Fantasy Fulfilled

Ryan and I give each other permission to include a little fantasy in our marriage. For instance, Ryan has an ongoing fantasy of playing for the Boston Red Sox, and I am okay with that. Whenever we go to Spring Training games in Arizona, Ryan lets his imagination go and by the time we leave he has planned out his career from playing on a "farm team" and then of course being picked up in draft by his favorite team. My fantasy life is fed mostly by visits to museums (at least this was before this year). When Ryan and I go to a museum, we always split up. He goes to indulge his artsy side and strolls the art galleries (all but Italian/Rennaisance art - he doesnt like pasty chubby white people...at least not in art). I on the other hand head straight to the artifacts. The Egyptian rooms, the pirate treasure rooms, room after room of little pieces of pottery, coins, ancient cooking tools, and fragments of 2000 year old sandals. By the time we meet up again, I have let MY imagination go and I am well on my way to going back to school to fulfill a childhood dream of being an archeologist (it was either that or a national geographic photographer in a Jeep). The thought of uncovering something for the first time that was once used by fellow, yet ancient humanity gets my adrenaline up even more than a good five mile run. I love to people watch and to analyze human behavior, and archeology is that at its most glamorous.

The dirt, the heat, the monotony of dusting off layer after layer of ancient ground in the hopes of finding that singular treasure holds more appeal to me than almost anything. I love and appreciate the cultures and people who laid the foundations for life as we know it today. I also love the people who did nothing to lay foundations today but who instead charted a course that was so unique that its culture had seemed to freeze in time... Thanks to my dad, who instilled in me at a young age a childlike wonder for adventure and discovery, this is who I am today. I am no less interested in pirate treasure and Indian artifacts today as I was as a 10 year old digging up my mothers vegetable garden (much to her dismay).

Yesterday, our family went to the Ashkelon National Park - on the coast of the Mediterranean and just barely north of Gaza. There a friend of ours from Jerusalem is heading up a dig there. A REAL dig. In Jerusalem you are able to pay as a tourist and sift dirt for a few hours to say that you were an archeologist. But this is a new site, an active site. When we arrived, we were greeted with the sight of a couple dozen archeologists and archeology college students, scattered across the area. Covered in dust, wielding trowels and brushes as well as the very non-Indiana Jones lap tops and laser mapping tools. They had bandanas on their heads and sweat on their brow.... My heart is skipping at this point. We were shown around the site and explained it was at two levels - an iron age dig higher up had unearthed a Philistine (think David and Goliath) home and some wells and graves. At the lower level was a bronze age dig from the Canaanite period (BEFORE the Israelites had formed a nation). Up to this point they had found plenty of bones and pottery, bricks and buildings, gravesites and bodies...some little trinkets like beads, Egyptian scarobs, and just that morning had found a little shiny stone piece used for sewing (dont ask me the technical term I cannot sew!). Up above the site in the walls were ancient water systems and even entire Roman pillars jutting out of the dirt, from other, more recent (yet ancient) eras.

Our 8 year old had come prepared with his Indiana Jones hat and his book on ancient hyroglyphics - he is teaching himself the language and was promptly put to work in one of the deep holes in the Canaanite dig. Our five year old was given a short job so he could say he did something. Ryan and Ben walked around trying to blend in while taking our shameless tourist pictures and pretending that it is perfectly NORMAL for a one year old to be at an active dig site. I was placed in the Philistine home, where I helped to scrape and dust a layer of ground for two hours. I was covered head to toe in dust and carefully picked at the ground, pulling out pieces of pottery covered in black soot (we had uncovered a hearth in the home) and bones (probably from a family meal...or maybe the family). I listened to the archeologists use lingo like "floating" and "mud bricks" and happily pretended like I was one of them. I took every first and fifth bucket of dirt over to the sifting area, and carefully placed my bones into the labeled "bone bag." Archeology is definitely just as glamorous as I always thought it would be. With a good imagination and a love for the great thread of mankind throughout history, how can it not be?? So with all of its ugly warts and trying days, I will always be thankful to Israel for providing me a little bit of fulfilled fantasy. Who knows? Maybe one day I will be back - when Ryan is busy playing for the Red Sox and I am in need of a good diversion.