Retiring My Office Bulletin Board

My Office Mate, Rivera's Daughter, and What Came Off My Corkboard

            Today, after a healthy (life-giving) dose of Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something Pleasant? I made myself deal with some of what I have dumped into storage boxes because, like her parents, I can't get rid of anything. 

            I decided to start with the bulletin board I carried down from my sixth floor office in Batmale Hall.  Most of the things I'd put on with thumbtacks or staples had fallen off on the way to the car--where I was helped by a very kind young political science teacher (who knows the power of graphic comics and videos) He helped me get with the storage box and bulletin board I was carrying all in one trip.  (As far as we know, only one collage fell through the elevator shaft or whatever that thing is in the elevator that lets things drop down six floors and never be seen again.)

            I decided it was time to use that board for the World Cup and put into my retirement scrapbook the remnants of office postings. I'd put up a photo of my office mate Bob and some other colleagues at an Asian Coalition Dinner, and Bob had put a pumpkin face over his head and given me a crown.

  I'd put THAT in my retirement album along with a couple of other things representing him on a bulletin board he rarely used.  He had been one of the teachers to go to Baltistan to deliver and use books at the school Greg Mortenson (and the person who really wrote the book) describes in Three Cups of Tea, so there's a photo of the little girls there wearing white hijabs that look a little bit like artfully draped sheets--twin size.   (I just looked up Three Cups of Tea and see all sorts of details beyond the suits that were filed against Mortenson for making $5,000,000 and using so little of that to build schools.  The co-writer committed suicide!)

Then there's a Home & Garden front page spread from April 22, 2012 that quotes something Bob wrote:

I am a lazy and inconsistent recycler and worry about my carbon footprint only when I'm in the market for new shoes.  Like most San Franciscans, I have the requisite green recycling bucket under my sink though I am never quite sure how to line it.  I know I can buy mass-produced biodegradable liner bags, but buying something simply to recycle it seems backwards."   The editor Nancy Davis Kho responded with a full-page spread on how to use the comic strips to make a compost in liner. 

           

Bob also put up a letter he wrote to himself from the ESL Department asking him to dress in a more up-to-date fashion but saying that his hair was okay.

            I've liked having Bob as an office mate and will write more.