I remember one time he was telling me about his grad school days in Tehran, when a bunch of botany grad students were driving in a beat-up old van to the research fields outside of town as they passed around a joint. I was totally following his story, thinking it could have happened here in Madtown, until the part where the Iraqi fighter jets flew overhead and bombed something less than a football field’s length away from them. Since they were stoned out of their minds, they got out of the beat-up old van and ran all over the place. “Huh,” I thought, “I can’t really see that happening here.” Which isn’t to say it never could – we have been so incredibly lucky not to have a war on our soil for so, so long.

One December day Mo got his car stuck in a snowbank, and I went out to try to help him, but I was very tiny at that time. Fortunately two big football players happened by, and I explained the problem. When they heard he was Iranian, one said, “No wonder he can’t drive in snow. Ain’t nothin’ there but sand, baby!” But I maintained that he had lived here for twenty years, he had no excuse. They quickly got him unstuck, and he gave each one a poinsettia from the greenhouse. He told me, “I love Christmas! Everyone is so happy! I may be Moslem, but Christmas is my favorite time of year!”

When my guinea pig died unexpectedly, Mo took me to lunch at a Mideastern restaurant, then he told me a crazy story about how the place used to be a Chinese restaurant, but the owner brought over his son-in-law from China and used him as slave labor. One day the son-in-law escaped, so the restaurant owner hired a hitman to kill him… only the hitman was an undercover cop. “The deal could have gone down right at the table where we’re sitting now,” Mo told me. Anyway, that was the end of the Chinese restaurant.

We also had a couple of “responsible adults” who were our supervisors, and I remember one used to do crazy stuff like sneak cannabis plants into the greenhouse. Once he was really bummed out because his fiftieth birthday was coming up, but everyone was busy that weekend, and even his wife didn’t really want to do anything. I said maybe they were planning a surprise party for him, and of course that was what was going on, so I accidentally ruined the surprise a little. They gave him tickets to a Grateful Dead show, and the timing couldn’t have been better because Jerry Garcia died not long after the show.

My fellow student workers could be a lot of fun too. One asked me to water her plants while she was home for Christmas break, and she said she would leave “a little something” for me. For reasons I cannot explain, I thought she was going to leave me a cupcake or something, but on her fridge she had taped an envelope with my name on it. It was awfully fat to contain money. I opened it to find the fattest spliff I’d ever seen in my life. My roommates were not coming home for weeks, so I smoked it at home. Previously marijuana had always underwhelmed me, but this time I was stoned. Really, really stoned. “Oh well,” I thought, “there’s nobody here to see me in this state,” but then Ma Hat called. I have always wondered if she could tell, but she never mentioned it. I can’t remember anything about our conversation except that I laughed a lot. But at the greenhouse we laughed a lot even without herbal enhancement. It was just the most fun place ever.

Famous Hat


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