As I walked the other day toward the office and by the large dumpster they’ve put out back to hold the office’s detritus, I wondered if I’d see my office chair in it. And, lo, there it was, a blue tape with the word “garbage” affixed to it.
I rather liked that ersatz flaked leather chair, but time marches on, and the whole office was being mitigated, defumigated, which requires that we not remain fixated upon what’s been familiar. All is change, all is flux, the center cannot hold. . . .
But to have order imposed on one who hasn’t been used to it, to one who does not feel whole unless stacks of sports pages past surround him, can be traumatic. I told my fellow workers that I feel like the leathery-hided Vermonter who, when told by the Putnam Valley hospital’s nurses that he’d have to be bathed, protested mightily that he’d never had a bath in his life, and that it would kill him. Needless to say, he did not live to say, “I told you so.”
So, as I’ve said, I can’t wait to get my office back to where you can’t get into it, to where it’s just me and O’en and my run-on sentences, streams of prose that editors do their damndest to dam up in See Spot. See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run fashion.
(Along this line, it occurs to me that I should apologize to Reggie Cornelia for having years ago poked fun at phonics, the use of sound-letter connections to teach reading. My daughter, who is a veteran teacher, tells me it’s the best way to learn how to read, and that the whole-language system that was once so popular has been discredited.)
So, I stand corrected. Or sit corrected, rather, thanks to the fact that, having had hardly any time to mourn the absence of my cashiered chair, I took possession of an even more regal one that had been used by a colleague who left recently and was sitting in a corner of the purged newsroom. The purloined throne ought to lend a dignified air to a room that, once I reclaim it, may otherwise offend the eye. Time marches on, but I’m staying put.