20190320.0430

There are some commonalities between the kind of academic work I have done (and am still doing, if only in small measure) and the more "normal" work I've moved into since early 2017. One such is the issue of inheritance--not so much of position or title as of the strange detritus that grows up around most any workstation. For as a graduate student, as a part-time instructor having to squat in shared office space, as a full-time instructor with an office of my own or with cubicles or just a desk in a shared office pool, as a part-time instructor with one office of my own or another, as a clerk in the central office of a chain of bad Tex-Mex restaurants, or as the front-desk worker at a substance abuse treatment facility, I have been other than the first to sit at a particular workstation, and I have found things that others have left behind them.
As with the marginalia I have encountered before and that I have discussed here and here and elsewhere, the desk-scraps induce me to wonder about my predecessors in the spaces I have occupied. I know there is not necessarily much to be gained from considering the implications of paper clips left behind in a secretary's desk, although the strangeness of which mailing labels remain in the desk drawer, what kinds of paper are kept closest to hand, and the occasional bit of coin I've inherited from those whose desks I've taken might well bear some inquiry. Or it would if I'd not immediately rummaged around, displacing things and discarding others as I made the space suit me. There are things still held that I've not touched, of course, not so much out of reverence as out of distraction or apathy. But they do not offer enough to make any kind of comments, at least not reliably. And I am not sure the pseudo-archaeology of such studies would be of interest to anyone other than me, in any event. It becomes an idle wondering, for the most part, something that I flatter myself might become some bit of characterization in the novel I pretend I am going to write someday, an indolent indulgence that distracts me from what I might end up doing in times to come and what I probably ought to be doing now.
I might do better next time. Certainly, I can see that there is a "next time" coming; I am poised to succeed my current boss, who is looking to retire at the end of the current fiscal year. I am in training to take the position, and I've spent a fair bit of time in my boss's office doing so, a fair bit of time at the desk. But I've not rummaged around in the desk; it's still occupied, even if I occasionally sit at it. It's not yet at a point where it's mine and I can claim anything that remains in it. And it's not yet at a point where it has been left behind and I can think on it and what I know of my current boss to arrive at some additional insight into that person. Though I know one will be coming; we only show parts of ourselves to one another in interacting. Other parts entirely emerge in what we leave behind us.
I wonder what my successors have thought about me, and what will they think who are yet to come.