Biophilia in biblio

The summer after I finished high school, I turned my part-time job at the second-hand bike shop into a full-time one. Long hours aside, it was a good job. We were paid hourly, so the wage was decent. My boss was a fairly traditional Calabrian man who believed that his female employees’ role was to service the phones and checkout, clean the store, and make cups of coffee for customers while they waited to have their inner tubes replaced. As a female person, I wasn’t permitted to sell bikes or fix them. Course I recognised the sexism going on, but I didn’t challenge it. Because there was a loophole: if the shop was clean and no-one was around to make coffee for, I was allowed to sit at the counter and read.

I was not going to be a martyr. I read Crime and Punishment that summer. I read a bunch of probably very average novels I don’t remember. The mechanic I worked with stormed around muttering about my indolence. But the boss’s rules went. When he got back from a holiday, he gave me a souvenir leather bookmark with FIJI embossed on it.