A GHOST IN THE ANNEX
When I retired two years ago from Whitman College, they granted me emeritus status, allowing me to retain full library privileges as well as email for life. They also let me keep my office, abode of twenty-one years, set in an annex to Maxey Hall, the building that houses the social sciences. The “they” in the matter of granting me ongoing use of my space was not an act of official largess, but came at the good graces of the social science admin wizard who keeps tabs on all things related to Maxey, annex included. She casually allowed one day, soon after my retirement, that no one was clamoring to grab my spot, so there was really no reason to move out. I asked how long I might keep it, and she just shrugged.
I heaved a huge sigh.
Though I fall far short of being clinically diagnosable as a hoarder, I am a packrat who keeps a secret space in the mind for all the many, many things I might want later. Not later in the day; later in life. I no longer hunt, but I have my father’s rifles, and mine, and a fair amount of ammunition dating back to the Kennedy years. I possess a Stihl chainsaw I have not used for more than four decades; it lies in the bottom of a backyard box, the size of a coffin, where I store the cooking charcoal (which I use regularly in all seasons) and a package of shagbark hickory chunks, brought to me by friends from Virginia, c. 1993, I someday intend to use for the smoking of pork shoulders. Charcoal, wood, and saw do seem to go together, and I do still hold out the possibility that I will return to firewood-cutting as soon as modern capitalism collapses.
The post-retirement gift of my campus office was, of course, too good to be true for long, but it did last a full two years. A month ago, I got a message from the powers in Memorial Hall, the college administrative hub, telling me it was time to clear out. Faculty office space is now suffering new pressures, and after a campus-wide inventory of all occupied spots, mine was found to be inhabited only by a ghost: me, in retirement. The message was kind – loving, even – but definite. I have until July to ret* the place out and give up my key.
This is an archaeology project, a digging into the recently abandoned ruins of a career. A sane person might just roll a few wheeled trash bins into the room and start dumping, but I am not a sane person. Soon after I received my eviction notice, I started working my way through filing cabinets and boxes, most of which have remained closed since I first moved in. I have hundreds of folders dedicated to class notes and student assignments I first began to develop at the University of Montana, where I first taught, in 1989. I have around a thousand books on the shelves, awaiting culling for the few that can be salvaged into the vanishingly small space left at home amid another thousand books. I have stacks upon stacks of magazines and journals, all of them organized and all of them useless. I have close to one hundred VHS tapes. And the Rolodex I once used when I ran a non-profit in Missoula back in the ‘80s. And two large plexiglass boxes full of floppy disks, the 5 and 1/4-inch variety written from an operating system known as CPM. And the Remington portable manual typewriter I used in college (c. 1970) to hammer out my papers. It is in pristine condition, waiting for a call from Ebay. I can’t just dump things – not even the thousands of pages of paper – without looking. I’m looking at everything. Because one never knows how some obscure shred might become useful again, later in life.
So....
The next few blogs in this slowly accumulating series are apt to grow from nuggets uncovered in my campus archaeology site. I’m going there every day now intending to spend a hour or two at a time, working my way slowly around the room, beginning in the southeast corner. I’m starting with the folders – class notes and xeroxed readings, layered with end-of-semester papers many students failed to come by and pick up. Some are more than thirty years old. Memories evoked by all this detritus may be worth visiting in a short essay or two. Take sheer strangeness of a college professor’s career, for example; or the evanescence of a classroom discussion; or the sometimes shocking intensity of an academically gifted twenty-year-old; or the matter of trying to teach writing in the age of the internet and texting. . . .
And perhaps there is where we shall begin next time.
* Ret is a favorite verb from my Pennsylvania childhood. The verbal phrase “ret up” (also “redd up”) has roots in the Middle English redden, to rescue, free from, or clear. Today, “ret up” means to make tidy. The word arrived with Scottish immigrants and is still in use in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and odd places in the U.S. Pittsburgh’s annual anti-litter campaign is called “Let’s Redd Up Pittsburgh.” I learned the word from neighbors in western Pennsylvania, sometime around the age of six when I was first developing my hoarding instincts. We were from Utah, and my parents found the word quite curious. It found its way into that special place in the mind where it could be stored for later use.