Artifact: The Rolodex

[Kali]

https://borderlore.org/artifact-the-rolodex

Remembering a mentor and his rotating cards of access and connection

by Maribel Alvarez

When Dr. James “Big Jim” Griffith, a folklorist, a friend and mentor to me, and the beloved founder of the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival, passed away in December of 2021, his wife Loma invited friends and colleagues to pick small keepsakes from his home office as remembrances. I selected an out-of-print pamphlet on the Yaqui Easter ceremonies, a bumper sticker from Cananea, Sonora taped to one of his cabinets, and Jim’s personal Rolodex.

more at link
https://borderlore.org/artifact-the-rolodex/

[erronis]

1. A good read. Thank you.

I believe objects carry the energy of their caretakers far longer than the time they were used and well past the life of their users. I keep Jim's Rolodex on a shelf in my office at the University of Arizona. Every so often I pull it down and look through the entries. Seeing my dear mentor's handwriting, studying his annotations, and tracking changes in addresses or area codes deeply moves me. A lifetime of transactions and transformations is encoded in this wheel of cards.

[PJMcK]

2. I had two Rolodexes

One for my office and a clone for my studio. I had the first one since 1980. Last year, I finally consolidated them electronically and tossed the old work-horses.

Ah, the memories those cards contained!

[Warpy]

3. one thing that has a good chance of persisting for a millennium or so

is the balck Bakelite rotary telephone body, at least in shattered form. I can well imagine future archaeologists or just landfill treasure hunters reassembling them and trying to guess their function. The large number of them at a certain layer will give rise to all sorts of theories. Since archaeologists tend to see most things as either willies or religion and the phone bodies won't look like willies and the dial hole is too large to be of much use to them, I suppose they'll try to reconstruct the religion of the 1910s-1960s from these plentiful but incomprehensible artifacts.

Well, unless Fatso and Putin decide to blow us up, instead

(I never minded the Rolodex, it just sort of sat there inoffensively, but remember what replaced it? It was a hunk of flotsam you wore on one wrist called the Filofax and was bulging with notes and numbers and reminders if you were trying to give the impression that you were in demand, somehow. I suppose being chained to cell phones that offer the same function is an improvement, but just. And ohmygawd, they're sill tring to seel filofaxes.)